Inside the ADL’s Search for a New Playbook

Inside the ADL’s Search for a New Playbook

On January 10, 2026, Jonathan Greenblatt sat down with Rabbi David Wolpe at Sinai Temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles for what was billed as a conversation about “the golden age of American Jewry—how we got here and whether it’s coming to an end.”

What happened in between reveals more about the Anti-Defamation League’s actual strategic thinking than any polished press release or carefully managed public appearance ever could. When clips from the discussion began circulating on social media, first shared by Chris Menahan of Information Liberation, they exposed candid remarks from the head of America’s most prominent Jewish organization that fundamentally reframed decades of ADL advocacy as primarily serving Jewish communal interests rather than universal principles.

Information Liberation posted on X a summary that captured the most explosive elements. “ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, in now deleted video, tells Sinai Temple in West LA that Leo Frank was ‘falsely accused,'(!) the ADL pushed integration in schools, Jews need to ‘find new allies’ because Blacks and LGBTQs abandoned them after Oct 7, The ADL’s historical fight for minority rights ‘was very Jewish.'”

Greenblatt’s framing of ADL history was blunt. He described the organization’s civil rights work from the 1910s through the 1940s as strategically motivated by Jewish self-interest. “These Jews understood that we could not win on our own,” Greenblatt said. “So, when the ADL fought in the ‘10s, and ]20s, and ]30s, and ‘40s, it was the organization that cracked those quotas, that changed those laws that made America better for its Jews.”

Greenblatt argued that Jews fought discriminatory laws and broke down barriers not only because discrimination was wrong in principle, but because Jews needed a more pluralistic America to be safe. He described the work as “very Jewish.”

Greenblatt then attacked contemporary leftist movements, largely developed by Jewish activists decades before, turning on their Jewish architects. “This was before intersectionality, before social justice and all of that gobbledegook,” Greenblatt said.

Above all, Greenblatt expressed deep frustration that traditional coalition partners in the Black and LGBTQ communities did not rally to Jewish causes after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. These communities, which had supposedly benefited from ADL advocacy for decades, had failed to reciprocate when Jews needed them.

Most notable was the case of Black Lives Matter. The 2020 BLM revival exposed long-standing tensions between Black and Jewish communities. Following George Floyd’s death, BLM declared solidarity with Palestinians and called for an end to “settler colonialism in all forms” — a turn toward anti-Israel rhetoric that unsettled many Jewish organizations that had previously aligned with the movement.

The breach deepened after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. BLM Chicago posted and then deleted an image of a paraglider carrying a Palestinian flag, widely read as an expression of sympathy for Hamas. BLM Grassroots followed with a statement condemning Israel’s “apartheid system” and affirming Palestinians’ “right to resist.”

For Greenblatt, the response to October 7 by large elements of the gentile left was a stark betrayal. The ADL had invested decades in civil rights work, stood against discrimination, and championed causes that undermined White gentile civilization. When the moment came, however, many of those same partners were silent — and some went further, aligning themselves with pro-Palestinian movements that condemned Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal.

Such developments have prompted organized Jewry to calibrate its outreach strategies. In some instances, factions of American Jewry have made overtures to the right, in efforts to infiltrate and Judaize right-wing circles.

Of note, the deleted video also contained revelations that went far beyond the alliance pivot. Asked about figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, Greenblatt described working “behind the scenes” with conservative allies to counter them. “I need people on the right to take down Tucker Carlson — so I’m trying to help Ted Cruz,” he told the Sinai Temple audience. On Fuentes, he said: “I need people on the right to take down Nick Fuentes — so I’m trying to help people like Ben [Shapiro].” He also named left-wing streamer Hasan Piker as a target of similar efforts on the left, calling him “a revolting person” who “says horrible slanderous things about Jews, about Zionists, about Israel.”

The “take down” language sparked immediate controversy. Tucker Carlson himself responded on X, stating, “Republican senator/presidential candidate working with the anti-white ADL to suppress speech. You can see why people begin to wonder about the system we currently have.”

Greenblatt also disclosed operational details that had previously been kept private. The ADL has 40 analysts monitoring extremists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, sharing intelligence with the FBI — a relationship Greenblatt said continued despite FBI Director Kash Patel’s public claim to have severed it. The organization uses AI systems to evaluate antisemitism complaints and route viable cases to a pro bono network of roughly 39,000 lawyers across more than 40 law firms. The ADL also describes itself as the largest non-governmental trainer of law enforcement on extremism and hate in the United States, training 20,000 officers annually.

Taken together, these developments suggest that organized Jewish institutions now confront a shifting landscape—one that compels them to adapt long-standing strategies of influence and alliance management to new political, socio-economic, and technological realities. Jewish influence exhibits inherent instability, as it relies on cultivating select minority coalitions to erode White American cohesion. Yet, once these proxy groups amass sufficient power, they frequently assert autonomy and occasionally challenge their Jewish overlords. As this author has previously argued, the Black-Jewish alliance remains precarious, given Blacks’ recurrent deviations in the political arena that often imperil Jewish political priorities.

This volatility has compelled Jewish leadership to adjust tactics toward Whites, promoting renewed enlistment in the military and re-entry into the labor force to sustain the warfare apparatus and Judeo-capitalist framework. Persistent Jewish animus toward White civilization, however, prompts the sponsorship of alternative ethnic battering rams in the long-term. America’s deepening multi-racial composition furnishes Jews with an expanded arsenal of such proxies.

Prior documentation from this author confirms organized Jewry’s overtures to upwardly mobile foreigners like Indian immigrants. Moreover, Greenblatt himself has disclosed targeted initiatives to court Hispanic evangelicals as new partners in the ADL’s quest to consolidate Jewish supremacy.

Greenblatt’s comments, and the backlash they sparked, reveal a Jewish community grappling with the collapse of its long-standing post-World War II playbook. The tried-and-true formula of building alliances, shaping narratives, and pulling strings among elites is crumbling, forcing Jewish organizations to scramble for fresh ways to hold onto power amid a rapidly atomizing society—a fragmentation that Jewish influencers themselves have done much to accelerate.