New Head of Anti-Defamation League Will Be a White House Aide that Neocons Aren't Happy With

The ADL has announced that White House aide Jonathan Greenblatt will  succeed longtime National Director Abraham Foxman.

Greenblatt, a 43-year-old grandson of a Holocaust survivor, currently serves in the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation in the Domestic Policy Council. He also founded the Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute think tank and co-founded the bottled water producer Ethos Brands, which donated to global clean water programs and was eventually acquired by the Starbucks Coffee Company.

He may be taking a direction that neocons would not be happy with.

Bill Kristol points to a JNS.org article and tweets, " Powerful indictment of ADL, liberal head-in-sand Jewish organizations in Wash Jewish Wk."

What's in the JNS article? This:

 Greenblatt’s area of expertise is “social domestic policy” suggests that ADL “wants to continue moving in the direction of emphasizing liberal social policy positions, as opposed to emphasizing fighting anti-Semitism and defending Israel,” Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Mort Klein told JNS.org.

Charles Jacobs—head of the Boston-based advocacy group Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), which has clashed with the ADL...

“ADL used Jewish donations to push for such things as immigration reform, gay marriage, and women’s rights, seemingly uncomfortable with focusing ADL’s work primarily on fighting to protect Jewish interests, even in these daunting times,” Jacobs told JNS.org.

Echoing that sentiment is Chicago-based attorney Joel J. Sprayregen, a former national vice-chair of ADL who ended his involvement with the organization about a decade ago.

“The ADL has been a great champion for civil rights over the years, but of course it’s a defender of the Jewish people, and I think they’ve blurred that mission in recent years, getting involved with things like bullying which are not part of an essential civil rights or Jewish mission,” Sprayregen told JNS.org.

With the hiring of Greenblatt, Foxman and ADL “have doubled down on this tragic abandonment of Jewish interests in favor of an ill-defined universalism,” said Jacobs...

“ADL will continue to lose relevance,” added Jacobs. “Jews who want to fight against the clear and present dangers of Islamic Jew-hatred and left wing anti-Zionism will step up their support of organizations that seriously engage these threats on the campuses, in our communities, and in the media. Jews will continue to abandon an ADL that has abandoned them.

To be sure, there is nothing praiseworthy in most of the  “social domestic policy”issues that the ADL wants to promote, however, a move away from calling for, or at least toning down demands for, US engagement in the Middle East is a good thing.

Thus, this is a welcome civil war to see developing within the Jewish community.

-RW