The ADL and Me
Long Before it Became Another Leftist Pressure Group the ADL Stopped Protecting Jews' Civil Rights
The Anti Defamation League, better known as the ADL, is in the news these days because Elon Musk has decided to fight back against the organization’s characterization of Musk’s free speech supporting X/Twitter as somehow supporting antisemitism. These days, under former Obama administration apparatchik Jonathan Greenblat, the ADL besmirches the legacy of its founders, who fought for civil rights for American Jews and later supported the establishment of the state of Israel, by acting as just another leftist pressure group. The fact that they are quick to tar their political opponents with the stain of “antisemitism” is frankly despicable.
The historical truth is that long before Rosenblatt’s tenure the ADL had stopped serving the broader interests of American Jews and instead focused, as many non-profit organizations do, on the interests of their financial supporters.
I learned that lesson 50 years ago when I tried to enlist the help of ‘America’s preeminent Jewish civil rights organization’ in my own encounter with discrimination against Members of the Tribe.
It was the 1970s and the ADL was working hard, through legislation and litigation, to open up “restricted” private country clubs that would not admit Jews as members. Despite obvious First Amendment freedom of association issues, the ADL argued that by being denied membership to these private clubs, Jews were denied business opportunities because of how integral playing golf at those clubs was in establishing business relationships.
Putting aside Grouch Marx’s famous quip concerning a restricted club in Los Angeles, saying that he’d never join a club that would have someone like him as a member, while the ADL might have had a point, none of that was going to help any Jew that wasn’t already wealthy enough to join a country club.
Growing up, my best friend, Stevie Margolin, was a third generation member of Knollwood Country Club, one of the Jewish country clubs in suburban Detroit. In the first half of the 20th century, when Jews were denied entry to private country clubs, affluent Jews started their own. The Jewish clubs near Detroit when I was a kid were Knollwood, Franklin Hills, Shenandoah, and Tam O’ Shanter and I think all of them are still operating.
Steve and his parents would often have me as their guest at the club and I would wonder why he was so normal while the other rich kids were sort of stuck up. When I got older I realized that it was because of his father, a poor boy from Brooklyn who went to Michigan on a violin scholarship and met the daughter of a wholesale plumbing supplier in an era when babies were booming and suburbs were expanding.
As it turned out, Steve went to law school, practiced law for a while in Memphis and then moved back to Detroit to run the family business when his dad and uncle retired. Since then the family sold out to a national chain.
I love Steve and loved his father but neither of them needed to belong to Oakland Hills to make their lives materially better. They were already wealthy enough to be spending mid five figures a year on membership dues.
So that’s what the ADL was doing in the 1970s.
What I was doing in the first part of that decade was going to college in Ann Arbor. Back then the number of administrators on campus hadn’t yet exploded and the student loan scam/grift hadn’t yet metastasized, so tuition was reasonable, about $750 a term if I recall correctly. Room and board multiplied that, my parents were on the edge of the upper middle class but not wealthy, so getting a summer job was essential.
In between my freshman and sophomore years, I got what was generally considered a dream summer job for a college student. I had initially planned to work for a friend who ran a crew painting a factory in Novi but the United States Postal Service hired me for a summer position as a relief postal carrier for those on vacation. The pay was unusually high for a summer gig and you could leave early as long as your route was delivered, typically about 2:30 in the afternoon.
They assigned me to a post office in northwest Detroit, on the edge of what had been a Jewish neighborhood in the ‘50s and ‘60s, before most of Detroit’s Jews moved to Oakland County. Everything went well until Friday when I told the branch superintendent that I was unable to work that Saturday because of the Jewish sabbath. He asked why I couldn’t work on Saturday when all of the other Jewish employees at that branch worked on Saturday.
He had an Irish surname so I asked him if he was married and a Roman Catholic, and he said yes to both questions. I told him, “Well in that case, I’m sure that you don’t do everything the pope does and the pope doesn’t do everything that you do.”
He didn’t like that.
I explained that the 1964 Civil Rights Act as recently amended in 1972 said that employers had to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious needs. Obviously a lot of employers can’t do that without disrupting operations, but the USPS is a bit unique in that it operates 24/7/365 in one capacity or another. There might not be Sunday delivery, but the U.S. mail even moves on Christmas Day. They could have easily assigned me some task to do on Sunday instead of working on Saturday. I also pointed out that U.S. Civil Service regulations placed an even greater obligation on a federal agency to accommodate. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rulings made the situation pretty clear.
Regardless of the law, the superintendent said that getting Saturdays off was a matter of seniority and the contract with the postal workers’ union and that I would be disciplined if I did not work the next day.
The next week I was told to report to a meeting with the regional superintendent, whose office was in a bigger post office in a different Zip Code. In a sleazy and manipulative effort, he also had two other summer employees in his office and said it would not be fair to them if I got Saturdays off.
When I brought up the Civil Rights Act and said that my civil rights were being violated, I’d say that he got red in the face but he was a very large black man so I’ll just say that he exploded in anger.
“Don’t you talk to me about civil rights! My wife is an official with the NAACP.”
When I didn’t work the following Shabbat, they fired me.
The first thing I did was call the Michigan office of the ADL. I figured, this was an open and shut case of religious discrimination against a Jew in the workplace, and that America’s preeminent organization working on behalf of Jews’ civil rights would take up my case, or at least provide me with some direction as to how to proceed.
That was some foolish figuring. The regional director told me that protecting the jobs of sabbath observing Jews wasn’t the focus of the ADL, and in any case they didn’t legally represent individuals. That was when I learned that the ADL didn’t represent Jewish interests, it represented the perceived interests of its wealthy donors. Helping millionaires get into country clubs was probably more profitable for the non-profit in terms of potential large donations than helping a Jew with a working class job.
This was more than two decades before the internet started to exist as we know it but somehow I found out about an organization of mostly orthodox Jewish lawyers called the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, or COLPA for short. COLPA was established specifically to support situations like mine. I called their office in New York and they put me in touch with a wonderful man named Abe Selesny, who agreed to represent me pro bono and prepared a case to present to the EEOC.
It took about a year to get a hearing scheduled. Three days before the hearing, after stonewalling for months and months, the U.S.P.S. offered me a settlement because they knew they were going to lose and didn’t want a precedent case. They wanted to be able to keep discriminating against sabbath observing employees in favor of those with union seniority.
The offer, about what I would have made as a temporary term employee minus what I earned at the minimum wage job I found working for $1.66/hr in a production broaching shop where my daily quota was 2,400 parts machined, was just enough that I really couldn’t refuse it. In retrospect I regret taking that offer and should have established a precedent.
That’s why I support Elon Musk in his battle against the ADL’s ironic defamation of his business. The charge of antisemitism, or more accurately, Jew hatred, is too important to be tossed about lightly. By applying the term to those that Greenblatt and other ADL mucky mucks consider to be their political opponents they diminish the power of the charge and ultimately endanger Jews.
Of course, the fact that they are fellow travelers with leftist Jew haters, I guess makes all of that to be expected.
Once, the ADL was supported by Jews interested in ending discrimination against Jews. It was founded by members of the B’nai Brith fraternal organization in 1913 the same year Leo Frank was lynched (after possibly being framed for the murder of a white, teenaged girl). The organization did much good in its early years, but it has widely strayed from its original mission.
Note: I’m on the ADL’s emailing list and get messages from both the regional director and the national organization over Greenblatt’s signature. To give you an idea of how woke the ADL is, the regional organization has spent more time complaining about the plight of “Jews of color” than about the orthodox Jews getting beaten on the streets of New York City. I have nothing against Jews who come from different ethnic backgrounds. I’m now related by marriage to black and Hispanic Jews and they are welcome members of our family. I’m sure that “JOCs” face unique challenges, but emphasizing those challenges over actual physical violence and intimidation targeting Jews makes clear where the ADL’s priorities are: leftist orthodoxies, not orthodox Jews.
Thanks Ronnie, following Jack in his travels, I have always appreciated your insightful comments.
My nephew is whip-smart, highly educated, has a wicked sense of humor and well on his way to being quite successful. Our family are good bible thumping Baptists. My nephew's father is a Baptist minister so I was fascinated to follow the nephew's conversion to Judaism as he prepared to marry a good Jewish girl.
Your thoughtful discussions and his commitment (and dryly humorous comparisons) are very educational!
As usual, just what the doctor ordered! I’ve wanted to hear from somebody who actually has skin in the game on the ADL thing. Very insightful and helpful--although depressing, as well. Our country is rotting from the inside. I cannot decide whether to be mad or sad.