Greenblatt: I think this is a time of great concern for Jews all over the United States. At A.D.L., we track antisemitism, we measure attitudes and we also track incidents. And we’ve never really seen a time like this, at least not in recent memory. So on the one hand, elevated or intense antisemitic attitudes, as a percent of the population, have more than doubled in the last five years. And we also track incidents. What I can tell you is, last year, 2024, was the worst year we had ever recorded in terms of acts of harassment, vandalism and violence directed at Jewish people or Jewish institutions.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic. If you’re looking for an organization that criticizes the Israeli government, Israeli politicians, Israeli policies, I’d point you to ADL.org, because we do it. There is a robust debate in the Jewish community. And I think you see heated criticism in the Jewish community of policies of the Israeli government.
When it crosses a line is when it’s not a criticism of Israeli policy per se, but we see things like, for example, the demonization of all Israeli people. Demonizing an entire group of people for a policy of government you don’t like, I would say that’s antisemitism. Second, delegitimizing the state itself, its right to exist. And then, No. 3, double standards when you talk about Israel versus other countries.
So Zionism is, simply put, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland. That’s what it is. Zionism is essential to the Jewish tradition. The idea of Jews returning to Israel, we’ve been talking about it since Moses, literally.
Anti-Zionism is the belief that Jews do not have that right. It is an ideology which is committed to saying we will do what we can to prevent Jewish self-determination in their homeland. Anti-Zionism is an ideology of nihilism, Lulu, which would literally seek to not just delegitimize but eliminate the Jewish state. And that’s very problematic.
How people choose to interpret it, to embellish it, dress it up as something other than what it is — but the reality is, if you believe how I laid out Zionism, then anti-Zionism is pretty simple.
And again, when you normalize language like “from the river to the sea,” like “globalize the intifada,” like “Israel is a Nazi state,” this creates the conditions in which people feel not just compelled but almost obligated to do horrible things. So I think ideas have consequences, and it starts with words.
So it’s just important that I come back to — my focus really every single day is the lived experience of Jewish people here. So I am not someone who is opining on the politics and the geostrategic issues.
look, the reality is the country inside the state of Israel has equal rights for its Arab citizens, whether they are of the Druze faith or the Christian faith or the Muslim faith, whether they self-identify as Palestinians or Bedouins or Arab Israelis.
Oct. 7 was this extraordinary moment. And on the 8th, the person who runs our Center on Extremism, the group at A.D.L. that monitors and disrupts extremist threats, reached out to me and said, You need to see this. And one of our people was in an S.J.P. national chat on Oct. 8. And in the chat, they released or published for people to use who were in the S.J.P. chat an organizing tool kit, discussion guides, in plural, and talking points about what had happened on the 7th. Now, mind you, we were literally still trying to figure out what was going on on the 8th. I’m sure you remember, you were covering the story. There was still fighting going on. We didn’t know exactly what had happened, who had perpetrated it, and yet S.J.P. on the 8th already had their narrative very well developed.
One of the things that caught our attention on the 8th is they went from referring to the state of Israel to only referring to it as “the Zionist entity.” “Zionist entity” is how the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah refer to Israel. On the 8th, they used terms like “genocide” to describe what was happening in Gaza. And they also talked about, they were sort of praising what had happened on the 7th, the direct conflict with “the Zionist entity.” So this definitely got our attention. This is not what you see from other groups on campus. There was a level of language here that seemed wholesale adopted from Hamas. And then what we proceeded to see was S.J.P. continue to amplify and spread narratives through their social media, through their on-the-ground protests, and use tactics that were way beyond anything we’d ever seen before from groups criticizing Israel on college campuses.
The language they were using, the tactics they were expressing support for were in direct alignment with a terrorist organization.
You know, we track extremists, and we’ve been doing it for decades and decades. This gives us a degree of pattern recognition. And we clearly saw extraordinarily concerning behavior that led us to think this needs to be looked at. Guess what? All of our concerns have borne out to be correct about what was going to happen on those campuses. Since those days, Jewish students have been targeted, victimized and vilified. In large part by campaigns organized and executed by S.J.P. That’s literally happened on our campuses. And I can go line by line and tell you the stories of all the individuals who’ve experienced this.
On March 5, at the takeover for the Barnard Library right here in New York City, CUAD — they banned the S.J.P. chapter at Columbia for its behavior, and the students immediately reconstituted it as “CUAD” — and those students literally handed out Hamas literature. How do I know that? Because I went to the campus the following morning. And the students who were there in the library as it was taken over by the CUAD students said, “Here, Jonathan, look at what they were handing out” — pamphlets that said “Hamas media office” on it. I’ll bring one the next time we meet so you can see it for yourself. So look, did Hamas send that to them? Did they download it? I don’t really know what the process of coordinating was. But you can’t hand out ISIS literature in front of the Low Library at Columbia. I guess you could, and you may be detained for doing that. Is that speech or is that conduct?
First of all, we’ve been doing civil rights for over 100 years in freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the ability to protest without fear of political reprisal. This is fundamental to our belief system. And so for me it’s not about speech — it’s about conduct. There’s lots of ways you can protest the actions of what’s happening, of the Israeli government, things in the Middle East, without using violent rhetoric or justifying violence. There’s lots of groups who do this, who don’t use this kind of language or these tactics.
Look, the situation in Gaza is a tragedy of immense proportions. The suffering, the starvation, it is heart-wrenching. It pains me every day. I would never purport to be a moral compass like David Grossman, but I do feel that my job requires me to have a kind of moral clarity.
I do think what’s happening in Gaza is a terrible, catastrophic situation. I don’t think it’s a genocide. Because that’s a legal definition which means an intentional effort. I don’t have the dictionary in front of me.
So in fairness, I don’t have that definition in front of me, and I haven’t read it like you have before this, but what I’ll simply say is that I don’t believe the Israeli government is committing genocide. I don’t think they are intentionally trying to destroy or annihilate a group of people. I do think this is a war that was started by Hamas. I do think Hamas has made the decision to black-market and hoard the aid that comes in. The Hamas government has chosen to build tunnels below, not to create protective structures above. So we could ask ourselves questions about who is really bringing the catastrophe to the Gazan people.
If you’re looking for a country anywhere in the world that treats everyone perfectly, I don’t think you’ll find one. If you’re looking for a country in the Middle East, a democracy with corrective capacity, that’s the state of Israel. And the rights that are enjoyed by minorities there, if you just compare it to other countries in the region, Muslims and Druze and religious minorities have more, and ethnic minorities have more rights in Israel than in any other country in the region.
Lulu: I know you’ve looked at a lot of the polling, and you know that Israel has lost a lot of support, even among Jews, especially among young Jews.* Do you ever worry that you might have positioned the A.D.L. in such a way that the younger generation of Jews won’t see you as defending them and the things that they believe in?
Greenblatt: What polls are you seeing? I understand anecdotally you may have heard it from some people. I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there. Have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues in New York City, the ones with the largest membership, and asked them? I would encourage you to go to 92nd Street Y. Go to the West Side J.C.C. Go to Central, Park Avenue, Rodeph Sholom, go to KJ. Go to all these large Jewish synagogues and ask where their young people are. Like, you can go to Brooklyn and find three synagogues.
But you’re giving the audience a very narrow, biased view, as if that’s where all Jewish young people are.
And those who want to pontificate, it must be nice. This is not you, but it must be nice for those people in the commentariat to have these views. And so, yeah, I do think it is fair to say many Jewish people are upset about the war, aspects of its prosecution, the human toll, etc. That doesn’t mean they think we should eliminate the Jewish state. And I think that’s the logic behind your question. That’s why I don’t agree with the logic, Lulu. There’s so much you get right. And on this, you’re just wrong.
But on a person-to-person, human level, I really believe in this idea of radical empathy and being there for others, not because it’s a quid pro quo, but because it’s the right thing to do, and opening your heart. So I guess what I would say to the non-Jewish person at the individual level is, No. 1, when you see something say something. Speak up, and try to have that radical empathy for your Jewish peer or colleague or friend or family member and go to them and try to, when something happens, say something.
I worry about communal ties that have been frayed between the Jewish and Muslim communities, for sure. So many Muslim people, like Jewish people, are outraged by what’s happened in the war, just like they were outraged by what happened on Oct. 7. How they come together and forge bonds, I think, is really important.
And I just worry on a day-to-day basis, again, about Jewish people having a sense of insecurity. You know, I was just talking with a family. Their Jewish child is at summer camp. They had security drills at the summer camp. That’s crazy at a Jewish summer camp, having security drills, but they have a whole new protocol because of the very real fear of threats. I worry that that’s the new norm. So I do think on the other side, not just of the war, but of this last decade, when we’ve seen such a rise of hate, when we’ve seen hate from podcasters on the right and on the left, when we’ve seen explicit acts of violence, from Pittsburgh to Boulder, coming from all sides, I worry that American Jews are now living with a kind of anxiety that’s well founded. The work to turn that around, the work to get back to where Jewish people, like all people, can feel safe in the places where they worship, in the place where they work and live, that’s what I want to see us get back to. That’s going to be really hard, and I think it’s going to take a long time.
At ADL, Musk making a nazi salute is not antisemitic.
Fake.
They forgot to delete that paragraph. Morons.