This week, the ADL released its annual audit of antisemitic incidents. Predictably, the organization repeated its familiar mantra that the Palestine solidarity movement was the chief culprit behind a precipitous, record-shattering rise in antisemitic incidents in 2024. While it’s encouraging that some media outlets gave space to a range of dissenting voices, others uncritically parroted the ADL’s framing in a rote spectacle that has almost become banal in its absurdity. “Jews in America faced more than 25 anti-Jewish incidents per day last year—more than one per hour,” Jewish Insider breathlessly reported. Apparently, we cannot escape the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ even in our sleep!
Last year, reporters highlighted sweeping flaws in the ADL’s methodology in the wake of October 7, when the organization included an array of Palestine solidarity rallies in its datasets of antisemitic incidents. This year’s audit takes the absurdity to new heights, listing Jewish Voice for Peace as a perpetrator behind 313 “antisemitic incidents” across the US. According to the ADL, a Jewish group is responsible for more antisemitism in the United States than the white nationalist Goyim Defense League, and is the fourth-largest institutional culprit of antisemitism overall.
Many of these incidents list JVP as one of many groups involved in a larger action. For example, an October rally in West Lafayette, Indiana co-organized by JVP, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Democratic Socialists of America was deemed an antisemitic incident because it featured a sign that read “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Other incidents list JVP as the sole perpetrator. A JVP-organized rally in Los Angeles last summer was classified as antisemitic over a sign asserting that “Zionism is ethnic cleansing.”
Indeed, the ADL seems to consider it antisemitic for anti-Zionist Jews to protest their own Jewish community. For example, in one February incident JVP members disrupted a speech at a Miami Beach synagogue by pro-Israel gadfly Alan Dershowitz, while in another, a coalition of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups staged a protest at Hunter College chanting “we say no to genocide, Jews on campus pick a side.” Strategic considerations aside, it is not antisemitic for Jews to protest political events held in synagogues or to pose political demands within our communities.
Elsewhere, the ADL deemed a JVP rally antisemitic because a speaker “criticized Zionism as the so-called ‘weaponization of Judaism’”— a charge which, in reverse, Zionist Jews often levy against the likes of JVP. And the ADL doesn’t merely render the identity claims of the Jewish Left as hostile threats—11 incidents name the Haredi anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta, which grounds its critique of Zionism in ultra-Orthodox theology.
A particularly ridiculous and potentially embarrassing case suggests that the ADL lacks a basic understanding of a long standing and widely practiced Jewish religious ritual. In October 2024, JVP and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) held a ritual action outside the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), a leading Bay Area Jewish communal institution, to protest the JCRC’s long standing involvement in repression of Palestine solidarity activism. Listing it among antisemitic incidents, the ADL complained that the protesters “hung signs with a list of ‘the sins of the JCRC’” and “threw bread at the building.”
In fact, the protest, which took place during the High Holy Days, included a performance of the ritual known as tashlich. For hundreds of years, Jews have cast bread or other items into a body of water during tashlich to symbolize teshuvah, the process of reflecting on individual and collective sin and resolving to change course, a central theme of the High Holy Days. In a creative, politicized tashlich, protesters dipped chunks of challah in the water of a nearby kiddie pool and cast them at the JCRC building. “In doing so,” one protester explained, “we are casting JCRC sins right back to them.”
It’s unclear whether the ADL was stunningly ignorant that protesters were performing a Jewish ritual, or whether they willfully misrepresented it. It’s not categorically impossible for Jews to participate in antisemitism, of course, but this tashlich ritual stands in a long tradition of Jewish prophetic protest, often directed at our own communal institutions.
In recasting even intra-Jewish political protest as antisemitic hostility, these “incidents” signal the logical end-point of the longstanding bankrupt strategy, spearheaded by the ADL and many fellow-travelers, to redefine antisemitism as sword and shield in the battle to defend Israel and Zionism from criticism. If the charge of antisemitism is to be wielded so brazenly as a cudgel against Jewish dissent, then the bounds of legible Jewishness, too, must be narrowed to fit the contours of Israelism. Within that suffocating framework, a tashlich ceremony must be rendered as equally threatening as a white nationalist assault.
Today, the Trump administration is weaponizing this redefinition to kidnap Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, snatching them right off the streets, and to launch an all-out war on the university itself. Like many, the ADL seems in recent days to profess a bit of buyer’s remorse, tepidly cautioning that the moral panic it’s done much to foment may have gone too far in producing such a nakedly authoritarian outcome.
Meanwhile, as the ADL’s arbiter-of-antisemitism credibility continues to crumble and it finds itself increasingly unable to play the role of communal gatekeeper, the very Jews it condemns as beyond the pale continue to take to the streets in protest against MAGA authoritarianism. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s whimper of pushback is too little, too late, given that the ADL has helped roll out the carpet for the authoritarian onslaught. In fact, Greenblatt and the ADL might want to familiarize themselves with tashlich before the next High Holy Days.
Editor’s note 9:24 am (ET), April 24, 2025: This post has been updated to include more examples from the audit and expanded analysis of the ADL’s broader campaign to “to redefine antisemitism as sword and shield in the battle to defend Israel and Zionism from criticism.” To read about the ADL’s threat to withdraw sponsorship of a major antisemitism conference due partly to the presence of the author of this post, go here. And for more on why this campaign is so deeply misguided, see: Shaul Magid’s ‘Anti-Zionism = Antisemitism’ isn’t Just Wrong, It’s the Problem and Seth Sanders’ Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think.
