Ep 98: How Wokeness Foments Antisemitism; a Conversation with ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt

0:00Our leaders aren't leading on college campuses, elected officials, so many are failing to demonstrate moral clarity. When you're either on team oppressed or team oppressor, everybody loses that game. This crazy woke ideology has a lot to do with why Jews are being marginalized and attacked. I totally agree with you on that, but you guys pushed a lot of those ideas originally, right? You were pushing CRT. We've never pushed CRT. We don't teach CRT. You also have material from Todd Nhesi Coates. Did you see what Todd Nhesi Coates has said in the last week? We saw his interview with Tony DeCocco on CBS, tough questions, fair questions.

0:34And then Tony got raked over the coals. We're pushing back on that pretty hard. So I think you're taking the right tone defending the guy at CBS, but do you realize that his name's still on your site promoting his work? I have to take a look at that. You've called out places like Harvard. Are they getting any better? Last year was a disaster on many of these campuses. We have taken on more cases, done more litigation in the last year than we did in the first 110 years.

1:07Jonathan Greenblatt is the CEO of ADL, the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL has been a very important organization for the Jewish people for 100 years. It's done a lot of amazing work. It's also gotten into a lot of controversy lately, where a lot of us thought it went too far to the left. I'm excited to talk to Jonathan about what's happened over the last year since October 7th. Jonathan was a great entrepreneur with a lot of success. He worked in the Obama administration, where I've known him for over a decade. And he and I don't agree on everything. In fact, there's a lot we don't agree on. I asked Jonathan some tough questions to make sure some of the ideas the ADL is promoting is not actually backfiring to hurt Jews and to take political stances that are inappropriate.

1:41I was very encouraged to hear some of his perspectives about the threat from Iran, the problems with the woke narrative, and his optimism for the future of America. I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to The American Optimist. Excited to have my friend Jonathan Greenblatt from the ADL here today. Jonathan, thanks for joining. Thank you so much for having me, Joe. I'm really delighted to be here. So, Jonathan, let's start with your background. You're the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. For our audience who aren't familiar with your story, Tell us about yourself a bit, like in your work in the private sector and in government.

2:06Sure. So I've been here at ADL for nine years, which seems hard to believe. But before that, I had a career in public and service in the private sector. So I got my start in government doing international economic policy during the Clinton years. I did that for five and a half years at the Commerce Department and then at the White House. In between, after that, I got an MBA at Northwestern. And then I went out to California to be part of the Internet Revolution. I was a product manager at a little internet company at the time called realtor.com that ended up getting very big and going public. And I wrote that out at NFV, the vice president of consumer products.

2:46The product guys are always the smart guys, huh? That's my experience. I don't know about that. But I learned how to do market research, how to work with consumers, how to work with an eng team and drive a QA process. and I learned how to ship product. And I learned I was pretty good at running a team, but I missed public service. And so I left that. And with my roommate from business school, we started a company called Ethos Water. And the goal was to use part of its profits to help children of the world get clean water because there are a billion kids or a billion people without clean drinking water.

3:18Ended up raising a couple rounds and scaling that company and selling it to Starbucks. And Howard Schultz also asked me to join the board of the foundation and figure out. Now we had, you know, scores of millions of dollars in free cash flow. How are we going to invest in clean water programs around the world? And then I got recruited back in to come to the White House, the Obama White House, where I ran the Office of Innovation in the West Wing that was focused on accelerating economic recovery. I remember we had a few meetings when you were there at the time. I agree to know each other pretty well, the Obama White House.

3:48That's one thing I'd give the Obama White House credit for that's different than this White House is that people like you who are interested in hearing from people of all points of view. Yeah, totally. Like I wanted to try to figure out how to use innovation to kickstart and turbocharge the economy, create more jobs, better jobs. So that's what I did. And then I thought I was going to go back to California and go run another business. And I ended up getting called out this job at ADL and I got recruited into it. I never thought I would be here. I had no nonprofit experience. I'm not a lawyer. I mean, I'm a Jewish person, I never worked in the Jewish world before.

4:21But what interests me, Joe, is running not a Jewish nonprofit, but a best in class, high performing, impact driving, you know, margin earning organization. And that's what I'm trying to do here. So it's amazing background. So really, you were in many ways an entrepreneur and also like an impact entrepreneur. Sounds like you helped huge numbers of people get clean water, help people in lots of other ways, made a bunch of money doing it. So that's a very successful career into the White House and now ADL. And I do love the framework of impact. Obviously, the ADL has been something that's important to our people.

4:55We're both Jewish. It's something that's been important to our people for a very long time. We'll talk more about it because it has a very complex history. But maybe tell us a little bit about what the ADL did in the past and why it was important. It's like, what are some of the successes it had? Sure. Look, ADL was founded in 1913 around the Leo Frank trial. This was a Jewish guy who was wrongfully accused of a crime, ultimately sentenced to death. There was exculpatory evidence, and his death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, and the mob was so enraged, they tore him from his jail, and they hung him from a tree.

5:30And the wake of his trial and death led to really the creation and the acceleration of ADL. So when it was founded in 1913, the mission statement that they wrote was that its purpose would be to, quote, stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all. So ADL has always thought we have to defend the Jews, and we do that by defending others. When everyone is safe, the Jews will be safe. ADL is involved in the civil rights movement as well. Yeah. So, like, look, ADL was the Jewish organization that made America safer for its Jews in the 10s and 20s and 30s and 40s.

6:05ADL fought the Nazis. ADL broke open the quotas. ADL stopped the discrimination. But in the 1940s, ADL started fighting for civil rights for African-Americans. And ADL, it filed its first amicus brief of the Supreme Court in 1947 on a case called Shelley v. Kramer that was about housing discrimination against Blacks. And in 52, in Brown v. Board of Education. And ADL was the group in the 1950s that got anti-masking laws passed in America to kneecap the Ku Klux Klan. And ADL fought also in the late 50s and 60s for immigration reform. And ADL fought in the 80s and 90s for anti-LGBTQ hate. So ADL has always had that duality.

6:55And one thing you said earlier to me that you're not for red or blue, you're for protect the Jews and obviously to help everyone. We'll go into this more, But one question is because it came up. So we fought as ADL and the Jewish people against the Jewish quotas. Obviously, these were things that were keeping us out of Harvard and Yale. I think there was a certain percent you could be Jewish otherwise. So it kept huge numbers out. But then but then today you wouldn't fight for against the Asian quotas. And because that's not something as popular. So I'm curious, how would you think about that?

7:23No, I think it's a really good question. I think we would fight against quotas. So, you know, I think we took a position on this Supreme Court case that was up maybe about a year. It was before the Supreme Court about a year ago on perceived discrimination against Asian American applicants at Harvard. I think, you know, without going into all the details of the case, I think it was kind of really on the borderline. But this organization, ADL, is against quotas. This organization will not support the idea of quotas that repress Asian Americans or Jewish Americans or black Americans. You can forget it.

8:01I think the thing about that case was, as you think about issues of diversity, is race something to consider in a holistic view of diversity. and we think there's merit to that but I do want to be crystal clear Joe like we don't support quotas not not then not now not ever no that's fair we'll go into a few more of these things I want to stop though and ask you a bit about October 7th which I think changed things for a lot of Jews in America this is it's not that there wasn't things going on behind the scenes that I think it just kind of forced awareness for everyone it kind of brought a lot of anti-Semites out.

8:36Can you talk a bit about what you saw and what you learned over the past year? Look, anti-Semitism had been building before October the 7th, but it was turbocharged that day. Literally, I mean, our offices, and we have 25 offices, and one of the biggest things that we do is we deal with anti-Semitic incidents. People report them to us and we respond. We have almost 500 full-time employees, and we investigate every report that comes in and respond. Like, Joe, in the last year alone, in the last 12 months since October the 7th, we fielded more than 10 ,000 incidents. That is triple the number of the prior 12-year period.

9:18Is that what's on the screen behind you right now? Yeah, actually. Yeah, so you can see these, I mean, the data here. Look, you see year over year, 2023 was a terrible year, but the numbers are continuing to go up. since 2023. Up there, you can see our heat map. I mean, we literally track anti-Jewish incidents, extremist incidents every single day. And we've hit high marks in 19 and 21 and 22. But after 2023, it just exploded. And I want to ask, what are you guys doing about this? Because on one hand, obviously, this is very important to call out and confront and show people. On the other hand, there's a perception that Jews are really powerful and are going to force people not to attack them using other organs of government or something, which might make of them hate us even more, right?

10:02So like what's, what's effective in, in, in, in attacking these things? It's a good question. I mean, so I will just say antisemitism is like a conspiracy theory that posits that the Jews are responsible for all the evil in the world. The Jews have too much power. The Jews have too much money. So what happens, Joe, is when you push back on that, you're successful. The haters say, aha, you see, we told you they have too much power. They have too much money. If I was a billionaire, powerful Jew running companies pushes back on this, is like that's exactly the conspiracy so what so what are we doing is useful here so it's kind of lose lose i mean our approach is number one we have to disrupt the extremists so we have a whole center that tracks you know left-wing radicals right-wing extremists religious fanatics and literally we try to intercept and stop them joe before they can perpetrate hate that's number one um and so we're working with law enforcement to put these people away when i say put these people away, we are not censoring free speech, as some of the conspiracists would say.

11:02We're not. We are trying to take people who represent an imminent threat because they have intent, they have weapons, and we can figure out where they are. I mean, that's the kind of people we're talking about. The anti-Zionist who wants to assault a Jewish kid because he's Jewish. The white supremacist who wants to shoot up a synagogue. That's the kind of threats that we try to intercept. So are there other instances in the last year where you found these people when you've got Got them stopped? Does that happen a lot? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like in 2023 alone, Joe, we gave over 2 ,000 tips to law enforcement where we could identify.

11:36Again, a threat means you have intent, like I want to kill Jews or I want to kill Joe Lonsdale. You have a weapon and we see that like in pick, you indicate it or we can see represented in like a photo or an image, a knife or a gun or something or an explosive device. And we can identify that person is located in the Chicago area. So that's the kind of tips we provide to law enforcement. And it's crucial. I mean, they lead to search warrants and arrests and prosecutions. Well, that's amazing work. And I thank you for it, Jonathan. That's really important for our people and for America in general.

12:12You know, I want to get your theory on what's going on in our country and in the world right now. You think there'd be maybe an outpouring of support for Jews after October 7th, which there was from some of my friends seeing the horrible images and seeing what happened. But, you know, instead, obviously, we've had a lot of people kind of joining in the attacks on Jews. You've seen blatant anti-Semitism from so many areas, including a lot of our most important educational institutions and the leaders there. Like, what's your theory of what's happening? I have some theories myself. I want to hear from you.

12:37You live in this every day. Like, why is this happening? Well, I think there are a few things that are happening. I think, number one, I think this moment, look, it's fraught, right? Like, you see the images of, like, you know, civilians getting killed in Gaza or Lebanon. And you can be upset about that. And we all should be. No civilian should be killed. On the other hand, we can argue about why they're being killed, right? Why are they in harm's way in the first place? So your heart should break for civilians and your blood should boil that Hamas put them in this position or Hezbollah put them in this position.

13:11But that being said, I think what's happening, Joe, is number one, the anti-Israel protesters have been radicalized by anti-Semitism, okay? So they are using anti-Semitic images like from the river to the sea come straight out of the Hamas playbook. Yeah. From the river to the sea is like saying Germany for Germans. Germany for Germans, like in some abstract context might be OK. But when someone where, you know, when a white supremacist says. When you're referring to the Holocaust and saying Germany for Germans, that's obviously not OK. Yeah, I'm totally fine if they don't want to have immigration.

13:50I'm not fine if they're saying they should kill. They should kill people. Right. That's that's the difference. Yeah. It's nuts. So I think on the one hand, the activists are using inflammatory, intentionally using inflammatory language to alienate and marginalize Jews. I think that's one thing. I think, secondly, they feel very emboldened because there's no pushback. Like, our leaders aren't leading on college campuses, elected officials. So many are failing to demonstrate moral clarity, you know? Like, there's been this debate in higher ed, Joe, that you're probably familiar with about institutional neutrality.

14:23Yep. I like the idea of institution neutrality because like universities and companies, organizations, they should focus on what they do every day. Like Brian Armstrong from Coinbase says, you know, like do your job. Like our job is crypto. Our job isn't to show up on every social issue. But on the other hand, I also believe in moral clarity. And if your employees or their families are getting butchered and tortured and murdered, like it's OK to say something that is like the right thing to do. So to be really honest, I think radicals have kind of infiltrated and inculcated themselves into institutions.

15:01They're intimidating the leaders who are weak to begin with. They're using inflammatory, hostile, hateful language that's being there's a permissive attitude towards it. And Jews are getting caught in the middle. And it's deeply terrifying. You've called out places like like Harvard and others and I think probably Penn and whatnot. And like, are they getting any better? Like, are things improved a little bit? Not really. I mean, last year was a disaster on many of these campuses. So far in the early days of this academic year, there have been less people involved in these rallies. I hate to even call them rallies, Joe.

15:38They're like riots. Like, let's not credit them as rallies. Let's not call these activists or antagonists. That being said, there have been less people involved, Joe, but the intensity is even higher. So the kind of rhetoric is even more charged. The tactics are even more sort of combustible. I think we're like a mat stroke away from real violence. Now, by the way, Joe, in the past month, since classes started, we tracked, I think we've got about half a dozen assaults, anti-Jewish assaults. We're representing students at Pitt, at Michigan, I think at Ohio State, who've been victimized and assaulted in just the past four to five weeks.

16:23It's a legal arm actually helping them take action. Yeah. That's great. I mean, look, and this is one thing I would say, Joe, that matters. Any organization you're talking to in the Jewish space, like if you are not doing things differently now, if you're not experimenting and innovating and trying new stuff, you should go home. Yep. Literally, you should go home. Like I said, ADL, Joe, we have taken on more cases, done more litigation in the last year than we did in the first 110 years. We're suing universities, school districts, representing Jewish people. We're suing companies for employee discrimination.

17:02We're suing the Islamic Republic of Iran. I mean, we're being much more aggressive. And this is a good example of where... It does seem like Iran is actually funding some of these activists. We saw it and we reported to law enforcement in October of last year that we saw things that indicated that many of these student groups were providing material support for a foreign terror organization. I wrote a letter to 200 university presidents on this. And this past summer, you know, the Directorate of National Intelligence, the arm of the government that coordinates the FBI and the CIA, the NSA, they reported Iran is providing money and organizing capabilities to these protesters.

17:45Does it bother you on Iran? Just to just go on that for a second. So for me, Iran is is is a very clearly set of evil people running that country. I love the Persian people. They're natural allies of the Jews. But the people running that country are sponsoring terrorism all over the Middle East. They seem like the main problem to me in the Middle East. And it feels like for some reason, Obama had this theory to get you. You worked with him. He gave them a bunch. Well, not what you were doing, but he gave them a bunch of money. He tried to do a balance of power. Biden as well tried to empower them.

18:12I think it led to more attacks on Israel to our people. Was that wrong of Obama and Biden to empower this regime and to naively try to do a balance of power? Or what do you think on this? I get in a post-Arab Spring world, there was this idea that maybe there would be an opportunity to kind of reset the region and democracy or normal would follow. But abnormal and terror are the tools of the Islamic regime. Yeah. The Islamic Republic is the largest state sponsor of terror and their number one export isn't oil, Joe, it's anti-Semitism. You agree with people like me who think we need a regime change in Iran?

18:49Yeah, we do. And I mean, we can argue about what's the best way to get there. But there are there's I will say this, Joe, for you to hear and your audience to hear. There is no such thing as reformists in the regime. There are only hardliners and ultra hardliners. And so we need a new regime, one that respects its people, that respects its minorities and respects its neighbors. This regime specializes in terror and militarism. And I just want to be clear, they are a revolutionary creed that targets Israel, the Jewish people, and the United States of America. That's a problem for me. They call Israel the little Satan and America the great Satan.

19:35They're coming for us. That's right. So, Jonathan, I really appreciate that. We're aligned on a lot of things. You're doing really important work for the Jews and for America. I wanted to have that context because I'm going to ask you a few tougher questions as well. Because I have to say the thing is sad is if my boobie, my grandma who passed away, would have been really proud that I was chatting with you. Because the IDL is so important to her and to our people for decades. some of my friends today who are jews especially those who are on the right uh are questioning questioning me for talking first of all i want to educate them with some of what we talked about about the important work you're doing but i want to i want to give you some perspective of some of the things they're they're frustrated about sure um and so you know a lot of us i'd say on the center and center right i believe the adl shifted hard to the left um and become partisan i think it's okay for you to be partisan obviously you obviously fired off tweets opposing pompeo and kavanaugh and that sort of thing i don't think that's a scandal or anything in 2020 actually was interesting.

20:28You went on Al Sharpton's show and called for a corporate boycott of Facebook for not censoring pro-Trump ads, and then briefly tried to pause advertising on Twitter a couple years later as well. It seems like you've moved back from those petitions now, or what do you think about calling for boycotts for people who are not censoring Trump and that sort of thing? Well, let's step back. So a couple of things. So number one, I don't think I'm partisan. It's certainly true that I work for President Clinton, President Obama, and I'm proud of my public service. But on the other hand, my job here, as I was telling you before, isn't to play for the red team, the blue team, it's to play for the Jewish team and for the human team.

21:04I think my job is called balls and strikes. So I regularly call out people from the Republican Party, the Democratic Party. And I often get criticized for that, right? The left thinks I'm too conservative. The right thinks I'm too liberal. I really think if you look at the expanse of our track record, at the end of the day, we're doing what we think is right, not weighing in this way or that way. Now, that being said, and by the way, I'll say one other thing, if I might, I think part of the reason why we're in this fix is because so much of our society and its cultural sources, universities, media have been sort of seized by this kind of, you know, this oppressor oppressed kind of model.

21:47And I think when we get forced to play in the oppression Olympics. Yep. When you're either on team oppressed or team oppressor, everybody loses that game. Yeah. And I do think this crazy woke ideology that sees so many, again, segments of society has a lot to do with why Jews are being marginalized and attacked. But I totally agree with you on that. But you guys pushed a lot of those ideas originally, right? You were pushing CRT, you were pushing all that stuff. You're saying people call you never push CRT. We don't teach CRT. We don't have a, we don't do CRT. Now we do believe in like anti-bias education.

22:24We've been doing that for decades. We do think we do try to, we do anti-hate content, but I don't think we, and I just, we look, let me be clear to you. We don't always get it right. And we've made our fair share of mistakes. And I can talk about my mistakes, but I would, I really do not agree with this perception that we're teaching CRT. By the way, like we don't have a relationship with Black Lives Matter. We don't teach CRT. We still do these things, even though I know there's a perception that we do. So on the Facebook Twitter thing, like we originally went after Facebook when there were white supremacists organizing through Facebook groups.

23:02And we track extremists. We saw them doing it. I brought it to the company's attention. They didn't act. And that was why we said advertisers should pause on the platform, not a permanent boycott, pause on the platform. So it wasn't about Trump, you're saying it was more about the white supremacist groups. It was about white supremacists and extremists. And by the way, to Facebook's credit, they did things after we did that. For example, they created a VP of civil rights. They started blocking Holocaust denialism. They started taking down extremist accounts. That's a good thing. And more recently, they called out the fact that Zionist is being used as a slur to attack Jewish people yep so like when companies get it right we will give them credit and when we get it wrong we'll call them out and i appreciate that i want to push a little harder on a couple of these things because i think sometimes there's what you believe and i think and this is not unique to the adl but in my experience a lot of staff in the non-profit world tends to skew very much to the left and then tends to do more left things maybe even than the organization intends to do so for example a lot of the educational material on your site um has a lot of stuff that would be considered by most people to be woke, to be tied to this oppressor or oppressed frame.

24:10We're going to give you an example here. You have a bunch of material referencing Ibram Kendi, who to many of us on the right is a hate figure, even though you guys, people, even though not you guys, but even though people on the left support his work, we think he's one of the most hateful and people who supports a lot of these things that hurt Jews. You also have material, I want to cite it to you, from Ta-Nehisi Coates that actually suggests people go read Ta-Nehisi Coates' works on reparations for black people. This is on your site today. Did you see what Ta-Nehisi Coates has said in the last week?

24:39Yeah, I don't know if you saw, I mean, I spoke to the New York Post about this at the beginning of the week. So we saw his interview with Tony DeCopal on CBS News. I thought it was a great interview, tough questions, fair questions in a measured way. And then Tony got raked over the coals. We all heard the recording. And then, you know, I had conversations with the leadership of CBS News about this. And so we're pushing back on that pretty hard. You can read, you can read what I talk, you know, talk to Charlie Gaspar. So I think you're taking the right tone defending the guy at CBS. But obviously you've seen for our listeners, Taunesse Coates came out, did a lot of things with classic anti-Semitic tropes on Jews as oppressors, Zionism as colonialism.