Anti-Defamation League, Our international Jewish Organization, Slipping

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

Jonathan Greenblatt at 2022 Conference

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is an international Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States specializing in civil rights law. 

It was founded in late September 1913 by the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish service organization, in the wake of the contentious murder conviction of Leo Frank.

The Anti-Defamation League traces its origins to the fraternal society, B'nai B'rith in 1913, which was founded in New York City on October 13, 1843, by Henry Jones and eleven other German-American Jews in a Chicago law office. 

 Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was an American factory superintendent who was convicted in 1913 of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta, Georgia. His trial, conviction, and appeals attracted national attention. His lynching two years later, in response to the commutation of his death sentence, became the focus of social, regional, political, and racial concerns, particularly regarding antisemitism. Today, the consensus of researchers is that Frank was wrongly convicted and Jim Conley was likely the actual murderer.

 

In the first two decades of the 20th century B'nai B'rith launched three of today's major Jewish organizations: Anti-Defamation  League (ADL), Hillel and BBYO (originally B'nai B'rith Youth Organization). Later they would take on a life of their own with varying degrees of autonomy.

ADL subsequently split from B'nai B'rith and continued as an independent US section 501(c)(3) nonprofit. 

Jazz in 1923 in America

A growing concern in the 1920s was the preservation of Jewish values as immigration slowed and a native Jewish population of Eastern European ancestry came to maturity. In 1923, years of bootlegging and crime as well as Jazz. 

 In U.S. history, bootlegging was the illegal manufacture, transport, distribution, or sale of alcoholic beverages during the Prohibition period (1920–33), when those activities were forbidden under the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) to the U.S. Constitution.                        

                     ADL LEADERSHIP     

    Richard Elias Gutstadt, executive vice-chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, died here in Chicago last night. He was born in San Francisco 66 years ago.  In 1917 he was 29 years old and a tall salesman with 5 dependents.  

Among the first to recognize the menace of Nazism to democratic life everywhere, Mr. Gutstadt achieved national renown as a lecturer and community leader during the ’30’s when he stumped the country organizing opposition to the growing Fascist movement in this country. He became an outstanding authority on the native Fascist movement in the period before World War II, the source of its power and its association and financing by the Nazis.

Mr. Gutstadt became national director of the ADL in 1931 and served until 1948 when he was elected executive vice-chairman. He was president of Sinai Congregation in Chicago when he died. When Richard Elias Gutstadt was born on 13 May 1888, in San Francisco, California, United States, his father, Herman Gutstadt,

born in Germany in September 1853, came to the USA early as an immigrant and

was 34 and his mother, Sarah Woolf, was 30. He married Neva Platt on 6 August 1911, in San Francisco, California, United States. They were the parents of at least 2 sons and 2 daughters. He died on 22 May 1954, in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States, at the age of 66, and was buried in Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States.                                

A 1951 meeting between ADL leadership and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. From left: President of Paramount Pictures Barney Balaban; Prime Minister Ben-Gurion; ADL Board member Louis Novins; ADL National Chairman Judge Meier Steinbrink; and ADL National Director Benjamin R. Epstein. Photo: ADL.

Epstein taught at the University of Pennsylvania and as a high school teacher in Coatesville for several years.

Epstein joined the ADL in 1939, the year the Nazis entered Poland,  as directory of its Foreign Languages Department. Epstein later became the Eastern regional director. Epstein was national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1948 through 1978. He was ADL vice president from 1978 through 1983. He replaced Richard Gutstadt, the national director from 1931 to 1948. In ADL leadership, Epstein presided over an aggressive strategic shift. Whereas Gustadt used more circumspect media relations and "fact-finding" missions regarding Nazi groups, Epstein conducted public and oppositional media campaigns and led infiltration and document-stealing missions against Nazi groups. For instance, Epstein's colleague and ADL attorney Arnold Forster developed a relationship with gossip columnist Walter Winchell, whom Forster fed embarrassing tidbits regarding antisemites.                            

Nathan "Nate" Perlmutter (1923 – July 12, 1987)Son of Hyman (Chaskel) Perlmutter and Bella (Brucha) Perlmutter, Nathan Perlmutter was born March 2, 1923 in New York City to Hyman and Bella (Finkelstein) Perlmutter, who were both immigrants from Poland. His father was a tailor and worked as a laborer for the Work Projects Administration during the Depression. His mother sold ices from a pushcart and sewed leather purses in a sweatshop. His father left the family when Nathan and his younger brother, Philip, were 16 and 13, respectively.

 Nathan was the executive director of the Anti-defamation League from 1979 to 1987. Perlmutter joined the ADL in 1949, serving as regional director in Detroit, Miami, and New York until 1964. He became associate national director of the American Jewish Committee from 1965 to 1969. After that, he rejoined the ADL as assistant national director from 1973 to 1979, at which point he became national director. He served as ADL national director until his death in 1987. From 1969 to 1973 Perlmutter was vice president of Brandeis University.

Perlmutter received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. "Nathan Perlmutter, a lawyer, lecturer and leader of the American Jewish community for 40 years, died Sunday in Manhattan of lung cancer. He was 64.  An author and political activist, Perlmutter was national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Last month, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. In presenting the award, President Reagan lauded Perlmutter as “a hero of the human spirit.”  An outspoken critic of intolerance against any group, Perlmutter joined the Anti-Defamation League in 1949. The league, founded in 1913, strives to “end defamation of Jews and secure justice and fair treatment for all citizens alike.”

                                              

 Abraham Foxman, lawyer,  was(born May 1, 1940) is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015,  Foxman, an only son, was born in Baranovichi, just months after the Soviet Union took the town from Poland in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and incorporated it into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The town is now in Belarus. Foxman had Polish Jewish parents Helen and Joseph Foxman.

Foxman's parents left him with his Polish Catholic nanny Bronisława Kurpi in 1941 when they were ordered by Germans to enter a ghetto. Foxman was baptized into Christianity by the Catholic Church, given the Polish Christian name of Henryk Stanisław Kurpi, and raised as a Catholic in Vilnius between 1941 and 1944 when he was returned to his parents.  Foxman immigrated to the United States in 1950 at age 10 with his parents. He graduated from the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York City.earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the City College of New York and graduated with honors in history.  Foxman also holds a J.D. degree from the New York University School of Law. He did graduate work in Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and in international economics at The New School.

ADL legal representative Arnold Forster hired Foxman in 1965 as a legal assistant in the ADL's international affairs division. In 1987, Foxman was the consensus choice of the Board to become its new National Director, replacing long-time director Nathan Perlmutter.

                    Jonathan, now 53 years old

Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Silicon Valley tech executive and former Obama administration official, succeeded Abraham Foxman as national director in July 2015. Foxman had served in the role since 1987.

Jonathan Greenblatt (born November 21, 1970) is an American entrepreneur, corporate executive, and the sixth National Director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Prior to heading the ADL, Greenblatt served in the White House as Special Assistant to Barack Obama and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.  Greenblatt was born on November 21, 1970, in Trumbull, Connecticut, to a Conservative Jewish family. He graduated from Tufts University in 1992, earning a Bachelor of Arts.Greenblatt also holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

He's not a lawyer or a student of Jewish studies like Foxman..  

 After college, Greenblatt worked on Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign in 1992 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He went on to join the administration as an aide in the Clinton White House and later the United States Department of Commerce, where he developed international economic policy with a focus on emerging markets and post-conflict economies. Greenblatt also holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Greenblatt is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. He is married to Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, an Iranian Jewish political refugee to the United States who is the founder and director of The Alliance for Rights of All Minorities (ARAM), a non-profit. They have three children.

I've not continued with Greenblatt's accomplishments in business because they are not Jewish oriented showing anything connected to our Jewish history or people per se.  He's a very talented businessman.  If ADL has changed, so has their leadership which probably reflects their main interests.                           

Accusation abound against the ADL these days as not doing the job.  What is the job?  Defamation means  the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal definition of defamation and related acts as well as the ways they are dealt with can vary greatly between countries and jurisdictions (what exactly they must consist of, whether they constitute crimes or not, to what extent proving the alleged facts is a valid defence).

Israpundit claims that: Under its current leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL has, among many other things:

• Enthusiastically accepted a non-apology from arch Jew-

hater 

Ilhan Omar for saying that “Israel has hypnotized the world.”

• Declared that the BDS movement is not necessarily 

anti-Semitic.  (We who know the background, know

it is.)  

• Supported Black Lives Matter, even after its anti-Semitism 

was made public in the Jewish media. in Syrian refugees who 

have been schooled to hate Jews

• Claimed that those who criticize anti-Semitic Critical Race 

Theory are enabling “extremists [who] are using the 

opportunity to spread racism, hate and antisemitism.”  I'm a 

student of DNA science, and we all see a change in our

knowledge today.  As more is discovered, more

changes are being made.  But a critical race theory is 

scarey.  They try already to criticize Jews and have 

been since the Greek and Roman days.   

• Called for the U.S. to take in Syrian refugees who have been 

schooled from childhood to hate Jews.

• Apologized for its past opposition to construction of the 

triumphalist Islamic center near Ground Zero.

ADL took on the job of a broad educational program to 

combat organized anti-Semites and anti-Semitism, to 

improve intergroup relations and understanding, and to win 

public support for civil rights reforms.  

Looking at this list and at the list of (Defamation), one can

see that some of this doesn't fit the definition of defamation;  

just a lot of anti-Semitism, and I'm not a lawyer!!  I'm not 

defending Greenblatt, but I believe the wrong man is in this

seat of power.  With today's problems, we need a lawyer who

is versed in Jewish history, and I don't mean just the 

holidays.  He or she needs to be documented in this education

as well.  So, Ted Belman and Israpundit, start looking.  ADL

cannot do a thing without money and the law under the frame-

work of the Anti-Defamation League, and if the situation 

doesn't fit, it needs to be forwarded to the appropriate group 

who can act.  Has this ever happened?  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27nai_B%27rith#:~:text=7%20External%20links-,History,immigrants%20led%20by%20Henry%20Jones.

https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0126/40967434.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Foxman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Greenblatt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

https://www.israpundit.org/for-years-the-adl-has-betrayed-jews-and-protected-our-adversaries-all-for-partisan-purposes/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-07-14-mn-3979-story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/191450845/herman-gutstadt

https://www.nli.org.il/ar/newspapers/amjwld/1954/05/28/01/article/6/?e=-------ar-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI--------------1 Richard Gutstadt

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/191450845/herman-gutstadt

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia