ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks on March 3 in New York City. Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League / Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman April 3, 2025

Jonathan Greenblatt, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, has walked back his organization’s previous support for President Donald Trump’s Trump campaign to detain and deport pro-Palestinian activists — thank God.

“No one should minimize the hateful, violent acts committed against Jewish students,” he wrote in an April 3 essay in eJewishPhilanthropy. “But if we sacrifice our constitutional freedoms in the pursuit of security, we undermine the very foundation of the diverse, pluralistic society we seek to defend.”

Now that the largest and most influential Jewish civil rights organization has reconsidered its unjustifiable initial support for the detentions, it’s time for others who may also have been seduced into believing such draconian measures are “good for the Jews” to speak out against them.

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Because they are definitely not good for the Jews.

Look, I get why Greenblatt and the ADL were initially enthusiastic. After a year of campus protests that sometimes led to physical harassment of Jewish students, vandalized university property and prevented Jewish and other students from attending class, I can imagine finding it satisfying to see actual perpetrators held accountable.

And so the ADL did.“We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism,” ADL posted to its X account on Mar. 9, after ICE agents took Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil into custody, “and this action further illustrates that resolve by holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.”

That post went on to throw in one sentence calling for due process. But as Greenblatt now acknowledges, the organization should have known better.

“We were glad to see the administration taking action,” he said in an interview this week with Jewish Insider. “But the pattern of behavior since then has raised concerns that would be easy to address by being transparent about the charges.”

Khalil has not been charged with any crimes; nor have any of the students or other university staff so far arrested, detained and deported as part of the Trump administration’s push. The administration’s approach, in this as in deportations of alleged gang members, has been to imprison first and ask questions later, going after anyone whose opinions somebody somewhere found objectionable — all under the guise of protecting the Jews.

So far at least 10 people have been detained, according to a Forward tracker.

I, like many liberal-leaning Jews, found it difficult to understand how the ADL and other Jewish organizations and leaders could have failed to immediately see the slippery Constitutional slope Khalil’s arrest put us on — and where it would inevitably lead.

Even worse is the fact that reporters have found that two Jewish groups, Canary Mission and Betar, have targeted pro-Palestinian activists for arrest and fed their names to authorities. These are shadowy groups — the ADL labeled Betar “extremist” — that represent a rightwing fringe of American Jewry.

It takes only the barest acquaintance with Jewish history to understand that when free speech and civil liberties erode for any group, Jews inevitably become a target.

In this case, we are doubly endangered — by government actions attacking free speech, and also by groups blaming the Jews as a whole for instigating these attacks.

Good on the ADL for eventually recognizing that, and being able to admit they made a mistake. Greenblatt said his awakening came after the detention of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, whom masked ICE agents swooped down on and disappeared as she left her home in Somerville, Mass. last week. Her crime? The 30-year-old Turkish national co-authored an op-ed in Tufts’ student newspaper calling for the university to divest from Israel.

“You cannot arrest people or eject people from the country because they are bigoted or racist,” he told Jewish Insider. “That’s not a crime. That has never been an offense.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Associated Press that Ozturk’s visa was terminated last week, after the agency found that she engaged in activities in support of Hamas. Of course the agency provided no evidence. Her friends said she did not organize protests, and Tufts confirmed that her op-ed did not violate school policies.

“We can hold perpetrators of unlawful antisemitism accountable while maintaining a commitment to the Constitution,” wrote Greenblatt in eJewishPhilanthropy. “We can protect the civil liberties of Jewish students even as we preserve the civil liberties of those who protest, harass or attack them because they are innocent until proven guilty.”

Of course, starting with Khalil’s arrest there was good reason to oppose the administration’s shotgun approach to antisemitism. Threatening to cut off all federal funding to a university — including critical medical research, and grants to Jewish students and professors — doesn’t help Jews. Eviscerating the offices at the Department of Education, including those that investigate campus antisemitism, doesn’t help Jews. What these measures help are people who want to undermine liberal education, elite institutions, and government bureaucracies. Which, you know, might just be the point.

Our job is not to be suckered into supporting it.

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