Know Your Enemy - Elon Musk, the Jews, and the ADL (w/ Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, & Peter Beinart)

We discuss the contradictory history of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — and how to make sense of its recent showdown with Elon Musk — with Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, and Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents.

Duration: 1h 5m
Broadcast on: 26 Sep 2023
Audio Format: other

A few weeks ago, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, eagerly joined in a campaign, originating on the far right, to demonize the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a century-old Jewish civil rights organization whose leaders have criticized Musk for allowing anti-semitic and white supremacist hate speech to proliferate on Twitter/X. To many progressives, it could sound like a simple story of good vs. evil — the righteous vs. the hateful — especially for those who've experienced the palpable flourishing of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent sentiment on Twitter/X since Musk purchased the platform.

But for our guests — Mari Cohen, Alex Kane, and Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents — the story is more complicated. Over the past five years, Jewish Currents has been perhaps the only outlet on the left aggressively reporting on the ADL, exposing its complicity with the Trump presidency, its attacks on pro-Palestinian activism, and its fraying relationships with Muslim and black-led civil rights groups. In this episode, we explore the central tension animating the ADL's erratic politics: can an organization officially dedicated to securing "justice and fair treatment to all" simultaneously forbid criticism of a state — the state of Israel — whose ethnonationalist social order is an inspiration to right-wing movements the world over? And if that contradiction can't be reconciled, how should we respond to Musk's attacks on the organization? Is the ADL salvageable? And does it deserve to be saved? Listen to find out!

Further Reading

Emmaia Gelman, "The Anti-Democratic Origins of the ADL and AJC," Jewish Currents, March 12, 2021

Peter Beinart, "Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?" New York Times, Aug 26, 2022

Mari Cohen, The ADL's Antisemitism Findings, Explained, Jewish Currents, April 4, 2023

Mari Cohen & Isaac Scher, "The ADL Doubles Down on Opposing the Anti-Zionist Left," Jewish Currents, May 1, 2022

Alex Kane & Jacob Hutt, "How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work," February 8, 2021

Noah Kulwin, "The Unbearable Ignorance of the ADL," Jewish Currents, Dec 9, 2022

Mari Cohen & Alex Kane, "ADL Staffers Dissented After CEO Compared Palestinian Rights Groups to Right-Wing Extremists, Leaked Audio Reveals," Jewish Currents, Mar 8, 2023

Alex Kane & Sam Levin, "Internal ADL Memo Recommended Ending Police Delegations to Israel Amid Backlash," Jewish Currents, Mar 17, 2022

Eric Alterman, "What Does the ADL Stand for Today?" The New Republic, Aug 21, 2023

James Traub, "Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?" New York Times, Jan 14, 2007

Find our intrepid producer Jesse Brenneman's new record "Modern Life" on Bandcamp, Spotify, or YouTube.

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!

Welcome listeners to episode 79 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Sam Adler-Bell, one of your podcast co-hosts, and I'm here all alone because my great friend Matt Sitman is off this week. Thankfully, I'm joined by not one, not two, but three distinguished guests from the wonderful publication Jewish Currents, and they join me to discuss a longstanding preoccupation of mine, a thorny topic which has recently become even thornier, and that is the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, which you, news-savvy listeners, may know as the story Jewish anti-hate organization that was recently attacked by Elon Musk and the far right, but which many of us have known for much longer as a fickle and petty organ of centrist liberal political power whose concern for civil rights and the First Amendment stops as soon as those rights are being used to criticize the increasingly ethno-nationalist state of Israel. I won't give anything else about the conversation away. Suffice to say, it's a very interesting one, except to say that I was joined by the best possible writers and thinkers to take on this subject. They are Mari Cohen, associate editor at Jewish Currents, Alex Kane, senior reporter at Jewish Currents, and Peter Beinart, who is the editor at large at Jewish Currents, and who listeners may know from his tenure at the New Republic, and who careful listeners may remember caught a few strays from our last guest, Samuel Moen, for his role in reviving Cold War liberalism in the post-9/11 moment, but whose political journey has taken him in quite a different direction since then, making his contributions to this conversation especially interesting, at least to me. So I'll do the housekeeping. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do for us is if you subscribe to know your enemy at our Patreon, www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy, for $10 a month you'll get all of our bonus episodes and a free digital subscription to Descent magazine. And of course, if you subscribe on Patreon for $5 a month, you get access to our rich backlog of paywalled episodes, including our recent rank punditry about the GOP presidential debates. As always, we want to thank Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast, and our intrepid producer, Jesse Brendan, who I want to mention here has a new album of his own music out. It's called Modern Life. It's very funny, as Jesse is, and very good. And you can find it on all the streaming platforms, which I'll link to in the show notes. With that said, here's my conversation with Alex Kane, Mari Cohen, and Peter Beiner of Jewish Currents about the tortured history of the anti-defamation league, enjoy. All right, welcome Mari, Alex, and Peter to know your enemy. - Hi. - Thanks for having us on. - Thanks. - We got the Jewish Currents Zoo Crew on the podcast, which I'm really excited about. Matt's not here, unfortunately, but he did give an excuse, which is that he said, and I want to get this quote right, "Too many Jews." He's not here, so he can't say that that's not true. But I'm really excited about this episode. As I already said, we're going to be talking about the anti-defamation league and its history, but just for the listeners, and so we're all on the same page. I just wanted to give a sense of what the sort of inciting event for this episode is, which is the recent showdown between the anti-defamation league, the ADL, a century old Jewish civil rights and advocacy organization, and Elon Musk. In brief, Musk has recently blamed the ADL and threatened to sue them over Twitter's cratering revenue, citing the organization's role in an advertiser boycott against the platform. Notably, the ADL hadn't been a member of Twitter's Trust and Safety Council, which Musk disbanded in December 2022, and Musk's criticism contributed to a wave of anti-ADL, and often anti-Jewish sentiment from basically the entire right, from its nastiest corners, to its toner types, from the grippers to Ben Shapiro. Everyone had something negative to say about the ADL, and many of them echoed calls originating on the far right to, quote, ban the ADL. And so from the outside, probably many of our listeners and especially progressives, this conflict could look quite simple and quite horrifying. The richest man in the world was teaming up with the most racist and anti-Semitic factions of the right to attack a legacy civil rights organization basically for the crime of doing its job, that is calling out Musk and ex, aka Twitter, for allowing anti-Jewish and white supremacist hate speech to proliferate on the platform.

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