The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State

American studies scholar Gelman debuts with a trenchant, elucidating history of the Anti-Defamation League. The book opens with the 1993 raid on the ADL’s San Francisco offices for “spying on civil rights groups and antiracist organizers,” a revelation that, as the New York Times wrote, “caused confusion for some liberals” due to the Jewish organization’s longtime association with civil rights. A similar culture shock occurred in 2025 as the ADL brushed aside Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute as “an awkward gesture” while also labeling protesters of Israel’s assault on Gaza as “supporters of terror.” Delving into the ADL’s little-told history, the author uncovers a long legacy of such conservative stances, as the organization repeatedly worked to sideline or actively target leftists. Among the revelations is an upending of the myth of the ADL’s founding as a response to Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia; instead, Gelman asserts, the ADL “was formed in 1913 by midwestern German Jews of the fraternal lodge B’nai B’rith” worried that the influx of “uncouth” and impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms were “changing the perception of Jewishness.” Following the organization across the 20th century, the author unearths a multitude of right-wing positions, from “insist[ing] that antisemitism did not play a role” in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs to supporting neoconservative policy in Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s by pegging leftist governments as antisemitic. It’s a gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization. (June)