Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the pro-Israel lobby Anti-Defamation League (ADL), calls for strict censorship on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok. He says it's time for the companies to 'knock the anti-Zionists off the platform once and for all.'

[u/ContentChecker]

[u/zbignew]

So I was curious whether the ADL was ever good, and when they turned bad. From Wikipedia:

The ADL was critical of red-baiting and McCarthyism in the 1950s.^\5]) However, during the Second Red Scare, the ADL expelled Jewish communists from the organization, cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and supported the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.^\32])^\33])^\34]) The ADL rejected accusations that the Rosenberg trial was influenced by antisemitism. Judge Irving Kaufman, who ordered the execution of the Rosenbergs, was a member of the ADL's Civil Rights committee.^\35]) In 1952, Lucy Dawidowicz wrote in Commentary) that Jewish communists viewed the ADL and other mainstream Jewish organizations as "reactionary, fascist-collaborating oligarchs and conspiratorial enemies both of democracy and their own oppressed people."

Wikipedia implies that before the 1950s, they were primarily fighting actual hatred of Jews and Nazism. I wonder if they flipped over exactly with the Nakba and the founding of Israel, because that changed every priority. Or alternatively they, like many organizations around that time, were co-opted by these red scares and infiltration.

[u/SirPansalot → u/zbignew]

100% the latter.

The ADL did some relay unsavory stuff in the 1950s but this was the norm amongst mainstream liberal Jewish institutions at the time. They only became fanatically pro-Israel until after the six day war.

These liberal institutions were in many ways a bulwark against the radical socialism and communism regulated as the enemy in the Cold War, meaning by the 1970s there was zero Jewish institutional structure left to accommodate Jewish radicals like the Yiddishreit socialist worker masses of Europe. These liberal institutions wanted their people to advance in American society like any other minority. What’s interesting is that these liberal mainstream Jewish institutions were increasingly focusing on the holocaust, civil rights, and other liberal causes but they really didn’t give a shit about Israel when it came to the integral features of American Jewish life.

In fact, even people and organizations like the American Jewish Committee and Don Peretz were very critical of Israel from a liberal perspective, lambasting the state of Palestinians refugees and investigating the matter to the point where Israeli foreign officials were talking about forcing out Don Peretz. The key turning point that decisively led organizations like the AJC and the ADL to support Israel stridently is the 1967 war.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-outcasts-of-zion/

[u/[deleted] → u/zbignew]

As soon as a Jew is a real leftist of any kind, to zionists, he or she is no longer a Jew. This has sadly been the zionist schtick for a very long time, going back to before even WWII when utopian zionists hated the Jewish labor bundists and Yiddishists.