by: David Robbins April 21, 2016 By Jonathan Greenblatt
CEO of the Anti-Defamation League
This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post Blog
This Friday night, Jews around the world will gather at Seder tables with friends and family to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We are commanded to tell the story as if we had personally fled slavery, transforming the experience from the simple recounting of an ancient tale to an…
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by: Mark Pitcavage April 20, 2016
On April 20, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that famous abolitionist and rescuer of slaves Harriet Tubman will be the new face of the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson (who moves to the bill’s back). The move is intended to answer a long-standing call for more diversity on America’s paper currency. Tubman, a former slave herself, helped hundreds of other slaves escape into freedom.
Initial reactions were largely positive—but not…
by: David Robbins April 19, 2016 By Jonathan Greenblatt
CEO of the Anti-Defamation League
This blog originally appeared on Medium
A little over a year ago, the Anti-Defamation League reacted to the newly announced parameters of the agreement between the world powers and Iran, saying it left us with “many unanswered questions” about Iran’s nuclear program and the Islamic Republic’s intention to fully and transparently uphold its commitments…
April 15, 2016 APRIL 17, 2016, Washington, D.C.
Thank you for that kind introduction, and thank you all for welcoming me here today.
In many ways, I am an unlikely person to be head of ADL…or to be head of a Jewish organization. See, I’ve spent most of my career in business or in government – creating companies, building brands, innovating business models, driving economic value and achieving social benefit, … all this took place far away from the organized…
by: Oren Segal April 14, 2016 By Kenneth Jacobson
April 15 is the 69th anniversary of the entry of Jackie Robinson into the major leagues. To commemorate that historic event and that historic figure, PBS is running a new two-part documentary looking at how this grandson of slaves rose from humble origins to integrate Major League Baseball.
In some ways, the story of Robinson and the integration of baseball is a little hard for us to understand in 2016. Society in general has come a…
by: Mark Pitcavage April 13, 2016
In the popular imagination, the bomb is the weapon typically associated with terrorists or extremists—but in the U.S. extremists seem to be killing more people with firearms than with any other weapon, and that use may be increasing.
It is certainly true that many of the high-profile terrorist attacks in the United States over the past century have been bombings, including the 1919 anarchist bombing campaign, the 1963 16th Street…
by: Marilyn Mayo April 13, 2016 Ken O’Keefe, an anti-Zionist ex-Marine and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist with a substantial following on YouTube, is currently on a national tour of the United States titled “F-ck the USSA/TSA/ Homeland Security Tour.” He is scheduled to visit cities all over the U.S., as well as Canada.
O’Keefe proudly announced that he would embark on this tour, taking Amtrak instead of flying. In announcing the tour, he claimed that the security…
by: Oren Segal April 11, 2016 It’s April 12, 2016 — Equal Pay Day, the symbolic date that women need to work until to catch up with what men had earned by last Dec. 31. The fact is that women who work full time, are paid an average of 79 cents for every dollar paid to men — and on average, African American and Latina women are paid even less. It’s not a day to celebrate, but it is a teachable moment to focus on the needless, costly, and discriminatory gender wage…
June 10, 2016 What’s it like to be a Jew in Norway? Frankly, it’s complicated.
With a population of less than 2,000 Jews, Norway is a place where “Jew” is a curse used frequently against Jewish schoolchildren. Yet it’s also a society where Jewish life proceeds freely, and the Norwegian government works to end anti-Semitism.
“We’re not finished with anti-Semitism in Norway,” says Rabbi Joav Melchior, rabbi of the Jewish Community of Oslo. …
by: Oren Segal April 07, 2016 Alison Weir, the director of the anti-Israel organizations If Americans Knew and the Council for the National Interest, is behind a series of billboards that read “Help the USS Liberty Survivors Attacked by Israel.”
The billboards, which have appeared so far in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, are “paid for by www.honorlibertyvets.org,” a website that promotes the anti…
by: Oren Segal March 31, 2016 The Nation of Islam (NOI) has published a series of interviews with anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theorists to support Farrakhan’s repeated claim that Jews are to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The NOI’s Research Group published the hateful interviews on its website in response to ADL’s article in the Huffington Post Reconciliation Cannot Mean Turning a Blind Eye to Farrakhan’s Anti-Semitism, an answer to Russell Simmons’ The…
March 28, 2016 Updated: July 05, 2017 Andrew Auernheimer (aka Weev) is doing his best to escalate the increasingly fraught battle between CNN and the anonymous Reddit poster who created a video clip of President Trump wrestling "CNN" to the ground. Auernheimer threatened CNN on the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi website, giving the network one week to fulfill a range of demands, including firing everyone involved in the Reddit story, creating a college scholarship for the Reddit poster, and…
by: Marilyn Mayo March 25, 2016 Update — 3/28/16: Hacker Andrew Auernheimer has claimed credit for exploiting network printers at these colleges to print these flyers. More information available here.
On Thursday, March 24, a number of campuses around the country received an anti-Semitic flyer that blamed Jews for destroying the country “through mass immigration and degeneracy.” The flyer asks people to “join us in the struggle for global…
by: Oren Segal March 25, 2016 It’s tough being born as a teenager. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its new artificial intelligence (AI) computer bot - named Tay and envisioned as a teenage girl – and she had a very rough first day. She was immediately besieged by excited techies, the curious and the haters. In a few hours, she was drawn into tens of thousands of exchanges. In the process, racists, anti-Semites, misogynists and other haters manipulated her into repeating…
by: Robert Trestan | March 24, 2016 The Times of Israel There is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to Janet Mock’s decision to cancel her “Redefining Realness” talk at Brown University this week. Ms. Mock, a transgender best-selling author, canceled her talk following pressure from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to reject the invitation due to Brown Hillel’s involvement.
SJP cannot have it both ways — advocating to muzzle a speaker…
by: Mark Pitcavage March 21, 2016 Federal prosecutors in Portland, Oregon, obtained a 19-count grand jury indictment in mid-March against Winston Shrout, a Hillsboro, Oregon, resident and one of the most prominent sovereign citizen gurus in the United States, a man whose videos and seminars have attracted thousands of people to the anti-government extremist movement.
Shrout was charged with 13 counts of using fictitious financial instruments in connection with an alleged debt elimination…
by: Oren Segal March 18, 2016 This week marks the 30th anniversary of a significant event in ADL history – the decision by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to posthumously pardon Leo Frank. Frank was the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil factory who was falsely accused and wrongly convicted in August 1913 of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked in the factory.
Anti-Semitism was rampant in the early 1900’s and Leo Frank&rsquo…
February 09, 2018 In February 2018, Arthur Jones emerged as the likely Republican nominee for U.S. Representative in Illinois' 3rd Congressional district. The vocal white supremacist and Holocaust denier is running unopposed for the Republican nomination, and will face incumbent Representative Dan Lipinski or challenger Marie Newman in the general election.
Jones, a long-time neo-Nazi, has repeatedly run for elected office, always unsuccessfully. He has been active in several…
by: Jonathan A. Greenblatt | March 16, 2016 New York Daily News On many occasions in recent years, the Anti-Defamation League I lead has spoken out as politicians, celebrities and other public figures tried making a point about a controversial subject by invoking the Holocaust. The analogy has shown up inappropriately in countless discussions of public policy because it is the most available historical event illustrating right versus wrong.
Abortion? It was said to be an “ongoing…
by: David Robbins March 11, 2016 Jinnie Spiegler
Director of Curriculum, Anti-Defamation League
This blog originally appeared on Edutopia
Marriage equality, refugees seeking safety in Europe, the Confederate flag, police shootings of black and Latino men, the presidential election, Caitlyn Jenner, ISIS, and immigration are just a few of the news stories that inhabited the headlines this year on our phones, laptops, and newspapers. Unlike 20 years ago when…