WEBSITE
https://droptheadl.com
ASSOCIATED CAMPAIGNS/ISSUES
Deadly Exchange Campaign
The Right to Boycott
REPORTS
The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US
See the Executive Summary at Palestine Legal
Download this report
The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements for Social Justice
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
Download the Executive Summary
VIDEO
Short explainer video from American Muslims for Palestine at the campaign website: https://droptheadl.org/resources
Weaponizing Antisemitism Allegations: Challenging Empires, Defending Communities
Shelter & Solidarity, 2020
NEWS & COMMENTARY
The Anti-Democratic Origins of the Jewish Establishment
Jewish Currents • 2021
The ADL Is Not a Friend to Social Justice Movements
Portside • 2022
How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work
Jewish Currents • 2021
Criticizing Oppressive Zionism is Legitimate, not Antisemitic
San Diego Union Tribune • 2021
What is the Anti-Defamation League doing in my school?
Medium.com • 2021
The ADL is not what it seems
Boston Review • 2020
Beware the Anti-Defamation League’s Efforts to Partner with Progressive Orgs
In These Times • 2020
Attacks from pro-Israel groups threaten California’s ethnic studies curriculum
Jewish Currents • 2020
Watered-Down “Anti-Racism Training” in Schools Is Perpetuating Racism
Truthout • 2020
U.S. Police are Being Trained by Israel—And Communities of Color Are Paying the Price
The Progressive • 2019
Marc Lamont Hill Was Arguing for the Rights of Humans, Not of States
The Nation • 2018
Revealed: Deputy Director of ICE was sent by the ADL for training with the Israeli military
Jewish Voice for Peace • 2018
ADL Tells Cops To Infiltrate Antifa — And Film Protests
The Forward • 2017
How the Anti-Defamation League Fuels Islamophobia
Alternet • 2013
New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation Emerge
LA Times • 1993
For News & Alerts
Type your paragraph here.
- 1 or 2 per month –
join our mailing list.
Action/Campaigns Drop the ADL
United Methodists are responding to Kairos Palestine: A Moment of Truth ,a statement of faith and urgent call to action from Christians in Palestine. UMKR seeks, through nonviolent means and in partnership with Palestinian Christians, freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians and Israelis.
RESOURCES
UMKR needs your support
🔸= Something New or Recently Updated
for our work to continue.
#DropTheADL
See resources and articles on the right side of this page.
Scroll down the page for updates on this campaign.
At the bottom is a 2024 action that you can support.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has branded itself as a civil rights organization in ways that conceal and legitimize its right-wing activities undermining the rights of Black, immigrant, queer, Muslim, Arab, and other marginalized communities.
Many progressive individuals and organizations partner with the ADL not knowing its ongoing legacy of supporting racist policing, surveillance, colonialism, and the silencing of social justice activism.
Misinformation about the ADL’s work, and its credibility in progressive circles, are what allow the ADL to continue harming social justice movements.
A primer has been compiled by organizations across the US working in coalition for freedom, justice, and equality, in the hope that it can be helpful in strengthening all of our social justice movements in resisting repression and advancing a vision of liberation for all.
See the primer at the website: DropTheADL.org.
Topics covered in the Primer:
• A history of targeting and surveilling progressive movements
• Support for racist, militarized policing
• Repressing Palestinian rights, smearing critics of colonialism as "anti-semites?
• Support for actual anti-semites, Donald Trump, and other right-wing, racist influencers
• Islamophobia/Anti-Muslim Racism and Anti-Arab Racism
• Campus Repression
• Trampling anti-racist, immigrant, queer, and other justice movements
See all this at: DropTheADL.org.
Download the ADL Primer
The ADL is not an ally.
An Open Letter to Progressives
UMKR is a signatory on this letter.
We are writing to ask you to reconsider the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a partner in social justice work.
Many organizations in our communities find themselves in spaces with the ADL, using its anti-bias education materials, or counting on the ADL to support our political goals. In light of a growing understanding of the ADL’s harmful practices, many progressive groups are rethinking those relationships.
Even though the ADL is integrated into community work on a range of issues, it has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence. More disturbing, it has often conducted those attacks under the banner of “civil rights.” This largely unpublicized history has come increasingly to light as activists work to make sense of the ADL’s role in condemning the Movement for Black Lives, Palestinian rights organizing, and Congressional Representative Ilhan Omar, among others.
We are deeply concerned that the ADL’s credibility in some social justice movements and communities is precisely what allows it to undermine the rights of marginalized communities, shielding it from criticism and accountability while boosting its legitimacy and resources. Even when it may seem that our work is benefiting from access to some resources or participation from the ADL, given the destructive role that it too often plays in undermining struggles for justice, we believe that we cannot collaborate with the ADL without betraying our movements.
TAKE ACTION
Join UMKR and dozens of progressive movements and organizations in signing the open letter. There are two forms, for organizations and individuals:
https://droptheadl.org/sign-on/
UPDATES
March 2022
A leaked ADL 2020 memo shows that leaders of the Anti-Defamation League debated whether to end a controversial program that connects American law enforcement officers with police leaders and members of the military in Israel.
Activists say leaked memo shows its time to ‘Drop the ADL’
Mondoweiss • 31 March 2022
ADL leaders debated ending police delegations to Israel, memo reveals
The Guardian • 17 March 2022
Internal ADL Memo Recommended Ending Police Delegations
to Israel Amid Backlash
Jewish Currents • 17 March 2022
September 2024
Open Letter to Educators:
The ADL is not a social justice partner
UMKR is a signatory on this letter
As longtime educators and advocates for educational excellence, we embrace the importance of supporting schools to tackle urgent questions of racism, injustice, and all forms of bigotry. We believe all our students have the right to be safe, to belong, and to develop as critical thinkers and constructive advocates in our diverse world.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has long marketed itself as an expert advisor to school communities on antisemitism and other forms of bias. However, despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.
The ADL is a divisive political interest group that:
sidelines historical, contextual, and systemic analyses of bias and racism in their curricula, focusing instead on individual feelings and actions;
restricts genuine inquiry in classrooms with pedagogy and content that leave little room for truly questioning assumptions and debating diverse perspectives on a wide range of topics;
distorts the definition of “antisemitism” in ways that stoke fear among many Jews and pit Jewish comfort against Palestinian rights;
pushes local, state, and federal educational policy that defends Israel at the expense of the rights of Palestinians, other people of color, and Jews who reject ethnonationalism; attacks schools, educators, and students with bad-faith accusations of antisemitism in order to silence and punish constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism.
Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes antisemitism and its extent in the United States today. But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of antisemitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews. They distort the prevalence of antisemitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as “bias incidents” in their statistics. By the ADL’s own count, some two-thirds of the bias incidents since October 7 have related to Israel.
For all of these reasons, we ask you to reconsider your partnership with the ADL.
We further urge you to join in nationwide efforts to drop the ADL from schools by taking the following actions:
Cut all ties with the ADL, including use or endorsement of their curricular materials, participation in their programs, and engagement in their professional development offerings;
End contracts with the ADL as consultants on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) policy, programming, or bias incident response – even when services are offered free of charge;
Stop referencing the ADL’s discredited statistics, and stop sending data or information of any kind to the ADL;
4. Ensure that all your institutional relationships and contracts truly uphold and promote principles of equality and dignity for all students who may be the targets of racism or bigotry of any kind.
This article, “The ADL is Not a Social Justice Partner for Schools,” in Rethinking Schools describes in more detail some of the ADL’s problematic practices in schools. We hope it will serve as the basis of further conversations.
TAKE ACTION
Organizations can sign this letter here
Individuals can sign this letter here
______________________________________________________________________________________