The ADL Is No Longer a Civil Rights Organization. Here’s What We All Lose

“Lo ta’amod al dam re’echa”—Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. (Leviticus 19:16)

On Yom Kippur evening this year, as Jews across the country prepared for the holiest day of our calendar, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that his agency was severing ties with the Anti-Defamation League. He called the organization—founded in 1913 to fight antisemitism and defend civil rights—”an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization.”

The timing was cruel, calculated, and sadly, predictable.

What happened next reveals something even more troubling than the attack itself. In recent weeks, the ADL quietly removed an entire section called “Protect Civil Rights” from its website, eliminating language that stated: “Our founders established ADL with the clear understanding that the fight against any one form of prejudice or hate cannot succeed without countering hate of all forms.”

In public statements, CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has signaled a shift away from the group’s historic commitment to protecting all vulnerable minorities, narrowing its mission toward a more exclusive focus on antisemitism. An ADL spokesperson called it “website maintenance.” But let’s be clear about what this represents: the abandonment of civil rights work by what was once American Jewry’s flagship civil rights organization.

For Jews, this is not an organizational pivot. It’s an orphaning. Many of us were raised to see the ADL as the Jewish institution that would stand beside our partners in the struggle for justice. With this change, that legacy feels abandoned.

The Loss of Institutional Infrastructure

When I worked at the ADL, I worked in the civil rights division of the organization. I believed deeply in the organization’s mission. The ADL’s history wasn’t perfect—far from it—but it represented something essential: the institutional recognition that Jewish liberation is bound up with everyone else’s liberation. The ADL worked with the NAACP to discredit far-right organizations in the 1960s and campaigned for landmark civil rights legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was solidarity. It was rooted in the practical understanding that the forces threatening Black Americans were the same forces threatening Jews.

During the civil rights movement, Jewish individuals and organizations provided financial support, legal expertise, and grassroots activism, with the ADL among prominent organizations in what historians call the “Grand Alliance”—the decades-long partnership between Jewish and Black communities to defeat white supremacy. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery, later saying it felt like “I was praying with my feet.” Seventeen rabbis were arrested together in St. Augustine, Florida in 1964—the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history—heeding Dr. King’s call to action.

These actions reflected a theological and political truth: our safety is collective, our liberation interconnected.

Without a genuine Jewish civil rights organization, we lose more than a national advocacy platform. We lose institutional infrastructure for coalition building. We lose organizational memory of how to show up in multiracial movements. We lose the framework that helped generations of Jews understand that defending voting rights, challenging mass incarceration, and protecting immigrant communities are Jewish issues.

The Lie That Divides Us

As the ADL retreats from civil rights work, a pernicious narrative gains ground: that other communities—particularly Black Americans—don’t care about antisemitism. That Jews must choose between safety and solidarity. That we can only protect ourselves by narrowing our focus, accommodating power, and abandoning broader justice work.

This narrative is wrong and dangerous, and it serves white supremacy. It’s a script that has been used for decades to justify Jewish retreat from coalition work. It also erases a fundamental reality: Jews are not separate from other marginalized communities. We are Black, brown, queer, trans, disabled, immigrants. When the ADL abandons civil rights work, it abandons these Jews—treating Jewish safety as if it could ever be separate from the safety of all the communities we belong to.

In 2020, the ADL and National Urban League announced an expanded partnership, recognizing their “storied history” of working together against racism and antisemitism. As recently as October 8, 2023—the day after the Hamas attacks on Israel—the NAACP, National Action Network, National Urban League, and Drum Major Institute issued a joint statement condemning the violence and standing in solidarity with the ADL. These partnerships existed and still exist in communities across the country, including right here in North Carolina, where Carolina Jews for Justice works alongside Black-led organizations, immigrant rights groups, and multiracial coalitions.

When we accept the false narrative that marginalized communities won’t stand with Jews, we play into the hands of those who want us divided. White supremacists have always known that Black-Jewish coalition represents an existential threat to their project. They have always worked to fracture that alliance.

The Failed Logic of Accommodation

The ADL’s shift wasn’t just about refocusing mission. It represented a strategic bet: that accommodation with the Trump administration would protect Jewish interests. The ADL endeavored since January 20 to accommodate the administration, with Greenblatt praising Trump’s university crackdowns and telling Republican attorneys general “God bless Secretary McMahon.”

That strategy failed spectacularly. Despite the ADL’s attempts to find common ground on Israel policy, Patel attacked them anyway—on Yom Kippur, no less.

As Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, observed: “This is a reminder that they’re coming for everyone that doesn’t 100% align with their agenda and their approach. This is about a far more systemic abuse and weaponization of the federal government to advance a political agenda. And that should frighten all of us.”

The lesson is stark: There is no safety in accommodation with authoritarianism. There is no protection in narrowing our solidarity. The same forces that target immigrants and Palestinian rights advocates will always come for Jews—no amount of strategic silence will change that.

What Jewish Resistance Actually Requires

In our tradition, we learn: “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof”—Justice, justice you shall pursue. Not “Jewish justice.” Not “safety first, then justice if convenient.” Just justice, repeated for emphasis, pursued without qualification.

At Carolina Jews for Justice, we’ve built our “Sacred Resistance in 5786” framework on the understanding that you cannot defend religious freedom without protecting educational freedom. You cannot fight antisemitism while ignoring Islamophobia. You cannot secure safety for Jewish communities while remaining silent about threats to immigrant communities, Black communities, LGBTQ communities.

This is a survival strategy born from generations of Jewish experience. When we organize as if only Jewish dignity matters, we violate a foundational principle of our tradition. We are made b’tzelem elohim—in the image of the divine, all of us. When we build power only for our own protection, we misunderstand how power actually works. When we abandon civil rights organizing, we abandon the very framework that makes Jewish safety possible.

What We Build Now

The ADL’s retreat from civil rights work leaves a vacuum. But vacuums create opportunities.

We don’t have to wait for the next generation to create what’s missing. We are already doing it.

Across the country, grassroots Jewish organizations are building something different: multiracial, multi-faith coalitions rooted in the understanding that our liberation is collective. We’re showing up for immigrant rights because they’re inseparable from religious freedom. We’re challenging gerrymandering because democracy itself is a Jewish value. We’re organizing for educational freedom because book bans targeting Black history and LGBTQ lives threaten Jewish students too.

We do this work not despite being Jewish, but because we’re Jewish.

The loss of the ADL as a civil rights organization is real, and it matters. It represents an institutional abandonment of the principle that animates authentic Jewish resistance: we cannot fight hate selectively and expect to win.

But we don’t need permission from legacy organizations to do this work. The Torah doesn’t say “wait for the right organization to lead.” It says pursue justice. Now. With urgency. Together.

Our founders—the actual founders of Jewish life, not just organizational founders—understood something the ADL has forgotten: the fight against any one form of prejudice cannot succeed without countering hate in all its forms.

That truth remains, whether or not it appears on anyone’s website.

The question facing Jewish communities now is whether we’ll allow one organization’s retreat to define our response to this moment, or whether we’ll build the institutions, coalitions, and movements that our ancestors would recognize—the ones that understand Jewish safety and collective liberation as inseparable.

“Al tifrosh min hatzibur”—Do not separate yourself from the community. Not the Jewish community alone, but the whole community. All of us who share stake in democracy, dignity, and freedom.

We’re not just fighting for Jewish safety. We’re fighting for a country where dignity isn’t divisible. The Torah tells us to choose the people—all the people. That’s our tradition. That’s our strategy. And that’s our future.