Jonathan Greenblatt seems to think that criticism of Israel’s brutal acts, not the acts themselves, could promote a violent response from observers abroad.
by Natasha Lennard, reposted from The Intercept, June 4, 2025
As the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt has done little to uphold his organization’s claims to fight antisemitism as the “leading anti-hate organization in the world.” Instead, he’s shored up the ADL’s role as little more than a fierce pro-Israel lobby group known for defending Israel by attacking its critics. With no sense of irony, much of this effort manifests as defamatory speech — at least in the everyday, if not the legal, sense — by Greenblatt.
Last weekend on Fox News, however, Greenblatt outdid himself.
In his appearance, Greenblatt said college graduates and social media influencers who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide were responsible for a man in Boulder, Colorado, throwing Molotov cocktails at a group of elderly people calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Greenblatt singled out a speech by the graduating class president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while naming streamer Hasan Piker and social media influencer Guy Christensen as “promoters of hate.”
“These speakers at these graduations — it just happened the other day at MIT — spreading blood libels about the Jewish people or the Jewish state, it creates conditions in which this kind of act is happening with increasing frequency,” Greenblatt said, referring to both the attack in Boulder and the shooting of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington, D.C., last month.
Megha Vemuri, the MIT class president that Greenblatt referenced, did not mention “the Jewish people” at all and spread no “blood libels” — antisemitic false accusations that Jewish people are murderous. She is one of several graduating students around the country who have used their commencement speeches to decry Israel’s U.S.-backed onslaught, which had already razed every university in Gaza to rubble by January of last year.
While Greenblatt’s claims on Fox were false and harmful, strong free-speech protections under the First Amendment mean that it is unlikely a defamation lawsuit against him would succeed in this country. But there is little doubt that, in the everyday sense of the term “defamation,” the Anti-Defamation League CEO’s claims that commencement speakers were spreading antisemitic lies — and suggestion that they’re responsible for two stochastic, violent attacks — were defamatory and dangerously so.
“We’ve got to stop it once and for all,” Greenblatt said of speeches like Vemuri’s. “I hope the Trump administration will do just that.”
In her fact-based and morally informed criticism of a nation state under investigation for genocide, Vemuri praised her classmates for protesting for their school’s divestment from “the genocidal Israeli military.”
“As scientists, engineers, academics and leaders, we have a commitment to support life, support aid efforts and call for an arms embargo and keep demanding now as alumni, that MIT cuts the ties,” Vemuri said. “We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it.”
In both the Colorado and D.C. attacks, which had otherwise nothing obvious in common, the suspects shouted “Free Palestine!” and reportedly told police that their actions were in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. Without knowing these very different individuals’ media consumption habits, I doubt they were spurred to action by graduation speeches.
Every day, new footage of mutilated children’s bodies, desperate hospital workers, and scenes of searing grief are broadcast directly from Gaza to our phones. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly releases public statements about ensuring that Gaza is ethnically cleansed. His government’s eliminationist violence in Gaza has been so extreme, unrelenting, and, crucially, livestreamed that even many complicit leaders in the West have in recent weeks condemned Israel’s excesses. Their belated words are no doubt gestures to future-proof their own reputations against charges of enabling genocide, but they nonetheless speak to the undeniability of the horror.
So blinkered is Greenblatt’s view, though, that it is only criticism of brutal Israeli acts, not the acts themselves, that could promote a violent response from observers abroad.
The logical conclusion of Greenblatt’s claim is that anything but silence on or support for Israel’s actions is not only antisemitic, but also produces the conditions for violence against Jewish people in the United States. Through Greenblatt, the ADL has backed the McCarthyite repression of campus protests and pro-Palestinian campus speech, praising overreaching crackdowns by university administrators and the government.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing its campaign to cage and deport students and graduates who express criticism of the Israeli regime. Though Greenblatt marginally backtracked and called for more “transparency,” the ADL’s first reaction to Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for his constitutionally protected speech was one of support: “We appreciate the Trump Administration’s broad, bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.”
MIT banned Vermuri from walking in her graduation ceremony in retaliation for her speech. New York University withheld the diploma of commencement speaker Logan Rozos, who used his speech to “condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.” These were just the latest examples of universities responding to pro-Palestine speech with punishment.
What further extremist censorship could Greenblatt desire?
“Blood libel” has been the standard retort of Israeli officials and their mouthpieces when critics draw attention to the Israeli military’s killing or maiming of over 50,000 children in Gaza. While hardly alone in this, Greenblatt has been a consistent public voice enforcing the pernicious lie that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, and that the movement to stop the mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians — a movement in which thousands of Jewish people like myself participate — is a movement against Jewish safety.
Long before last year’s Gaza solidarity encampments, the ADL’s reporting on antisemitic incidents played a significant role in obfuscating understanding about the state of antisemitism in the U.S. When the ADL counts antisemitic incidents, it includes actions done in protest of Israel, which in turn downplays the threat of far-right antisemitic violence; notably, Greenblatt excused white nationalist billionaire Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally as an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm,” while Greenblatt has compared the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf to a Nazi swastika. A number of the organization’s own staff quit in the months following October 7, when Greenblatt doubled down on targeting Israel’s critics.
The continued insistence that Israel’s brutality is carried out in the interest of all Jewish people absolutely puts Jewish people at risk all around the world through the forceful conflation of Jewish identity and an ethnostate carrying out genocide — an alignment that thousands of anti-Zionist Jews like myself reject. It is ideologues like Greenblatt, not the anti-genocide student activists he targets, who insist on connecting Jewish identity with Israeli state violence.
While the ADL is ostensibly committed to tracking all forms of extremist violence, Greenblatt has not blamed pro-Israel voices in the U.S. for the rise in Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks in the last two years. We did not hear equivalent calls for the government to “deal” with Zionist advocates when three Palestinian students wearing keffiyeh were shot in Vermont in late 2023, leaving one paralyzed; or when a pro-Israel landlord in Illinois killed a six-year-old Palestinian-American tenant by stabbing him 26 times with a large military knife; or when a Texas woman attempted to drown a Palestinian-American three year old last September in an act police said was motivated by racial hatred. Greenblatt — and the U.S. government under both Biden and Trump — reserve their accusations of collective culpability for Palestinians and their supporters.
In a New York Times Morning newsletter on Tuesday, which itself mangled distinctions between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, author Jonathan Weisman wrote, “Attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli government a world away are collective punishment, and collective punishment is bigotry.” On this point, Weisman is entirely correct. It’s nonetheless an extraordinary statement to make without stressing that Israel’s all-out destruction of Gaza in response to October 7 is “collective punishment” at its most extreme.
Meanwhile, Greenblatt is inviting this country’s authoritarian government to carry out further collective punishment against Israel’s critics.
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