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The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
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.
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.
- GenresNonfictionJudaismHistory
342 pages, Hardcover
Published June 16, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2026
A Must-Read to Unmask the ADL
From the 1st page, I was hooked. “On April 9, 1993, newspapers from San Francisco to Baltimore blared variations on a stunning headline: “Anti-Defamation League Offices Raided by Police, Spy Data Sought in San Francisco.” The ADL–the organization school districts consider a trusted teacher trainer– was busted for spying on civil rights groups!
Gelman’s book unmasks the ADL to reveal its little-known origin story as a 1913 organization founded by white upper class midwestern German Jews to rescue their image endangered by the arrival of poor “unassimilated laboring-class Jewish immigrants–Eastern European Jews.” From there, Gelman documents the ADL’s attacks on leftists during the 1950’s Red Scare, Black liberationists in the 60’s and anti-Zionists in the present, all the while offering a class of wealthy charitable donors a network to build business, social and political relationships that would advance their assimilation into whiteness, and crown the ADL as a “quasi-state agency” in the fight against antisemitism and the “new antisemitism” redefined as opposition to the State of Israel.
Along the way, Gelman notes how the strategic ADL published educational pamphlets–later school curriculum, held “Fireside Discussion Groups” for Jews, especially those not active at synagogues, and “blanketed” US newsrooms with an article “Russian Jews Against Bolshevik rule” to win favor with the capitalist class and brand itself as a defender of democracy and warrior against hate.
In the ADL’s crusade against Palestinian rights, Gelman writes the ADL counted each protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an antisemitic incident, fueling a conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism as lawmakers cited ADL statistics to justify school censorship.
“The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State” is a book for all of us wishing to understand how the ADL masquerades as a civil rights organization to plant a Zionist foothold in education and politics and colonize the American mind. Read the book, send it to a lawmaker, a teacher, a rabbi.
From the 1st page, I was hooked. “On April 9, 1993, newspapers from San Francisco to Baltimore blared variations on a stunning headline: “Anti-Defamation League Offices Raided by Police, Spy Data Sought in San Francisco.” The ADL–the organization school districts consider a trusted teacher trainer– was busted for spying on civil rights groups!
Gelman’s book unmasks the ADL to reveal its little-known origin story as a 1913 organization founded by white upper class midwestern German Jews to rescue their image endangered by the arrival of poor “unassimilated laboring-class Jewish immigrants–Eastern European Jews.” From there, Gelman documents the ADL’s attacks on leftists during the 1950’s Red Scare, Black liberationists in the 60’s and anti-Zionists in the present, all the while offering a class of wealthy charitable donors a network to build business, social and political relationships that would advance their assimilation into whiteness, and crown the ADL as a “quasi-state agency” in the fight against antisemitism and the “new antisemitism” redefined as opposition to the State of Israel.
Along the way, Gelman notes how the strategic ADL published educational pamphlets–later school curriculum, held “Fireside Discussion Groups” for Jews, especially those not active at synagogues, and “blanketed” US newsrooms with an article “Russian Jews Against Bolshevik rule” to win favor with the capitalist class and brand itself as a defender of democracy and warrior against hate.
In the ADL’s crusade against Palestinian rights, Gelman writes the ADL counted each protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an antisemitic incident, fueling a conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism as lawmakers cited ADL statistics to justify school censorship.
“The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State” is a book for all of us wishing to understand how the ADL masquerades as a civil rights organization to plant a Zionist foothold in education and politics and colonize the American mind. Read the book, send it to a lawmaker, a teacher, a rabbi.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
August 7, 2026
The ADL and the Racial State is essential reading for anyone interested in the ascendance of far-right forces in US politics. Gelman's sharp analysis, backed by rich archival research, pulls back the curtain on the long history of the ADL's support for these forces, its long history of undermining both efforts to expand democracy and campaigns for redistributive justice.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews