Last month, the comedian and talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg found herself at the center of the controversy-of-the-week when she described the Holocaust as disconnected from racism, since, she said, it involved “two white groups of people.” Jason Greenblatt, head of Anti-Defamation League (ADL), came on her television program the next day and patiently clarified her misunderstandings. But the incident, Seth Mandel notes, highlights the direction in which Greenblatt has taken this venerable, and once avidly nonpartisan, organization:
One thing Greenblatt did not do was ask Goldberg where on earth she could have gotten such a preposterous and offensive idea. . . . For on the very day that Goldberg made her comments about the impossibility of a conflict being racial in nature if the perpetrators and victims had similar complexions, the definition of the word “racism” on the ADL’s website read, . . . “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
Follow the logic: according to the Anti-Defamation League itself—the Jewish organization set up in 1915 specifically to combat anti-Semitism—Whoopi Goldberg’s remarks were accurate. The Holocaust couldn’t have been about race, under the ADL’s definition of the word “racism,” because American Jews cannot be victims of racism.
Almost from the moment [Greenblatt] took over in 2014, the ADL has been mired in accusations of political bias, of providing cover for anti-Semites on the left from the kind of accountability the organization doggedly pursues for anyone on the right. Those accusations are true. But the organization is in the middle of a more consequential turn. To gain admission to the new progressive pantheon, the ADL has found itself compelled to jettison its century-old mission and become a different kind of organization entirely.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/seth-mandel/adl-progressives-antisemitism-greenblatt/