Jared Kushner speaks at a conference in Riyadh on October 25, 2023. Photo by FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images

The Anti-Defamation League is about to make the serious mistake of signaling to Jews that it’s OK to vote for former President Donald Trump in this critical election year — by giving his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a major award at its annual conference in New York City this week.

That’s a misstep both because Trump has consistently emboldened those who hate Jews, and because the Israel-Hamas war has revealed the flaws endemic to Kushner’s approach to Middle East policy as a top Trump aide.

But above all, it’s a misguided move because by embracing Kushner — and with him, implicitly, Trump — the ADL is undercutting its brave history of fighting anti-Jewish hatred.

At a moment when ADL should be solely focused on fighting rising antisemitism in the wake of the war, the group is again choosing to spark controversy with no clear end goal.

Some of the ADL’s own staff have complained that the group has refocused its historical fight against bigotry to emphasize pro-Israel advocacy. According to a report in The Guardian, one senior manager wrote in a Slack channel, “There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric, and to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging to our reputation as experts in extremism.”

Separate from the ADL’s recent shift toward treating anti-Israel discourse as inherently antisemitic, its award to Kushner makes little sense.

In announcing the honor, an ADL spokesperson claimed that the 2020 Abraham Accords, which Kushner spearheaded, have proved “pivotal for hostage release and an end to the conflict post Oct. 7 terrorist attack.” But those accords are partly to blame for that attack, by suggesting that Israel could ignore the Palestinian question while normalizing relations with other Arab states.

Kushner boasted that the accords were the “beginning of the end of the Israel-Arab conflict,” and that tensions between Israelis and Palestinians “aren’t as complicated as people have made them out to be.”

Clearly, he was wrong.

Meanwhile, Kushner used his ties to the Arab world to profit from those who wanted to remain on good terms with Trump and his family, most notably by securing a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia in his own private equity firm, Affinity Partners, alongside $200 million each from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

The ADL award for Kushner is particularly surprising because the group — like American Jews in general — has spent years being intensely critical of Trump. (Kushner has said he will not join a second Trump administration, if Trump is reelected in November.)

Antisemitic incidents began to spike soon after Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015; in the years that followed, the ADL repeatedly criticized him for using antisemitic images and language, and even appearing to threaten American Jews. The ADL also condemned Trump’s Muslim ban; attacked his support for separating immigrant children from their parents while in ICE detention facilities; and, three days after the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, became the first major Jewish organization to call for his removal from office.

Those actions were in line with most of the ADL’s history. But a closer look shows that the organization has pivoted to place an outsize focus on condemning rhetoric critical of Israel — which has helped move it from an institution that vehemently stood up against Trump’s antisemitism to one willing to work with him and his family.

The ADL was founded after the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank to combat widespread antisemitic stereotypes and anti-Jewish discrimination. In its early decades it organized a consumer boycott against The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper owned by automobile magnate Henry Ford, a notorious antisemite; closely monitored the activities of pro-Nazi groups in the U.S., in some cases paying informants to infiltrate those groups; and exposed white supremacist leaders and groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. It was part of a broad liberal coalition that supported the civil rights movement.

Under Abraham Foxman, who served as the ADL’s executive director from 1987 to 2015, the group started expanding its definition of antisemitism to include many approaches to criticizing Israel. Jonathan Greenblatt, who took over in 2015 after serving in the Obama administration, initially appeared to refocus on more explicit forms of hate, but has in recent years come to follow Foxman’s example.

In 2022, he proclaimed that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” He has described Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as groups that “epitomize the Radical Left, the photo inverse of the Extreme Right that ADL long has tracked.” After Oct. 7, the ADL wrote letters to college and university presidents urging them to ban both SJP and JVP from their campuses. The ADL has described protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “pro-Hamas activism.”

The ADL’s audits of antisemitism and surveys of antisemitic attitudes now conflate obvious anti-Jewish bigotry with incidents and statements that focus exclusively on Israel. These audits say that antisemitic incidents in the U.S. have risen 360% since Oct. 7, but that data includes both overt acts of antisemitism — like defacements of Jewish sites and cheerleading for Hamas’ massacre of Israeli Jews — and more general protests against the war, which is estimated to have so far killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza. This, despite a recent survey by the Jewish Electoral Institute showing that 91% of Jewish voters believe that someone can be critical of Israeli government policy and still be pro-Israel.

This shift in ADL priorities may help explain why it has chosen to honor Kushner, who has never spoken out against Trump’s many troubling statements about Jews, in the middle of the deadliest war in Israel’s history.

But there’s another potential reason: money.

Almost all the 23 members of the ADL board of directors who have donated to political candidates primarily support Democrats, according to public records. That’s not surprising, given Jews’ voting patterns (77% supported Biden in 2020). Even Jewish billionaires overwhelmingly support Democrats.

But ADL also has a few major donors who are among the relative handful of wealthy Jews who have given major donations to Republicans, foremost among them Marc Rowan, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, the lead benefactor of the ADL’s Civil Society Fellowship program.

Rowan, whose political contributions have in recent years tilted heavily toward GOP candidates, led a successful campaign to oust the president of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a trustee, over her response to anti-Israel protests and antisemitism on campus. That issue now appears to be at the top of the ADL’s agenda.

Maybe the group simply wants to hedge its bets in case Trump is reelected. Because no matter the ADL’s motivations for honoring Kushner, doing so is a way of telling American Jews that Trump is now kosher.

Correction, March 6, 2024: A previous version of this story incorrectly included Seth Klarman in a list of ADL donors who have given substantial donations to Republicans. Klarman was once a major GOP donor, but has in recent years directed the majority of his political donations to Democrats, although he has continued to channel some funds toward Republicans. 

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