What is the Anti-Defamation League?

• The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that was founded in 1913 with the stated mission of combating antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. It is an influential voice with governments, media outlets, schools, law enforcement agencies, and the private sector, operating numerous training and “educational” programs and a network of local organizers and lobbyists. 
• In its first decades, the ADL supported liberal causes like opposing the Ku Klux Klan and anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s and supporting the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. At the same time, dating back at least as far as the early 1950s and continuing through the early 1990s, the ADL conspired with US police and the Israeli government to systematically spy on more than 12,000 Americans, including members of Congress, Arab-Americans and political activists and organizations critical of Israel, and opponents of apartheid South Africa, which was a close ally of Israel. The groups ADL agents spied on included the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the American Indian Movement, the United Auto Workers, and ACT UP.
• Since the 1970s, the ADL has moved further to the right and become increasingly vocal in its backing of Israel, promoting the notion of a “new antisemitism” which includes anti-Zionism, or opposition to the religious-nationalist ideology Israel was founded on.  
• The ADL regularly produces reports that ostensibly document instances of antisemitism but which use problematic methodology and include examples of anti-Zionism, which are widely cited by politicians and publicized by media outlets with little or no scrutiny of their claims.
   

Why is the ADL problematic?

It falsely conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish bigotry.

• The ADL deliberately conflates opposition to a religiously-exclusive Jewish state in Palestine/Israel with hatred of Judaism and Jewish people. As the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has declared: “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” In doing so, the ADL has weaponized accusations of antisemitism against Palestinians and critics of Israel - including liberal and progressive Jews - politicizing the term and harming the fight against real anti-Jewish bigotry.
• The ADL aggressively lobbies governments, educational institutions, law enforcement agencies, and businesses to adopt the problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism, including among its examples: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

It supports Israel’s apartheid system and oppression of the Palestinians.

• While the ADL occasionally criticizes the Israeli government and overtly racist Israeli politicians, it is committed to maintaining Israel’s racist system of oppression against the Palestinian people that human rights groups, the International Court of Justice, and other experts have concluded amounts to apartheid, and whitewashes Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights, including denying its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.                                                            

It smears and works to suppress defenders of Palestinian rights in the US, threatening the Constitutional right to free speech.

• As part of its backing for Israel, the ADL attacks and smears defenders of Palestinian rights in the US, including student groups, the Movement for Black Lives, and progressive Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, pushing schools, the federal, state, and local governments to suppress their activities. As one anonymous ADL employee told the Guardian newspaper in 2024: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.”
• The ADL has been a proponent of legislation in Congress and states across the country intended to suppress boycotts in protest of Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights. Civil liberties groups like the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights have warned that so-called “anti-BDS laws,” named after the grassroots boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights, threaten the First Amendment right to freedom of speech for all Americans, including the right to engage in boycotts of conscience. In 2016, ADL staff wrote an internal memo warning that anti-BDS laws are “unconstitutional, and bad for the Jewish community.”
• The ADL has also endorsed two executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, in 2019 and 2025, targeting critics of Israel in the US, students in particular. The order signed in February 2025 threatens non-US citizens with deportation for protesting in support of Palestinian human rights. As with anti-BDS laws supported by the ADL, free speech advocates condemned the order as an attack on the First Amendment.

It defames Palestinians and incites anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism.

• The ADL demonizes Palestinians, Arab-Americans, and others working for freedom and equality for Palestinians, smearing them as antisemites and supporters of terrorism.
• In March 2024, ADL CEO Greenblatt compared the keffiyeh, the traditional Middle Eastern scarf that is a symbol of the Palestinian freedom struggle, to a Nazi swastika on national television. 

It defends and gives cover to racist, antisemitic right-wing politicians and others.

• While the ADL attacks and smears Palestinians and left-wing supporters of Palestinian human rights, it gives cover to and helps legitimize antisemitic right-wing politicians and others who back Israel. 
• The ADL has been criticized by many in the Jewish community for not condemning President Trump strongly enough for his repeated antisemitic statements or associations with antisemites. In October 2024, following a Trump presidential campaign rally in New York City that was widely condemned for featuring racist and antisemitic speakers, prompting comparisons to a fascist, pro-Nazi rally held at the same venue in 1939, the ADL issued a tepid statement that failed to even mention Trump or his campaign by name.
• In January 2025, the ADL defended Elon Musk after he twice gave what many interpreted as a fascist Nazi salute at an event celebrating Trump’s inauguration, advising those who were upset to give Musk “the benefit of the doubt and take a breath.” In 2023, an ADL executive resigned and several advisory board members threatened to quit after CEO Greenblatt praised Musk for declaring that posting on X (formerly Twitter) that Palestinians should be free “from the river to the sea” would be considered a call to genocide of Jews and a violation of the platform’s terms of service, shortly after Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X, causing many advertisers to stop doing business with the company.  
• Since the late 1970s, the ADL has also cultivated relationships with right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, who support Israel for theological reasons, believing that the establishment of the state of Israel is part of an end times prophecy in which Jesus will return and Jews and all other non-Christians will either convert or be damned to hell. As the ADL’s longtime director, Abraham Foxman, wrote in 2002, “American Jews should not be apologetic or defensive about cultivating evangelical support for Israel.”

It spies on human rights and social justice activists.

• Since the ADL’s decades-long spying operation against Arab-Americans and others was exposed in the early 1990s, resulting in the organization settling a federal class-action lawsuit, it has continued to spy on human rights and social justice activists in the US. According to a 2020 internal memo obtained by the Guardian, the ADL “regularly tracks, profiles and sends threat assessments of individuals” it views as a problem. 

It organizes US law enforcement training with Israeli police and military.

• In 2004, the ADL began a program that has brought more than 500 US police and other law enforcement officials to Israel to learn “tactics and strategies to combat terrorism” from Israel’s human rights-abusing police and military. Critics say the program reinforces racist stereotypes of Arabs, Muslims, and other people of color among US law enforcement agencies and helped accelerate the militarization of US police departments, contributing to increased police violence against people of color and others.
• In 2020, in the wake of mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, a leaked internal memo quoted two senior ADL executives questioning whether the ADL’s police training program in Israel exacerbated US police brutality, writing:

"In light of the very real police brutality at the hands of militarized police forces in the US, we must ask ourselves difficult questions, like whether we are contributing to the problem… We must ask ourselves why it is necessary for American police, enforcing American laws, would need to [sic] meet with members of the Israeli military. We must ask ourselves if, upon returning home, those we train are more likely to use force.”

• In 2022, it was revealed that in 2020 the ADL considered ending its police training program during the protests against George Floyd’s murder but decided instead to put it on “pause” and may resume and expand it in the future.
   

Who has criticized the ADL?

• Many of the ADL’s own staff have criticized the organization’s weaponization of false claims of antisemitism to smear left-wing critics of Israel and its defense of right-wing antisemites, both internally and anonymously to journalists, with some resigning in protest:
  • In 2022, after CEO Greenblatt publicly declared that anti-Zionism is the same as antisemitism and compared supporters of Palestinian rights to right-wing extremists, a senior manager at ADL’s Center on Extremism wrote to colleagues:

    “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.”

  • In 2023, a researcher with the ADL’s Center for Technology & Society resigned following the group’s attacks on students protesting Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza, telling the Guardian: “I resigned because I felt that Jonathan Greenblatt’s comments [accusing students of supporting Hamas] were undermining my ability as a researcher to fight online hate and harassment.”
  • Another ADL staffer who quit over the ADL’s attacks on individuals and groups (many of whom were Jewish) protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza told the Guardian: “Those were Jewish people who we [as the ADL] were defaming… And it makes it harder to talk about that when any criticism of Israel, or anyone who criticizes Israel, just becomes a terrorist.”
  • Another ADL employee told the Guardian: “The ADL has a pro-Israel bias and an agenda to suppress pro-Palestinian activism.”  
• Progressive Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have also criticized the ADL for weaponizing false claims of antisemitism against Palestinians and their supporters and for fueling racism against Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims. In 2020, dozens of progressive, social justice, civil liberties groups, and others, including JVP and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, launched a campaign urging progressives to stop working with the ADL. In an open letter they noted:

"[The ADL] has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence."

• Civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild have criticized the ADL for pushing anti-boycott legislation that infringes on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and for urging universities and governments to investigate and suppress student groups protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In November 2023, the ACLU warned that the ADL’s calls for investigations of student groups, "chill speech, foster an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, and betray the spirit of free inquiry."
• In June 2024, after extensive examination and debate, Wikipedia editors concluded that the ADL is a "generally unreliable" source when it comes to Palestine/Israel and related issues, citing:

“significant evidence that the ADL acts as a pro-Israeli advocacy group and has repeatedly published false and misleading statements as fact, unretracted, regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The general unreliability of the ADL extends to the intersection of the topics of antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

Go deeper

• Fact Sheet: Is Israel an Apartheid State?
• Explainer: The IHRA Working Definition of Anti-Semitism