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"A gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.
"Emmaia Gelman's gripping book sent chills down my spine. In meticulous detail, she documents how the Anti-Defamation League, in the name of combating hate, terror, and antisemitism, has defended Israeli policies of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, attacked the Left, assailed Black, Brown, and queer movements, given cover to US imperial crimes, and become a mouthpiece for neoconservatism. But this is not the tragic story of an organization that lost its way. Rather, the ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Exploring how the Anti-Defamation League was at the center of a creative neoconservative project to reshape the ideas at the heart of American power structures, Gelman's Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State transforms our understanding of the history of Zionist organizing in the US. Gelman shows with precision and rich historical detail how the ADL co-opted the civil rights movement to present Arabs and the Left as racist, reframed racial violence with the more limited conception of 'hate crimes,' seeded repressive anti-terrorism legislation, and turned itself into a spy agency to surveil its political enemies on behalf of the US state to which it has always been loyal."—Arun Kundnani, author of What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism
"Unsparing in her attention to elite institutions, anticommunism, and the suppression of mass politics, Gelman forges a new politics of the possible. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State historicizes our lived present to give us exactly what we need: a careful dismantling of the imbricated categories of 'liberal' and 'conservative.' At a time when the ADL stands at the bipartisan forefront of anti-Palestinian policy—criminalizing speech to deny and enable the ongoing Nakba and genocide in Palestine—this incisive, meticulously researched history could not be more urgent."—Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine
"In this urgent and necessary book, Gelman uncovers the complex and troubling history of a once widely admired—and now deeply contested—organization ostensibly committed to civil rights. Drawing on rich archival evidence and propelled by incisive analysis, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State shows that the ADL was never the steadfast defender of civil rights it claimed to be. For much of its history, it has been dedicated to suppressing Jewish political dissent and securing the assimilation of Jews of European ancestry into the structures of American white supremacy and the broader liberal racial order that undergirds US and Israeli state power. This history runs through the organization's attacks on Jewish labor movements, its embrace of McCarthyism, its opposition to legal remedies for racial inequality, and its unwavering support for Zionism and the state of Israel—even amid Israel's worst human rights atrocities. The ADL's alliance with the far right in the Trump era, Gelman demonstrates, is no rupture with its past but the culmination of a long-standing project: to appropriate the language of civil rights while entrenching the very hierarchies it professed to oppose."—Barry Trachtenberg, author of The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the “Algemeyne Entsiklopedye”
"Gelman has gifted us with an indispensable analytical history of an organization that continues to play an outsized role in shaping, politicizing, and policing the popular common sense. This relentlessly documented, rigorously researched book will indelibly alter any reasonable reader's perception and understanding of the Anti-Defamation League and its historical relation to liberationist, antiracist, and decolonizing movements."—Dylan Rodríguez, author of White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide
"It is impossible to overstate the importance of this book for these times. Well-researched and deeply informed, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State shows how the ADL leads the way in undermining abolition and other anti-violence and redistributive efforts by making policing and lawfare appear as socially good violence."—Jodi Melamed, Professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University
"A bold and bracing history of the ADL's century-long campaign to enforce and depict a nonexistent Jewish American hegemony around Israel, capitalism, and US state-building. Gelman deftly traverses German/Eastern European Jewish class differences, the divergent range of Jewish commitments to civil rights and Black power, and Ocean Hill-Brownsville and urban divides over power-sharing, while courageously confronting the ADL's organizational investment in overstating antisemitism as a tactical reaction to growing anti-Zionism among US Jews. This is a paradigm-shifting must-read."—Sarah Schulman, author of The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
"This compelling book provides the indispensable history of an organization that claims to defend equal rights and civil liberties while actually working to secure the foundational logic of the racial and carceral state at home and a genocidal project of apartheid overseas. Gelman takes us through and lays bare the many convoluted layers of denial at work in the ADL with clarity, keen intelligence, and a constant commitment to justice and the truth."—Saree Makdisi, author of Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial
"Gelman gifts us a stunningly urgent study that helps us counter the most pernicious myths the ADL's ideological machinery has constructed over decades. What we are left with is an airtight road map to both the concrete historical details and the structural knowledge needed to refuse the Zionist warfare that is intent on reshaping our reality."—Lara Sheehi, author of From the Clinic to the Streets: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures
"Gelman's history of the Anti-Defamation League is about the making of racial liberalism throughout the twentieth century, which is to say it is about how the language of redistributive justice was co-opted, reframed, and attenuated through the ADL's appeal to anti-hate legislation, safety, and references to the 'new anti-Semitism.' Presenting a remarkable archive of sources, Gelman illustrates how the ADL became a normative force in American racial liberalism, offering anti-hate and anti-bias school curriculum. In doing so, Gelman shows that the ADL has assisted the state in limiting, reframing, and opposing Jewish, Black, queer, and Palestinian demands for justice throughout the twentieth century. While readers will be fascinated to learn about the ADL's history, they will also learn how the ADL helped the state limit the available opportunities for redistributive justice in America and helped target anti-genocide and anti-Zionist protests in the contemporary era. Relatedly, they will learn how the ADL has attempted to undermine movements for Black-Palestinian solidarity by invoking the moral panic of 'Black antisemitism.' The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State is both necessary and important."—Alex Lubin, author of Never-Ending War on Terror
"The backlash to pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2023 and 2024 quickly consolidated around anti-liberation, pro-state rhetoric, directly continuous with the manufactured panics aimed at the Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ movements. Gelman here explains why this was not a coincidence but the ADL's institutional logic working as designed. This revelatory book is well-researched, superbly written, elegantly argued, theoretically powerful, and morally just."—Isaac Kamola, coauthor of Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War
"Meticulously researched and persuasively written, Gelman's book blows the lid off a household name in the human rights field, revealing the ADL's long-standing record of racial profiling and discrimination. An iconoclastic study that is guaranteed to ruffle feathers."—Andrew Ross, author of The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates
"An early 1990s FBI raid on the ADL's spying operation against peace and environmental groups exposed the inner character of the supposed protector of human rights. Since at least the 1960s, and up to the present, the ADL has lobbied against affirmative action, support for human rights in Israel, and an assortment of related issues. Now, at last, we have something approaching the full story. Gelman deserves the heartfelt praise of progressives and scholars of Jewish life as well."—Paul Buhle, editor of Jews and American Popular Culture
"Those hoping to understand the ADL's current far-right alignment must read Gelman's Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. Based on prodigious archival research, this book pulls back the curtain on the ADL's history of so-called 'anti-hate' work, revealing the organization's active role in shaping domestic and foreign policies that marginalized, indeed silenced, efforts to redistribute power and resources most justly. Gelman's sophisticated and smart analysis makes clear that the ADL's weaponizing antisemitism and support for Israel's genocide in Gaza in our current moment are but the latest chapter in the ADL's fight against antiracist, anticolonialist movements. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State forces a new reckoning with the question of who speaks for the interests—and real safety—of American Jews and indeed of all of us."—Marjorie Feld, author of The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism
"Long considered a noble defender of persecuted minorities, the Anti-Defamation League has recently shocked many for its cynical weaponization of antisemitism to enable apartheid and genocide in Palestine. But as Gelman demonstrates in this indispensable history, throughout a century of ever-changing racial discourses and politics, the ADL has remained consistent in its service to capitalism, whiteness, and settler colonialism. This book is essential reading for scholars and activists working to dismantle the complex systems of oppression insidiously baked into US liberalism and its institutions."—Jeff Schuhrke, author of No Neutrals There: US Labor, Zionism, and the Struggle for Palestine
"In this deeply researched and incisive history, Gelman shows how the Anti-Defamation League's well-known opposition to antisemitism has obscured its consistent support for settler colonial and carceral projects, not to mention its enduring hostility toward liberatory movements. You'll never think of the ADL in the same way."—A. J. Bauer, author of Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press
"Gelman's pathbreaking, masterful history of the ADL explains not simply this organization's raison d'être but also its raison d'état. Gelman's acute political and historical analysis of the ADL's underexamined role in twentieth-century US racecraft, empire, and ongoing settler conquest makes for gripping reading. Going forward, it will be impossible to understand US political culture without taking this book into account."—C. Heike Schotten, author of Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony
"The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized in the United States against the Left. Gelman helps us make sense of why the ADL is still seen as an authority on civil rights while it continues to drift rightward, accommodating and excusing some of the most racist right-wing antisemites. For parents, educators, and students in schools where ADL materials are still ubiquitous, this book is a call to action. For Jewish leftists, this book challenges us to build alternative institutions to fight for racial justice and to better understand how class and race shape Jewish politics."—Adam Sanchez, Managing Editor of Rethinking Schools