Jewish Leadership Project Calls for ADL’s Greenblatt to Resign

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL’s annual gala in Los Angeles — November 6, 2014. (Michael Kovac / WireImage via Getty Images)

The Jewish Leadership Project’s statement on the ADL’s failure to counter Jew-hatred in its educational materials

After years of neglect, the ADL is vowing to “review” and “update” elements of its “anti-bias” teacher training and their K-12 lesson plans after a Fox News investigation found they contained radical left-wing ideologies including concepts from critical race theory, intersectionality, and gender theory.

The ADL, founded with a mission to protect the Jewish community, now promotes a curriculum that embraces Jew-hating organizations including the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March.

“This is not a surprise to us,” declared Jewish Leadership Project co-founder Charles Jacobs. “As we wrote in our recent Newsweek op-ed, ADL leaders, especially CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama administration official, have hijacked the one-time stalwart Jewish defense organization to serve — and even promote — radical progressive ideologies that are putting the Jewish community at risk. Antisemitism is a five-alarm fire in America right now, and instead of dousing it, the ADL is pouring gasoline on it.”

JLP co-founder Avi Goldwasser elaborated, “There is a bait and switch here. People turn to the ADL to fight Jew-hatred and what they get instead is a partisan political agenda. Although right-wing Jew-hatred is still a lethal threat, the growth of modern antisemitism is coming from the left, black supremacists, and Islamists. Instead of fighting these forces, Greenblatt’s ADL mostly whitewashes these threats and, on occasion, even promotes their agenda.”

“This exposé proves what we at JLP have been saying,” remarked JLP fellow Karys Rhea. “ADL prioritizes political correctness above its responsibility to the Jewish community. After years of ignoring the problem, Greenblatt recently admitted in an op-ed that there’s left-wing Jew-hatred on college campuses. Yet the ADL’s curriculum is actually making it worse by training students in elementary, middle, and high school to become the very left-wing ideologues who harass and target their Jewish classmates.”

The Jewish Leadership Project calls upon the ADL’s board to hold Jonathan Greenblatt accountable for the damage he is causing. He must resign or be replaced.

The ADL urgently needs to revert to its original mission to prioritize the fight against Jew-hatred in all its forms and prioritize its actions to protect the community.

The Jewish Leadership Project (JLP) is a grassroots non-profit initiative which demands that major Jewish organizations — including Federations, the ADL, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs — cease subordinating the safety and welfare of the Jewish American community to partisan ideology.

Follow the JLP online and on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

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