In October 2022, Greenblatt went on CNBC to talk about Musk’s impending takeover of the social media network. According to a recent Vice investigation, before the television appearance, Greenblatt’s staffers had prepared talking points that highlighted how Musk had been accused of racial discrimination in a lawsuit targeting his electric car company Tesla.
Instead of heeding those talking points, however, Greenblatt praised Musk as “an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator” and the “Henry Ford of our time”—a striking parallel to draw given Ford’s history of antisemitism (Greenblatt eventually backtracked on the implied praise of Ford).
[…]
Two former employees said they were frustrated when Greenblatt used words like “barbarians” and “savages” to describe Hamas militants—terms that their own work fighting dehumanization had taught them to avoid. “In the immediate aftermath, I was not particularly happy with some of the messaging, but I was told ‘emotions are running high, Jonathan [has never been] this emotional,’ and I was willing to extend grace to understand that,” the fourth former employee said.
But Greenblatt and senior leadership continued to disappoint. After October 7th, the third former employee told Jewish Currents, employees were told to put all their existing work on pause and focus primarily on anti-Zionist discourse. “There was genuine antisemitism and cases of white supremacist accounts piggybacking on anti-Zionism, and I think we could have done a lot more messaging around that,” the employee said.
“But it was not that at all. It was really focused on [opposing] anti-Zionism no matter who it was from, no matter the context, even if it’s an 18-year old college kid who maybe has family dead. If they said something, we were going to call it out.”
[…]
As yet, the internal discontent roiling the ADL has not impacted its fundraising horizon, according to the current staffer. This year, the organization’s goal was to raise over $80 million—a goal they reached before Thanksgiving. But the current staffer said that Greenblatt’s decisions had nevertheless damaged the organization’s credibility—a state of affairs reflected in Eisenstat’s departure.
“If you are a civil rights, human rights, or democracy advocate, you don’t go to work for the ADL without being willing to swallow some stuff that you disagree with, but this has gone way past that,” the current staffer said. “Jonathan has so undermined our credibility and expertise.”
The fourth former staffer echoed that concern: “ADL certainly had its problems for decades, but at least some of the research was credible. Now I don’t know why anyone would take anything the ADL says seriously at all, and that sucks.”
Another perfect example of why we can expect no help from upper‐class Jews. They look out for their class, not their people.
