September 20, 2024 – As antisemitism reaches unprecedented levels in the United States, ADL (Anti-Defamation League), OneTable, and Passages Israel are working to build bridges between the Jewish and Christian communities through shared experiences and dialogue. Their joint initiative, “A Light in the City,” aims to foster friendship and understanding by hosting Shabbat dinners in four key cities. The pilot program, to take place in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York…
20 Results
By Carole Nuriel and Aykan Erdemir
An examination of textbooks used in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades of Moroccan state schools during the 2021-2022 school year indicate that tolerance and diversity are core to the curriculum promoted across Moroccan society. The excerpts on Judaism and Jews that Morocco’s Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training provided to ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) show that the country’s elementary school textbooks depict Jews as an…
August 21 marked the 53rd anniversary of the 1969 al-Aqsa Mosque arson and the ongoing disinformation campaigns scapegoating Jews and Israel for the attack. Although Israeli authorities promptly arrested, tried, and convicted the culprit, Denis Michael Rohan – a Protestant extremist from Australia who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus – Middle Eastern outlets have been publishing inaccurate reports of the event to this day. In a blog published last month,…
August 21 marks the 53rd anniversary of a terrible attack against an Islamic holy site, when a Protestant extremist from Australia named Denis Michael Rohan set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, destroying large parts of the site and irreplaceable artifacts.
Rohan’s crime should rightly be widely condemned and the loss commemorated even five-plus decades later. It is important to note that Rohan, who believed his actions would prompt the Second Coming of Jesus, was…
At ADL, we monitor extremism and misinformation regularly as part of our work fighting hate. As is the case with many legacy organizations, there is a fair amount of misinformation spread about who ADL is and the reality of the work we do. To help stop the spread of this misinformation, below are responses to some of the most egregious claims.
Claim: ADL supports racist, militarized policing
Fact: ADL opposes racist or militarized policing and has a long and documented history of…
by: Jonathan Greenblatt | April 06, 2020 The Times of Israel As the Jewish community prepares for Passover under quarantine, I’m reflecting on how this moment is so profoundly difficult for so many Jewish families as we head into the holidays.
The coronavirus pandemic has not only upended the lives and livelihoods of people everywhere, but it is going to have a profound effect on Jewish families preparing for the celebration of Passover, which begins on the night of Wednesday, April…
by: Rabbi David Sandmel January 21, 2020 Update: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oberammergau Passion Play has been postponed until 2022.
In 1634, the residents of the picturesque village of Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps made a vow to perform a passion play every ten years as a sign of their gratitude to God for having been spared from a deadly plague. Today the Oberammergau Passion Play is performed every ten years, in years ending in zero, and will also be performed in 2034 …
June 25, 2019 UPDATE: On June 26th, ADL submitted this statement urging passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act as part of House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties hearings entitled “Continuing Challenges to the Voting Rights Act Since Shelby County v. Holder.
This week marks six years since the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nation…
January 07, 2019 By Rabbi David Fox Sandmel | ADL Director of Interreligious Engagement
I have traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories a number of times with interfaith groups, including Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals and Muslims, among them some African-Americans. A recent trip that brought together rabbis and African-American pastors from around the country, however, was different because the African-American experience and Black-Jewish relations framed the entire…
Remarks, as delivered, to the NAACP Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas July 16, 2018 Remarks as delivered
Thank you, Gary, and good morning, NAACP! It is so great for me to be here with you today.
You know, two months ago, my friend – and your President and CEO – Derrick Johnson, addressed the Anti-Defamation League at our National Leadership Summit in Washington D.C. in a room a lot like this. And in a speech no one on our side will soon forget,…
by: Jonathan A. Greenblatt | February 09, 2017 Your Holiness,
This week, in synagogues all over the world, Jews will read Shirat Ha-yam, the “Song of the Sea” from the book of Exodus that Miriam, Moses and the Israelites sang after they miraculously passed through the Sea of Reeds on dry land.
As a newly free people, they expressed their thanks to God for their redemption, saying:
Who is like you, o eternal, among the…
December 21, 2016 Editor’s Note:A Muslim academic and a Jewish interfaith rabbi recently sat down together for a discussion about the spate of hate crimes that have taken place in the aftermath of the 2016 election campaign and what can happen with Jews and Muslims work together to combat hate speech.
The following conversation between Dr. Mehnaz Afridi, Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Institute at Manhattan College, and Rabbi David Sandmel, Director of Interreligious…
by: Rabbi David Sandmel | June 05, 2016 The Times of Israel The General Conference of United Methodist Church recently concluded its quadrennial gathering, which this year was held in Portland, Oregon. I and many others in the Jewish community, not to mention many Christians as well, were pleased with the outcome of a number of votes on resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Inter alia, the Church rejected resolutions calling for divestment or for investment screens…
by: Jonathan A. Greenblatt | October 27, 2015 PBS - Religion & Ethics Newsweekly The promulgation, on October 28, 1965, of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Church’s Relations with Non-Christian Religions, may be the most important moment is post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations and interfaith relations writ large.
In its fourth chapter, Nostra Aetate effectively overturned centuries of what the noted French Jewish historian…
by: Lorraine Array March 23, 2015
Recent incidents around the world remind us of the power of hate and vitriol to permeate our religious, cultural and national borders. ISIS continues to expand its alliances and fear-mongering tactics. The world is in many ways paralyzed to see a way forward, and the need for solutions capable of building bridges of understanding and respect has never been greater.
In this spirit, in early 2013, the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) Connecticut Office…
by: Abraham H. Foxman | February 26, 2014 The Huffington Post Ten years ago, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" film was released amid a swirl of controversy and after a relentless public relations campaign playing up the director's celebrity status and his adamant refusal to change the film amid concerns of insensitivity and anti-Semitism. Gibson's "Passion" was a passion of hate. His film bought into all of the troubling representations of the Passion that fortified church-based…
July 12, 2013 The Anti-Defamation League commends the International Council of Christian and Jews (ICCJ) for its comprehensive statement about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which calls on religious institutions and groups to refrain from issuing one-sided declarations in attempting to promote a resolution to the dispute. The statement by ICCJ, one of the world’s oldest and most respected international Christian-Jewish organizations, urges religious bodies and leaders to recommit…
by: By Abraham H. Foxman | April 18, 2013 The Huffington Post One of the first things Argentinian native Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio did after being elected pope on March 13 was to send a message of friendship to Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni -- and, by extension, the Jewish people.
"I sincerely hope to be able to contribute to the progress that relations between Jews and Catholics have enjoyed since the Second Vatican Council," wrote Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis…
January 02, 2013 Q. What is the basis for ADL's concerns about Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"?A. We first learned about Mr. Gibson's plans to make a film based on the final hours of Jesus' life in a New York Times Magazine article that appeared in February 2003. An early version of the script was shared with us. In August 2003, an ADL representative saw a rough cut in Houston. On January 21, we saw a version of the film at a screening in Orlando, Florida. We had hoped to see the film…
by: Abraham H. Foxman | July 11, 2007 Jewish Telegraphic Agency NEW YORK (JTA) – With anti-Semitism resurgent in the world, one of the encouraging elements for the Jewish people, particularly if one is to compare things today to the 1930s and 1940s, is the remarkable change in the Catholic Church's attitudes toward Jews. In the past four decades, a conceptual revolution has taken place in the church's relationship with the Jewish people. The first step came with Vatican II and its…