In an interview yesterday with MSNBC, The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt declared that to avoid being unjustly branded an antisemite — a charge rejected by countless Jewish New Yorkers as ludicrous and entirely political in nature — Muslim-American NYC Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani must show contrition to the ADL and seek his organization’s approval. “He doesn’t get to pick-and-choose which Jewish people he talks to,” Greenblatt said, characterizing the major Jewish congregations Mamdani addressed during his campaign, including the Upper West Side’s B’nai Jeshurun, as unrepresentative of “mainstream” Jewish New Yorkers. “He needs to come to us,” asserted Greenblatt.

In response, here are 30 articles articulating why the ADL is no longer a legitimate civil rights organization representative of American Jews and how Greenblatt and his organization have turned their backs on both civil rights and the sizable portion of the American Jewish community that identifies as progressive. If anything, Mamdani (or Brad Lander on his behalf) should explain how the ADL has abandoned its mission and values and no longer seeks to protect the Jewish community writ large, rather than grovelling before an institution that has clearly lost the plot and thrown in with fascists.

• December 3, 2015: ADL defends Trump’s remarks at Jewish Republicans’ forum — “Here, context is everything,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Thursday evening. “Mr. Trump’s presentation was completely supportive of Israel and the Jewish community, even if one might disagree with him on some of the other issues he raised.” Earlier in the day, Trump had said he didn’t expect support from Republican Jews because he wasn’t seeking their money. “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” Trump said. “You want to control your own politicians.”
• Spring 2021: How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work — “Interviews with eight former ADL employees found that CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has repeatedly chosen to support crackdowns on criticism of Israel over protecting civil liberties, putting him in conflict with his own civil rights office.”
• May 1, 2022: The ADL Doubles Down on Opposing the Anti-Zionist Left — Speaking directly into the camera in a pre-recorded speech, Greenblatt said that “SJP, JVP, and CAIR … epitomize the radical left, the photo inverse of the extreme right that ADL long has tracked.” The ADL plans to apply “more concentrated energy toward the threat of radical anti-Zionism,” he said. Though the organization has long maintained that anti-Zionism “isn’t always necessarily antisemitic,” as noted in its online glossary, Greenblatt rejected that view on-screen. He said that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” calling anti-Zionism an “ideology … rooted in rage … predicated on one concept: the negation of another people.”
• March 8, 2023: ADL Staffers Dissented After CEO Compared Palestinian Rights Groups to Right-Wing Extremists, Leaked Audio Reveals — But Greenblatt also stressed throughout the meeting that if employees had major disagreements with his positions on the question of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the ADL might not be the right place for them to work. “If you still feel like you can’t square the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then maybe this isn’t the place for you,” he said.
• October 19, 2023: ADL researcher quits over Greenblatt blasting of Jewish left on Israel and Hamas — “A researcher at the Anti-Defamation League resigned Thursday, apparently in reaction to the group’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, publicly condemning American Jews who are protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.”
• October 31, 2023: The ADL Is Defaming Palestinian Students as Terrorist Supporters — An “urgent” open letter issued last Thursday by the ADL…urged college and university administrators to “immediately investigate” their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.” They claim to have sent the letter to nearly 200 schools.
• November 11, 2023: Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks — “The Anti-Defamation League has classified the event — and dozens of other protests led by Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — as ‘anti-Israel,’ according to an analysis by The Intercept, and added them to their database documenting rising antisemitism across the U.S.”
• November 19, 2023: The cowardice of Jonathan Greenblatt — “ADL has not called Elon Musk an antisemite,” he said on September 7th. “ADL has not called Twitter an antisemitic platform. ADL is not actively pressuring companies to not participate on Twitter. In fact, up until last week, ADL was advertising on Twitter. So the notion that we were trying to ‘kill the company,’ that’s a fiction.” Less than a month later, the organization announced it would resume advertising.
• November 22, 2023: The ADL Smears Anti-Zionist Jews Like Me While Overlooking True Antisemitism — “Somehow, Greenblatt saw little difference between a gathering of rabbis and human rights activists — garbed in tallitot, blowing shofars and evoking values of justice and human dignity — and a murderous movement of mass shooters, race-war fanatics and insurrectionists who champion the smashing of multiracial democracy with genocidal glee. Greenblatt was telling me that when I, a Jewish person who stands for justice, dig through a dark web of Hitler memes and screeds of ​“white genocide” each day, I’m essentially looking in the mirror.”
• January 5, 2024: Anti-Defamation League staff decry ‘dishonest’ campaign against Israel critics — “There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric, and to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging to our reputation as experts in extremism,” a senior manager at ADL’s Center on Extremism wrote in a Slack channel to over 550 colleagues. Others chimed in, agreeing. “The aforementioned false equivalencies and the both-sides-ism are incompatible with the data I have seen,” a longtime extremism researcher said.
• January 26, 2024: I Regret to Report There’s a New Antisemitism Controversy at Harvard — Finally, and as egregiously, there is the fact that Penslar’s critics evidently combed through his scholarship for phrases they could present as antisemitic. “Lessons in how NOT to combat antisemitism, Harvard edition,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League. “Start by naming a professor who libels the Jewish state and claims that ‘veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization’ to your antisemitism task force. Absolutely inexcusable. This is why Harvard is failing, full stop.” … What makes the series of events at Harvard so disheartening is not that the attack on Penslar is unique but that it transparently gives the game away: There is no set of credentials that can prevent a person who is earnestly trying to do work in this space from getting sucked into the politicization and, yes, weaponization of antisemitism.
• March 5, 2024: By honoring Jared Kushner, ADL suggests Trump is now kosher — and betrays its founding values — “At a moment when ADL should be solely focused on fighting rising antisemitism in the wake of the war, the group is again choosing to spark controversy with no clear end goal.”
• April 15, 2024: 60+ Muslim, Arab & Allied Groups Condemn ADL for Anti-Palestinian Hate, Call for Firing of CEO Greenblatt — “We join American Muslim organizations and dozens of other communities in condemning the ADL and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for enabling anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate. Mr. Greenblatt’s reckless, dangerous comments about the Nazi swastika and the Palestinian keffiyeh were simply the latest example of how far the ADL will go to smear and silence critics of the radical Israeli government.”
• April 29, 2024: The Anti-Defamation League Has Abandoned Some of the People It Exists to Protect — “But the ADL, under the leadership of Greenblatt, is insisting on conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and it has made this conflation central to the ADL’s work. This has not only muddied the waters of its own antisemitism research, it has also undermined the safety, security, and pluralism of American Jews.”
• May 16, 2024: Anti-Defamation League ramps up lobbying to promote controversial definition of antisemitism — “Its lobbying spike marks a dramatic shift – it spent about $100,000 on lobbying in 2020 and is on pace to spend nearly $1.6m this year based on its first quarter expenditures, a Guardian analysis of federal records finds. The spending positions the ADL as the largest pro-Israel lobbying force on domestic issues. Records show the surge’s broader aim is to promoting a controversial definition of antisemitism across a range of federal agencies and mobilizing the government to enforce it.”
• October 30, 2024: Former ADL chief Abe Foxman blasts group for muted response to Trump’s MSG rally — “I’m reluctant to criticize my successor, but, hello, he went after this guy on CNN yesterday, and couldn’t mention Trump, it’s a little bizarre,” Foxman, who led the ADL for decades and has endorsed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s no question about it: For the American Jewish Committee, the ADL, Conference of Presidents, the federations, all these institutions, if this happened six months ago, they would be out there condemning racism and antisemitism and hate speech,” he said. “So I’m troubled.”
• November 1, 2024: Let’s Call the ADL What It Is: an Ally of Fascists — “This response—or lack thereof—should have been surprising. But it’s merely the latest evidence that the ADL has completely abandoned the civil rights part of its mission, which has long been in tension with its Israel advocacy—a contradiction that movements have pointed out for years. These days, the organization, under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, appears to have one primary objective: demonizing those of us in the movement for Palestinian human rights.”
• November 1, 2024: Why Is the Anti-Defamation League Running Cover for Trump? — There were the racist statements targeting Puerto Ricans, Latinos, Black people, Palestinians, and Jews; the description of Vice President Kamala Harris as a “Samoan, Malaysian, low IQ” individual; the prominent display of a font regularly used in Nazi campaigning on the hat of Trump’s shadow running-mate, Elon Musk; and the speeches featuring rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler. One of the event’s speakers even described the night as a “Nazi rally” in his own remarks. … So how, with all that storied history behind it, did ADL respond to Trump’s 2024 Nazi rally? “Political rallies should be about politics and policy, not offensive jokes,” the organization wrote, in a bizarrely anodyne message that did not even name the presidential candidate for whom the rally was held.
• January 9, 2025: ADL Chief Invokes Pager Attack as Inspiration for Taking on Internet Trolls — “We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle,” Greenblatt said. “This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it.”
• January 21, 2025: ADL says ‘awkward’ Musk gesture ‘not a Nazi salute’: ‘This is a delicate moment’ — “This is a delicate moment. It’s a new day and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety,” the ADL wrote in a Monday post on Musk’s social platform X. “It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.”
• January 22, 2025: The ADL needs to dump Jonathan Greenblatt — Unfortunately, in the last couple of months, the current ADL CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has pushed for policies that infringe on free speech, congratulated election denialists, and sanitized clear Nazi salutes as “awkward gestures” while labeling anyone who advocated for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war as antisemitic. Such actions have brought criticism to the ADL and have put its reputation in jeopardy, which is a tragedy because there are many counter-extremism researchers who are doing lifesaving work that push for policies that help non-governmental and governmental institutions reduce racially motivated attacks. However, as long as Jonathan Greenblatt stays in charge of the ADL, more people will realize that the Anti-Defamation League isn’t meant to combat disinformation and extremism anymore, but to preserve a Nationalist ideology at all costs.
• February 27, 2025: Why the ADL is encouraging Jews to invest in Tesla — “Among the top 10 holdings of TOV are Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, Amazon and Tesla. Roughly 2% of the fund is invested in Tesla, the primary source of wealth for Elon Musk, who is currently leading the Trump administration’s efforts to slash federal spending and workers — and who has for years been embroiled in antisemitism scandals as well as tussles with the ADL itself.”
• March 3, 2025: Controversy surrounds Anti-Defamation League’s ties to Trump administration — Melissa Shaw worked as a contractor facilitator at the ADL for over a decade. She is sending this message to the leadership of the organization she says she once loved dearly. “I’m going to call in Jonathan Greenblatt very publicly. I would like to implore Jonathan to listen to the diversity of Jewish voices that are asking for something more and something different,” said Shaw.
• March 4, 2025: The ADL goes quiet on some hatreds — “I watched from the inside as the ADL erased racial justice from its civil rights priorities, caved to pressure from conservative media for being ‘too woke,’ and quietly abandoned core education programs. The shift began with an internal pause on its use of the word ‘racism’ while it sought a ‘new’ definition (spoiler: they still don’t have one). Then, it removed ‘racial justice’ from its portfolio altogether.”
• March 24, 2025: ADL’s position on Khalil arrest puts freedom of speech at risk — As a longtime supporter of the Anti-Defamation League and as a board member of ADL Midwest, I am opposed to the national ADL position and messaging about the imprisonment of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. His arrest, detention and imprisonment by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is unconstitutional, as he is a legal, permanent resident of the U.S. I write today with my Jewish and American values to say, “Not in my name.”
• March 27, 2025: ADL Shutters Flagship Anti-Bias Program — “The civil rights division is not engaging on any civil rights issues,” said the former ADL education staffer. “The division has been reduced as it no longer aligns with the current strategy. The only issues ADL speaks out about are related to antisemitism.” In this context, sources say the shifts in education appear less like an incidental administrative update and more like a concerted effort to back away from the organization’s broader mission. “The ADL appears to be responding to the political winds shifting,” said a former senior education executive at ADL National who requested anonymity to protect their professional reputation. “Why have a dual mission when one of them is increasingly out of favor and one of them is increasingly rewarding in all senses of the word?”
• April 23, 2025: ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt Praises Trump’s War on Harvard: ‘It’s a Good Thing’ — Asked, “Do you support what the Trump administration has done and the way they’re doing it?” Greenblatt replied, “I am really glad that the Trump administration is leaning in and holding the perpetrators accountable. Now, the question becomes, how do you do it in a way that’s strategic and addresses the systemic issues that’s sort of detrimental to the whole enterprise of higher education?” He continued, “I think it’s complicated, and at ADL we focus on the nuance, to be frank, but make no mistake, it is a good thing that President Trump is leaning in. It is a good thing.”
• June 6, 2025: ADL chief compares student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaida in address to Republican officials — “There is a throughline from Occupy Wall Street to BLM to ‘defund the police’ to ‘River to the Sea,’” he added, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement launched a decade ago to protest police violence. “They are the same people, these are the same kind of nihilists.”
• June 13, 2025: ADL regional board member resigns over organization’s approach to antisemitism and civil rights — “Historically, the ADL has been a premier civil rights organization and working in concert with other civil rights organizations,” Ludwig said in an interview. “That focus seems to have been abandoned and there seems to have been a decision made to ally the organization with a very misguided use of antisemitism as cover to implement authoritarianism.”
• June 26, 2025: Amid record fundraising, ADL lays off staff to consolidate focus on antisemitism — The Anti-Defamation League laid off 22 employees this week, roughly 4% of its workforce, as part of an effort to focus its work more narrowly on antisemitism as it shifts away from broader civil rights and public policy work.

So to recap, according to the ADL under Greenblatt, Nazi salutes and antisemitic slurs are okay if you’re “pro-Israel,” but any expression of opposition to Israel is virulent antisemitism requiring federal crackdowns, deportations, and the abandonment of our commitment to civil rights.

This is who Mamdani needs to seek approval from, on behalf of the Jewish community? I think not.