The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
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“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
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) once sought to portray itself as a defender of civil rights aligned with racial justice movements in the United States. In a groundbreaking study that Publishers Weekly describes as a "gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization," Emmaia Gelman exposes the ADL’s alliance with American white supremacy and western empire and its historic investment in Cold War anticommunism. Her definitive account shows how the ADL as a Zionist organization has advanced and supported pro-state policing, a hate-crimes framework that obscures racialized structures of power, and a “War on Terror” that has stoked anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
In this talk, Gelman will focus specifically on the relationship between hate crime legislation and the suppression of Arab American organizing in the 1980s.
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