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What Antisemitism? The ADL Prostrated to Musk and Trump
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What Antisemitism? The ADL Prostrated to Musk and Trump

To defend Israel, Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League is willing to turn a blind eye to the growth of fascism on the right.

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David Klion
Feb 04, 2025
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What Antisemitism? The ADL Prostrated to Musk and Trump
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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, DC, on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk’s two consecutive televised salutes on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration immediately divided the nation between people who recognize what a Nazi salute looks like – including Nazis themselves – and people who feel obligated to contrive such imaginative defenses as “a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd.” For the most part, those reactions fell on predictable partisan lines, but one major ostensibly nonpartisan organization came out for the latter position – the Anti-Defamation League, whose official account on the Musk-owned social media platform known as X tweeted the following response:

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.  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.  In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.

The ADL’s tepid defense of Musk, which reads as if written by committee to try to appease all potential critics, drew widespread outrage from American Jews – whose electorate overwhelmingly (71%) voted for Kamala Harris per a December poll, in line with a decades-old trend of consistent Jewish support for Democratic candidates. Outside of the sizable Orthodox minority (74% voted for Trump), American Jews are mostly liberal and not inclined to give Musk, a racist demagogue who has a history of espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories and supporting far-right parties around the world, the benefit of the doubt.

The ADL, a Jewish organization founded over a century ago with the specific mission of combating antisemitism and bigotry, is out of step with the community it claims to serve. Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s previous head, seemed to break with the organization’s current leadership when he tweeted, “Elon Musk may be the world’s richest man but that does not excuse his thanking the Trump supporters with a Heil Hitler Nazi salute [in] addition to supporting Germany’s neo-Nazi party in the next elections it is a very disconcerting image.” Foxman’s successor, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, probably intended to do damage control when he lightly chastised Musk for joking about the Holocaust on X three days after the salutes. Still, Greenblatt is unrepentant about his assessment of Musk’s gesture. “I said what I saw,” he texted Jodi Rudoren, the editor-in-chief of the Jewish publication the Forward, last Friday. “That’s all.”

How did the ADL, which for generations has presented itself as America’s leading antisemitism watchdog, find itself prostrated before the most powerful enabler of white supremacy in recent American history? The ADL’s descent from a distinguished civil rights stalwart to its current debased form has been a protracted one, spanning decades – and one marked by the ever-increasing relevance of Israel to the organization’s core mission.

From Championing Civil Rights to Prioritizing Zionism

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