# Anti-Defamation League The **Anti-Defamation League (ADL)** is the Jewish civil-rights organization founded by B'nai B'rith in September 1913 — in the year of the Leo Frank case, the Atlanta Jewish factory manager wrongly convicted of murder and lynched in 1915 — "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all." For most of its history it was the American establishment's monitor of antisemitism and, through its Center on Extremism, of the organized far right. In this vault it appears in two roles that have come into tension: as the **classifying authority** the memes and terrorism pages cite, and as an institution whose own political position has become contested from both directions. ## The classifying authority Seven of the eighteen pages linking here are in the Memes folder — [[Pepe the Frog]], [[OK Hand Sign]], [[Sonnenrad (Black Sun)]], [[Fourteen Words and 1488]], [[NPC Wojak]], [[Great Replacement Visual Memes]], [[Roman Salute Revival]] — because the ADL's Hate Symbols Database is the reference that decides, for platforms, courts and newsrooms, whether a symbol counts. Its Center on Extremism's annual audits, its reports on the [[Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] and [[Proud Boys Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] defendants, and its documentation of the [[Buffalo Tops Supermarket Shooting]] and [[Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting]] perpetrators' online lives are primary sources here. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] is its counterpart for the hate-group map; the two overlap and disagree at the edges. ## The contested institution Under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt (since 2015) the ADL has been pulled three ways. - **From the right.** In September 2023 [[Elon Musk]] endorsed the far-right #BanTheADL campaign and blamed the organization for X's advertiser losses, threatening to sue — weeks before his "actual truth" reply endorsing a [[Great Replacement Theory]] post triggered the Apple, Disney and IBM advertiser exodus ([[Twitter Timeline]]). The ADL then praised Musk's November 2023 policy against "from the river to the sea," prompting senior resignations; and when Musk made what much of the world read as a Nazi salute at the January 2025 inauguration, the ADL called it "an awkward gesture," provoking a revolt among board members and staff over the earlier accommodation. The [[Roman Salute Revival]] page carries the gesture. - **From the left.** Critics — including a growing share of American Jewish organizations — argue the ADL conflates anti-[[Zionism]] with antisemitism, and that its campus campaigns against pro-Palestinian groups after October 2023 turned a civil-rights body into an advocacy one. In June 2024 Wikipedia's editors rated it unreliable on the Israel–Palestine conflict and, for related reasons, on antisemitism; the ADL's 2025 report alleging anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia was disputed by historians as an attempt to control the narrative. - **From the state.** The second Trump administration's campaign against universities in the name of fighting antisemitism — Columbia, Harvard, the deportation of pro-Palestinian students — used the ADL's framing while attacking the institutions and the [[America First]] right's antisemites the ADL also tracks; its proximity to that campaign is now itself a controversy. The vault's [[Reform Judaism]] and [[Zionism]] pages carry the intra-communal debate; [[America First]] carries the antisemitic current on the right the ADL still monitors. ## Why the vault cares The ADL is where the vault's two uses of "antisemitism" — as an organizing principle of the far right ([[Great Replacement Theory]], [[Fourteen Words and 1488]]) and as a charge deployed against critics of Israel — meet in one institution, and the institution's difficulty holding both is the same difficulty the wider discourse has. Its symbol database remains the vault's reference; its political judgments are cited with the caveats above. Financially it is a $60M-a-year operation (2023 expenses $57.9M, endowment $67.1M). ## See Also - [[Anti-Semitism]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Reform Judaism]] · [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] - [[Elon Musk]] · [[Twitter Timeline]] · [[Roman Salute Revival]] · [[Great Replacement Theory]] - [[Memes Hub]] · [[Pepe the Frog]] · [[OK Hand Sign]] · [[Sonnenrad (Black Sun)]] · [[Fourteen Words and 1488]] - [[Oath Keepers Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] · [[Proud Boys Seditious Conspiracy Trial]] · [[America First]]