Under fire from the left for speaking up against Mamdani and resented by the right for a decade of partisanship and woke betrayal, the organization stands at a crossroads.
The Anti-Defamation League is being accused by The New York Times, MSNBC, left-wing Jewish organizations and the antisemitic Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of Islamophobia and unfairness to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. But for those who are hoping that the Jewish defense group will return to its mission of defending the Jewish people and drop its decade-long detour into woke partisanship, that’s a hopeful sign.
After years of showing every indication that it was not merely useless in the battle against antisemitism but increasingly aligned with those enabling a dangerous growth of left-wing Jew-hatred, the ADL is starting to try to do its job again. Like many liberal Jews, the organization’s leaders were not merely shocked but caught completely off guard by the reaction to the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The surge of antisemitism coming from the political left that manifested itself on the streets of American cities and on college campuses was too obvious and devastating for the ADL to ignore.
A Mamdani monitor
