A Point of View: ADL at 95: Battling old hatreds in new forms

As the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Anti-Defamation League approaches on July 10th, I can't help but think that its founder, Sigmund Livingston, probably would have wished we had not reached this milestone. After all, when you create an organization with the aim of ending anti-Semitism and seeking to erase bigotry in all its forms, you can't help but want to achieve your goal and put yourself out of business.

The hard realist in me tells me that Livingston, a Chicago lawyer and nobody's fool, likely knew that ADL was to be his life's work - and that it would take generations beyond his own to come to the end of a difficult road. Today, more than 60 years after World War II and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, we know only too well that not only did anti-Semitism not end in the ashes of that global war stamped with Hitler's genocidal Jew-hatred, but that a new if not improved kind of Jew-hate has replaced it.

The anti-Semitism Livingston first battled was the American brand that saw Jews as socially inferior, religiously suspect, beyond assimilating into the American mainstream. The worst caricatures of Jews were rampant in American magazines and newspapers - hook-nosed and money-grubbing, unworthy of the blessings of American ideals of equality and justice. Jews were denied access to higher education, employment opportunities, social standing. "No dogs! No Jews!" were common warnings on advertisements for America's summer resort communities.

Even given a substantial amount of self-help within the Jewish community, we could not prevent the individual inflammatory incident, like the 1915 lynching of the "Yankee Jew" Leo Frank, a northerner sentenced to death in the American South for the rape and murder of a young woman - a crime he did not commit.

If the fledgling ADL could not halt that horrible case of mob "justice," it did meet with early success in dramatically reducing the number of coarse, stereotyped references to Jews in the media of the day. ADL also forced an apology from industrialist Henry Ford for circulating the scurrilous anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And by understanding that a civil society can not tolerate the wholesale spewing of hatred against any group, ADL early on exposed the Ku Klux Klan's terrorist tactics against African-Americans and Jews as well as the German-American Bund's pro-Hitler rallies replete with Nazi flags waving swastikas.

After the war, ADL joined court cases in favor of the separation of church and state and in support of school desegregation. We knew that religious belief and practice, so crucial to the Jewish minority, could best flourish where government played no role, while American ideals of justice and equal opportunity could not flourish if "separate but equal" reigned supreme in our schools. The end of World War II also permitted a reassessment of relations between Jews and the Catholic Church whose role during Hitler's advent had been, at best, equivocal. Interfaith dialogue took root, and the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate, finally repudiating the centuries-old charge of deicide against all Jews, was a major achievement in which ADL played a role.

The most important addition to ADL's mandate undoubtedly occurred with the birth of the State of Israel. I'm proud to say that ADL has consistently defended the Jewish homeland, most recently against a species of criticism that might be called moral exceptionalism, where the right of a nation-state to defend itself against terrorism is suddenly suspect only when it is carried out by Jews.

Here, in particular, is where the new anti-Semitism has become a booming cottage industry:  Israel is uniquely responsible for the deplorable condition of the Palestinian people, never mind that a two-state solution was available from Israel's very inception in 1948, only to be rejected by its Arab neighbors. The Zionist project is racist, never mind that we have dark-skinned brethren from Yemen and Ethiopia or that Israel incorporates more than a million Arab citizens whose minority status is legally protected. 

Israel is uniquely responsible for the volatility of the entire Middle East region, never mind that despots have ruled its Sunni and Shia and Christian and Coptic citizens for centuries with barely a nod toward establishing participatory democracy, economic justice, or other norms of civil society. No, it falls to the only democracy in the region, Israel, where multiple opinions on all policies of state may be publicly voiced - and from where I may likely hear a few choice words of dissent - to be viewed as the singular scourge of the planet.

To those who entertain such selective moral outrage against the State of Israel, ADL says a determined "No!"  It is not that we believe that Israeli policies are exempt from criticism; if that were the case, many of its own citizens and politicians and engaged intellectuals would risk internal censure, or worse. But the drumbeat of high-horse hyperbole in certain quarters, in Europe and America as in the Middle East, that compares Israel to Nazi Germany and the Palestinians to victims of genocide is curiously invoked even as increasing numbers of those surveyed admit to being tired of hearing us Jews reference the Shoah, and still others deny that it ever even happened.

What is wrong with this picture? ADL wants to expose these hypocrisies, and we suspect that it will be a very long time before we can rest on our laurels. Here's to the first 95 years, then, for we should celebrate our successes with great pride. Let us hope and pray that in five years, a two-state solution will have miraculously been negotiated and some form of Peaceable Kingdom will reign between Israel and her neighbors. I wouldn't bet on it, but it would be nice to see one more goal achieved, and have one more example of mutual respect and understanding between Jew and non-Jew to give the next generation hope.

After all, we would still like to go out of business some day.