Why the ADL is encouraging Jews to invest in Tesla
The antisemitism watchdog is now a player in the stock market, with a new $100 million fund invested in companies it deems ‘good’ and aligned with Jewish values
Elon Musk is seen on a television on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 2018. Photo by Getty Images
By Arno Rosenfeld February 27, 2025
The Anti-Defamation League wants you to help them combat antisemitism by purchasing shares in a new stock market fund — ticker symbol “TOV,” which means “good” in Hebrew — that invests in companies the advocacy group says it has vetted with “rigorous Jewish values-inspired research.”
But the ADL isn’t sharing its precise methodology for selecting companies, and some of the fund’s largest initial holdings are in companies with a checkered record on what the group says are its top priorities for the fund, including antisemitism and green energy.
TOV is an exchange-traded fund, often referred to as an ETF, a popular type of investment that combines many different companies into a single product that retail investors can purchase. Many ETFs aim to match returns to the overall stock market’s performance, but some are organized thematically, like focusing on companies that promote gender equality.
The ADL said that TOV, which started trading Thursday morning at around $25 per share, is meant to invest in the 500 largest publicly traded corporations in the United States but exclude “those companies with business activities that do not align with Jewish values.” At Thursday’s launch, it owned stock in about 496 companies, according to Ari Hoffnung, managing director of JLens, the ADL subsidiary that manages its advocacy with public companies, including the new ETF.
“Our screening method is deliberately light because we believe in the ‘own and advocate’ method,” Hoffnung said via email. “Very few companies are screened out.”
He said that the only companies that were intentionally excluded from the fund were the tobacco companies Altria and Philip Morris; ConocoPhilips, an energy company that mines the tar sands; and General Mills, which sold its stake in a Jerusalem factory in 2022.
Several large Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh and the Atlanta Jewish Foundation, committed at the launch to investing more than $100 million in the fund.
Among the top 10 holdings of TOV are Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, Amazon and Tesla. Roughly 2% of the fund is invested in Tesla, the primary source of wealth for Elon Musk, who is currently leading the Trump administration’s efforts to slash federal spending and workers — and who has for years been embroiled in antisemitism scandals as well as tussles with the ADL itself.
Among other issues, Musk reinstated several neo-Nazis who had been banned from Twitter when he bought the platform and renamed it X. He has generally allowed white supremacist content and hate speech to flourish on X. Meta and Amazon also have checkered histories of moderating antisemitic content.
Asked about these issues, Hoffnung, the JLens director, said, “TOV reserves its strongest screening and advocacy for areas of clear Jewish consensus while respecting the legitimate diversity of Jewish thought on complex policy questions.”
Last month, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO, called Meta’s loosening of content restrictions “mind-blowing” and said it was “taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism.”
The ADL was also among several Jewish groups to criticize Amazon in 2022 when it refused to remove an antisemitic film from its streaming service after basketball star Kyrie Irving promoted it on social media.
Activists sometimes purchase a small number of shares in a company in order to gain access to shareholder meetings where they can pressure the company to change its policies. That does not seem to be the strategy here, as Meta, Amazon and Tesla are among TOV’s largest holdings. The trio represent nearly 10% of the fund’s holdings, a significant share considering that no single company makes up more than 7%.
Fund aims for ‘constructive engagement’
The website for JLens, which merged into the ADL in 2022, says it also prioritized tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, in selecting which companies to include in TOV.
The site details a set of environmental priorities like “net zero emissions commitment” and “societal obligations,” including product safety and cybersecurity.
But JLens does not detail how it applies these values to select companies for TOV investment. The oil companies Exxon Mobil and Chevron and weapons manufacturers RTX and Northrop Grumman are among the companies TOV had shares of at launch.
“From a Jewish-values perspective,” Hoffnung said in the email, “there is support for the idea that investing in defense companies aligns with the principle of pikuach nefesh (preserving life).”.
He said the group’s goal is to invest in as many of the top 500 companies as possible, and that it had scored the 496 companies included in the fund based on their alignment with Jewish values. This score was used in a “symbolic, non-material” manner in determining how many shares to buy.
The fund was announced to thousands of people on the ADL’s email lists Thursday morning and in a statement on its website Greenblatt framed it as primarily a way to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Support for the actual BDS campaign — which calls for a broad boycott of the Israeli economy with the aim of effectively creating a binational state in the region — is virtually unheard of among publicly traded companies. But pro-Israel Jewish groups have used “BDS” to encompass almost any economic pressure levied on Israel for political reasons, including a company’s refusal to operate in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
TOV also appears to have invested in several companies that are not among the 500 largest in the country. For example, the fund owns shares of Wynn Resorts, the Las Vegas casino developer, which is ranked 1,761 in terms of total value among public companies.
The company was founded by Steve Wynn, a Jewish billionaire and major donor to President Donald Trump.
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