I recently read a piece by Anna Snyder with the wonderful title, “Why Do Historians Complicate Things?” The job of the historian is to capture the fullness of the past, after all and the past is a complicated place. Our job is to try to capture some of those complications and explain their relevance to the present. As a historian who spent his entire academic career outside a history department I identified with her statement, “We are, professionally speaking, difficult people to the majority of those outside the discipline.” Someone can only hear, “It depends.” or “It is more complicated than that.” so many times, after all.

One sentence jumped out at me: “We write entire articles to explain why a term meant something slightly different in 1849 than it did in 1850.” More than two decades ago an editor for a major publisher told me how he was frustrated in trying to get historians to write general books: “I hear things like ‘I only really know about 1942.'” Ouch.

The take away message is that “when historians are interpreting the past for non-academic audiences, we must complicate without the help of lengthy discursive footnotes. Doing this effectively and responsibly is a matter of civic importance.” I love this. History is important, dammit! We need to be able to make it important for everyone. Yes, yes getting the facts right is important but so is making the past relevant. We don’t write history “for the sake of the past.” Julius Caesar is dead and gone, we can’t do anything for his sake. We write for each other and “each other” does not only include other historians. If we are lucky enough to have anyone read what we write, we’d better make it count for them.

This bring me to Emmaia Gelman‘s new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. Gelman is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Gelman is not setting out to write a complete history of the ADL because it is far to large a topic and “I did not have access to the ADL’s in-house archives” (p. 15). I sympathize with both caveats as I have not been able to access those archives either even though I asked nicely.

The book is based on a critical perspective that “sets out to discern how power produces the seemingly natural conditions in which it operates, and to comprehend and resist the violence of those operations” (p. 14). I have a great deal of sympathy with this perspective. My work on scientific racism can be described in a similar fashion: the supposed “objectivity” of racist science naturalizes human differences and has justified all kinds oppression and violence.

Gelman is interested in the ADL as a political institution. Granting that the people working for the ADL have accomplished worthwhile things, “challenging housing discrimination to infiltrating White Citizen Councils , some people working for the ADL have taken risky stands and made substantial dents in material injustice” (p. 15). Those accomplishments notwithstanding Gelman portrays the ADL as an elitist and conservative institution embedded in and accepting of the capitalist system of the USA. Elitist because, from its beginning in 1913, it was composed of elite German Jews who disdained recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe as uncultured near-savages who needed to be disciplines so as not to cast all Jews in a bad light. The first chapter, “White Settler and Immigrant Riffraff: Before World War II,” makes a very persuasive case for the ADL’s elitism.

For Gelman the ADL’s elitism overlaps with its inherently conservative politics. “Until the 1950s,” Gelman writes, “most US Jewry was working-class and far to the left of the ADL, and the ADL was anxious to distinguish itself from them” (p. 2). Thus, it embraced liberal capitalism and set itself against mass movements of the anti-capitalist left. Because true liberation requires the destruction of racial liberalism, the ADL was, and is a barrier to any anti-racist project. “I wanted to understand,” Gelman writes, “why the ADL invested so heavily in civil rights and at the same time advocated obviously racist and violent projects, including colonial violence in Palestine and also US-based projects like supporting blanket surveillance of Muslims by the New York City police department, claiming advance Jewish safety and protect democracy” (p. 16). Gelman wanted to “look for the logic that threaded them together” (p. 17).

Gelman is critical of the ADL for its move to “the vital center….[which] produced a durable bipartisan conservatism using the imperative to ‘protect civil rights and democracy’ as means of disciplining and marginalizing popular movements… It framed a return to American ideals as the antidote to fascism and war, and rejected the leftist challenges to the state and right-wing racism and religious rigidity as forms of extremism” (p. 90).

Gelman argues that to merely “follow the money…misses the dense field of personal relationships and moral authority that underwrite the ADL’s work” (p. 17). Gelman writes of “settler colonialism, Cold War imperialism, Western hegemony” in which “Zionism is only a later crystallizing expression” (p. 262). These are huge analytical categories that fail to capture the complexity of the arguments in the context of the time and, as a result, misses those dense relationships Gelman wants to unmask.

Now is the time for me to invoke those standard historians’ arguments. First, “I only know about 1942.” OK, I’ll be a little broader than that. I’m working (still!) on my book about radical capitalism in the Civil Rights Era and have a lot of views on antisemtism and the ADL in the decades following World War II. In this review I will concentrate on Chapter 2, “Red Jews, Anticolonial Arabs, Black Leftists, and Colorblind Anticommunism: The ’50s and ’60s.”

Second… well.. dammit it is complicated! Most scholars agree that how antisemitism and Anti-Zionism and the myth of “Islamic antisemitism” evolved after the Six-Day War in 1967 The two decades between the end of World War II and the Six-Day war deserve to be analyzed on their own terms. Gelman notes the shift (p. 8) in the ADL in 1974 with the book, The New Anti-Semitism. For Gelman the pro-Zionism and Islamophobia of 1974 was only a hardening of the same ideology found in the previous decades. I disagree.

The result of the turn in the late 1960s is the inexcusable position of today’s ADL defending the genocide in Gaza, which it clearly is. The question is whether or not the “logic” of the ADL’s politics that led to its position today existed decades ago? Gelman seems to think so. I want to argue that today’s ADL’s position on Zionism was a contingent outcome of choices that the ADL took later in its existence. I want to argue, in Ian Hacking’s phrase, “against inevitability.”

1. Where and What Was the Left?

Gelman’s argument largely depends on the existence of leftist alternatives to the ADL’s program of action. Gelman argues that a leftist alternative existed to the liberal capitalist regime in which the ADL operated. The book charges that the ADL attacked this genuine leftist alternative and became a conservative Cold War extension of the Federal government’s oppressive anticommunism.

Gelman argues that, after World War II, the ADL gained power and prominence in part by abandoning the Jewish political left. “As the ADL’s stature rose,” Gelman argues, “as a mainstream democracy organization, its claims to represent US Jewry gained importance, and its antipathy toward the Jewish left became more consequential.” Gelman points to the coordination among “more conservative wealthier groups” to narrow the scope of acceptable politics for the Jewish cause (p. 93). Gelman writes that the ADL enjoyed “its success in burying the Jewish left” (p. 90). Gelman’s claims here are quite strong: Jewish organizations “moved to cleanse themselves of any connection to communism and to purge the leftist whose existence they had wishfully denied…. The purges of Jewish organizations paralleled the purges of communists from their unions, as well as the excision of entire communist-led unions from labor coalitions that would also decimate the infrastructure of Jewish life.”

Gelman wants to track “The ADL’s conflicts with popular movements from below” (p. 13). While assuring the reader that the left was offering more genuine solutions to oppression, Gelman offers little description of who the left were or what they were advocating. When discussing the ADL’s shift to focus on “civil rights, racism, and egalitarianism,” Gelman assures the reader that “the left had already been organizing on those issues for decades” (p. 102). That declaration raises more questions than answers about the left: What organizations? How were they organizing? What were their arguments? Gelman discusses the dismissal of the work of Black sociologist Oliver Cox’s Marxist analysis of racism (p. 83-4, I discuss Cox here), but apart from that the reader is largely left in the dark about any leftist program of action.²

When offering evidence of a vibrant communist/leftist community of Jews in the immediate postwar years, Gelman suddenly interrupts the narrative and sends the reader back to the prewar United States describing just such a community which was, indeed, criticized by the ADL (pp. 85-88). But, as the very sources Gelman cites make clear, after the war, “the left for all intents and purposes almost withered away” (p. 309). McCarthyism and Cold War politics had something to do with it, to be sure. In the Jewish community leftist politics had always been strongest among Eastern European Jewish immigrants and racist immigration restrictions in the 1920s had cut off that immigration. American Jews were increasingly middle-class, not working class. The Communist Party of the 1930s had never been primarily composed of working class members in any case and, as social and physical mobility of American Jews increased so did the communities in which the American left flourished.

All of these demographic changes, does not mean that the postwar ADL was not hostile to leftists. It is more reasonable, however, to see that hostility as reflecting the constituency of American Jews they claimed to be representing. They followed more than they led anticommunist politics. As another source of Gelman’s notes the longevity of the ADL’s parent organization, the B’nai B’rith owes to its flexibility in responding the changing political and social circumstances. We may view that flexibility as accommodationist or unprincipled, as Gelman does. Or we may view it as a necessary response to the reality of the situation in which the ADL found itself in the postwar world.

2. The ADL and Governmental Anticommunism

Gelman argues that the ADL identified “Jewish, Black and Arab organizers as a threat to democracy” (p. 102) and claims that “The ADL’s anticommunist fervor superseded any distaste for right-wing anticommunist crusaders” (p. 96). Gelman writes of the ADL’s “Cooperation with McCarthy and his widely reviled lieutenant, Roy Cohn” (p.97). These claims are under-evidenced in the book.

In what way did the ADL cooperate with McCarthy? Gelman points to a meeting between Arnold Forster, ADL general counsel and other ADL leaders with McCarthy in December of 1951. We don’t know what happened at that meeting, but according to Gelman, it marked the beginning of cooperation between the ADL and the government red-baiting witch hunters. But a few pages earlier, Gelman argued that by 1953 the ADL classed McCarthy “into the category of disreputable demagogues” they opposed (p. 89). So any kind of collaborative activity between the ADL and McCarthy occurred in a very short time period. Within those two years, there is little evidence that the ADL played any role in assisting McCarthy.

We can agree with Gelman that governmental anti-communist investigations were abuses of governmental authority. We can agree that those investigations were based more on character assassination than genuine threats to the country. We can agree that many leftist Americans were not in thrall to the USSR. That does not mean that the examples Gelman provides of the ADL aiding those investigations show that the ADL played any significant role in the persecution of leftist Americans. Gelman’s evidence for significant collaboration between the government and the ADL is almost nonexistent.

Gelman recounts Louis Harap being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). But the extent of ADL “collaboration” was to worry that HUAC’s inquiry would put Jews in a bad light, hardly evidence of “collaboration” between the ADL and McCarthy in the persecution of Harap. (You can read Harap’s testimony here).

If Gelman was searching for a non-elitist and anti-Zionist leftist, Harap was not it. Harap was the managing editor of the magazine, Jewish Life which was a communist publication. From its founding in 1946, and following Moscow’s line, Jewish Life was non-Zionist. Then, on May 14, 1947, the Soviet announced a new policy, explaining that Marxist dictates required, rather than rejected, a Jewish state in Palestine. Soon, the USSR was the staunchest defender of Israel on the international stage (here and here). In 1953, when Harap was forced to testify before HUAC, Jewish Life was a Zionist publication minimizing the number of Palestinian refugees and their suffering (see here and here). If Zionism is, by definition, settler colonialism, then the American left, at least as represented by Jewish Life, was just as guilty of it as American Zionists.

I am not trying to justify HUAC or its investigations into Harap, which were clearly an abuse of governmental authority and violation of Harap’s constitutional rights. The Harap incident, however, does not provide evidence Gelman needs to show that his persecution was part of the ADL suppressing an anti-Zionist leftist who was part of of “bottom up” movement.

Following Harap’s testimony, Gelman argues that in a meeting between the ADL and other Jewish organizations and HUAC the ADL “directly asked to work with HUAC” to “suppress the Jewish left and sharpen the propaganda value of the hearings” while “conspicuously casting aside concern for democratic processes” (p. 99). You can read the memorandum the ADL produced as a result of this meeting here and decide if Gelman accurately recounts it. In my read of it, it looks to me as if the ADL is trying to tame the committee to be more careful in its witnesses and how they are treated. They express particular frustration about antisemitism, asking the committee, “Why don’t Committee members say flatly, when a witness falsely charges anti-Semitism, that they regard anti-Semitism as being un-American and odious?” My read of the document doesn’t support the idea that the ADL is eager to join HUAC’s persecution of the reds. But, even if Gelman’s read is correct, there is no evidence that this particular meeting led to any significant cooperation between HUAC and the ADL.

Gelman claims that “this, too, was the context in which the ADL surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a target of McCarthy’s allegations of communism and a constant subject of FBI monitoring” (p. 98) a claim the ADL denies. Gelman cites a 1993 Village Voice¹ article which makes the claim relying on Henry Schwartzschild who had worked for the ADL before leaving the organization finding them soft on civil rights. If the ADL was spying on King and did turn over their files to the FBI, what did they say? The FBI had extensive files on the ADL, which Gelman acknowledges (p. 14) and even more extensive files on King, but my admittedly quick perusal of them finds no evidence of ADL reports about King. If the ADL did report on King, perhaps it was to say that, despite what the American right was claiming, King was no communist.

“A year after the secret meeting more collaboration between the ADL and McCarthy came to light” Gelman claims (p. 99). The only other evidence of a “connection” (p. 98) between the ADL and McCarthy and HUAC that Gelman offers is the friendship between Arnold Forster, ADL’s chief investigator, and columnist Walter Winchell.² “Through the ADL’s surveillance of the right, Forster regularly provided Winchell with material for his column (p. 98). It is not clear how supplying information on the right to a journalist aided governmental persecution of anti-racist or anti-Zionist leftists. Gelman provides no evidence that Forster aided Winchell’s or McCarthy’s anticommunist campaigns by naming suspected communists.³

There is no denying that the ADL communicated with the FBI. Forster himself applied for a job with the FBI in 1937 but was rejected because “he dressed poorly, did not appear resourceful, would probably not develop, and was not mentally alert” (p. 26). Forster never did turn against the FBI, but that does not necessarily translate to persecution of the left. For example, he sent an embarrassingly fawning letter to Hoover congratulating the director for the book, Masters of Deceit, for example (p. 16). In that book, Hoover had claimed that “Some of the most effective opposition to communism in the United States has come from Jewish organizations such as…the Anti-Defamation League” (p. 257). Hoover’s point was that Jewish organizations had denied that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot and argued that one could follow Judaism and subscribe to atheistic communism; typical Cold War claims.

3. The ADL and the Communists

Gelman analyzes the books published by the ADL in the 1950s and early 1960s but is not always fair in the offered descriptions. Gelman admits that Arnold Forster’s, the ADL’s chief investigator, 1950 book, A Measure of Freedom ” “conceived the threats to democracy almost exclusively from the right” (p. 102). The description would be more accurate by deleting “almost” because Forster’s book lists no threats to democracy from leftists at all. Hardly evidence of McCarthyism or a “fervent” anticommunism.

To show the ADL’s hostility to the left, Gelman focuses on Forster’s treatment of how rioters prevented two different performances by Paul Robeson. Forster noted that the US Attorney General listed sponsoring organization, the Civil Rights Congress as “subversive.” But Forster was clearly concerned that the rioters were simply using Robeson’s communism as a cover for their racism since “anti-Semitic and anti-Negro epithets were heard above the din” in the first riot.” In the second riot, “the anti-Semitic note which had been present in the first was even more evident this time” (p. 90).

Gelman’s description of Forster’s recounting is simply misleading:

Initially, Forster wrote, “some believed” that the anticommunist protest was “a healthy sign of Americanism.” As the rioting went on, though, it became more focused on anti-Jewish and anti-Black messages. Forster’s concern was that such organizing led to Jewish and Black people being “lumped together with the controversial Communism issue.”

Here’s what Forster wrote:

Reaction to both riots was mixed. Some believed that the attempts to prevent the concerts were a healthy sign of Americanism; others believed the “protests” to be a menace to democracy. The Anti-Defamation League recognized in these incidents an invasion of civil liberties destructive of the democratic fabric. (p. 90)

Undoubtedly racists and antisemites believed the riots were signs of “Americanism,” but Forster makes quite clear that the the racism was evident from the beginning and the ADL condemned the riots from the beginning. Gelman’s implication that the ADL thought the riots were “healthy Americanism” and that they only shifted from that position as the rioting progressed is simply false.

The next book Gelman examines is 1952’s The Troublemakers. Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, the book’s authors, devoted an entire chapter to “Confusion from the Left” devoted to how “the Communist party works zealously among Negroes, Jews, and others in order to dramatize its alleged concern for human rights” (p. 218). For Forster and Epstein, the Communists, specifically the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) were disingenuous in their defenses of Willie McGee or the Trenton Six, criminal cases in which Black defendants were abused by a white supremacist criminal justice system.

Gelman correctly notes that “in both cases, the CRC had sought to defend against the racist contortions of justice. The ADL was outraged at the CRC’s involvement because the CRC described the prosecutions as a function of liberal capitalism, which provided no justice to Black workers” (p. 103). Gelman describes the insulting and dismissive language Forster and Epstein used to discuss the Black defendants which stripped them of any agency whatsoever. For the ADL, the defendants were “Black, poor, and gormless–and were ideological marks easily duped by communists and their offer of fundraising” (p. 104).

The heart of Gelman’s critique of the the ADL in these instances is how the communists publicized the cases: “the two cases,” Gelman writes, “had generated substantial international support for the defendants and outrage over Jim Crow laws” (p. 102). The ADL thought this publicity was evidence of the basic problem with the communist cause. In the midst of the international outrage, “millions had had all but forgotten the basic question of guilt or innocence” of Willie McGee (p. 219). The ADL’s logic was this: the communist cause was the overturning of liberal capitalism and not defending Willie McGee. Indeed, if Willie McGee were executed, that would just prove to the world that racial justice was impossible under capitalism. Therefore, the communists should not be trusted with the courtroom defense of Willie McGee, as his execution would serve their cause and his acquittal would damage it.

In the end, all that international publicity did not save Willie McGee from execution nor did it overturn liberal capitalism in the United States.

4. The ADL and the American Right

Gelman is absolutely correct that the ADL operated within the strictures of liberal capitalism. “The ADL is not an outlier in that sense: Civil rights advocacy has been the site of enormous contestation between groups who view the liberal state as a framework for justice, and others who contest it as foundationally racist” (p. 7). Left out of this formulation is the far right, which embraces an anti-democratic and overtly white supremacist social order. Gelman never really addresses, except in passing, the American far-right which the ADL saw as a real threat to American Jews and democracy. Is it really the case that there was no distinction between the ADL and those Americans we would label “conservatives” in the 1950s and early 1960s? Were they all rowing together? It does not seem so. Forster and Epstein’s 1964 book, Danger on the Right (unmentioned by Gelman) does not mention communism as a threat to the American political order. It does take on the anti-democratic and antisemitic right.

In the two decades after World War II, American anti-communists of the right despised the ADL. “The ADL, which is staffed by political Liberals, is notoriously unfriendly to anti-Communists of the tough stripe,” griped William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1962. The ADL was “arrogantly speaking as if in the name of New York Jewry in a series of filthy and defamatory lies” about “professional anti-Communists.” Buckley concluded that “it is better to be a professional anti-Communist…than a professional defamer.”⁴

If the ADL was so set against the communists, as Gelman maintains, what was Buckley’s problem with them? The answer may be in the ADL’s Primer on Communism. Gelman discusses this 1952 book briefly (p. 89) but, in my mind, misses two important distinctions it made between its anticommunism and that of the American right-wing^. First, the ADL warned of how right-wing “opportunists trade on ignorance and misinformation, trying to mislead the nation into believing that American patriotism consists solely of hatred of Communism. Fight Communism, yes; but love Democracy more. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution were too dearly won to be surrendered to the Trojan Horses of totalitarianism” (p. 3). Second, the ADL pointed to a tradition that held “the working class could achieve its rightful place by peaceful means–through elections–and construct socialism gradually and democratically. These ideas became the cornerstone of democratic socialism as distinguished from communism” (p. 12).

For the American right, such views were heretical. For them, democracy was dangerous, had it not brought the socialistic New Deal? From the direct election of Senators to the enforcement of voting rights for disenfranchised Black Americans, the right consistently opposed any expansion of democratic rule. And socialism was nothing more than a step on “the road to serfdom.” For the right, unfettered capitalism was fine and needed to be protected from democracy. Gelman seems to ignore the differences between the ADL’s anticommunism and that of the right, differences that were seen as unbridgeable in the context of the time.

Buckley enjoyed an exaggerated reputation for drumming antisemitic rhetoric out of right-wing politics. If we are searching for an anti-Zionist, bottom up social movement in the postwar US, the antisemitic right fits that bill. For the truly antisemitic right, the ADL was nothing more than proof that the Jews were behind international communism and must be destroyed (see here, here, here, or here for a taste of this literature).

5. Anti-Zionism and the American Right

To find voices opposing Zionism in the US in the immediate postwar world, we need to look to the right, not the left. The American right opposed Zionism, not because they cared about Palestinians, but because they saw anti-Zionism as a necessary part of Cold War politics. And, of course, there was still more than a whiff of antisemitism in the American right.

Alfred M. Lilienthal, for example (cited by Gelman, pp. 106. 110-1) wrote an anti-Zionist book, What Price Israel in 1953. Lilienthal was no leftist opposing Israel simply because he opposed Zionism abuse of Palestinians. Much more important for him was Palestine as key weapon in the Cold War. He described the partitioning of Palestine as part of a Soviet conspiracy:

The US government demonstrated once more a complete lack of comprehension of Communist tactics. Why was the Kremlin permitting and even encouraging, the emigration of Jewish refugees to Israel from satellite countries?…These and other implications of Soviet Pro-Zionism were stressed in reports sent home by US diplomatic representatives in the field, but their warnings remained completely ignored in Washington. (p. 71)

Lilienthal also promoted one of the most popular antisemitic smears in the 1950s. Lilienthal argued that “That the Khazars are the lineal ancestors of Eastern European Jewry is a historical fact” (p. 222). The Khazars (sometimes “Chazars) were an ethnic group of people in Eastern Russia in the early medieval period. It had long been believed that the Khazars had, at some point in their history, converted to Judaism. In the twentieth century, antisemitic writers transformed the legend of the Jewish Khazars into an anti-Zionist and antisemitic weapon. In 1951’s Iron Curtain Over America, SMU professor John O. Beaty wrapped all of this up in one hateful package: “The Marxian program of drastic controls, so repugnant to the free western mind, was no obstacle to the acceptance of Marxism by many Khazar Jews.” After World War I, the German people were faced with a choice between “Communists, many of whose leaders were of Khazar stock” and Germans chose the native party and Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor.” Roosevelt was led by the nose into World War II “for no formulated purpose beyond pleasing the dominant Eastern European element” who “regarded with complete equanimity, perhaps even with enthusiasm, the killing of as many as possible of the world-ruling and Khazar-hated race of ‘Aryans.’”

What Price Israel was published by Henry Regnery, most famous for publishing William F. Buckley, Jr’s God and Man at Yale. Lilienthal’s book was only one of the anti-Zionist books Regnery published. Some of these books, like Montgomery Belgion’s Victor’s Justice became foundational to the Holocaust denial movement.

Regnery’s output of anti-Zionist books paled in comparison to those put out by right-wing publisher, Devin-Adair, which published half a dozen books by European fascists seeking to reconstruct their movement after the war (p. 30). It also published two anti-Zionist books by Rabbi Elmer Berger (here and here). Berger was the executive director of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism (ACJ). Like the other Jewish organizations of the time, the ACJ was founded by German Jewish elites. Unlike other Jewish organizations the AJC did not come out firmly for civil rights and the end of Jim Crow in the 1950s (here).

Berger was more committed to Palestinian rights than most of the AJC and had an ongoing relationship (p. 177) with Fayez Sayegh who was the most powerful voice portraying Zionism as settler colonialism. Yet, Sayegh was no leftist. Sayegh warned, not just of the dangers of Soviet influence in Israel, but of Marxism embedded into Israeli life:

Communism is strongly entrenched not merely in the political life and institutions of Israel, but also in the economic-social structure of Israeli society. In fact, the political strength of Communism in Israel is derivative, reflecting the appeal of Communism as an ideology and a way of life to Israeli masses, and the influence of Marxist-Socialist teachings upon Israel’s patterns of socio-economic organization. (p. 7)

Conclusion

The logic of liberal capitalism does not seem to necessitate the policy outcomes Gelman wants to ascribe to it, specifically those of Zionism.The evidence for the ADL’s cooperation with the oppressive anticommunism of the government seems to be two meetings and a handful of communication between the FBI and the ADL. Gelman never provides examples of leftist anti-Zionist activities before 1967. And, Gelman seems unaware that anti-Zionism flourished in the far right of American politics who were much more committed to capitalist state-building than the ADL was which was precisely why the ADL was despised by the far right. If we want answers to why the ADL is the way it is today, the answers cannot be found before 1967.

I have not addressed Gelman’s concerns about how the ADL attacked Arab writers and activists as antisemites rather than anti-colonial activists who were trying to come to the defense of hundreds of thousands of refugee Palestinians from the Jewish state. That discussion will have to wait for another day.

Footnotes

1. David Williams, “The Jewish Thought Police,” The Village Voice, July 27, 1993: 33-9. ↩︎
2. The pedant in me wants to point out that McCarthy was a Senator and not a member of any House committee. ↩︎
3. Gelman writes “Larry Ceplair writes that the ADL made anticommunism available as a platrom for fears, and opportunistic fear-mongering on a wide range of issues.” citing Ceplair, Larry. 2011. Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History. Praeger, 100. I have not been able to find Ceplair making this claim about the ADL on that page or any place else in the book. ↩︎
4. William F. Buckley Jr, “The Mad Attempt to Get Schwarz,” National Review, July 31, 1962; William F. Buckley Jr, “‘He Shall Not Be Heard’: The Anti-Defamation League,” National Review, June 19, 1962. ↩︎

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