Transcript

Aparna Gopalan: Welcome to on the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. My name is Aparna Gopalan and I’m going to be your host today. Today’s episode is about the ADL, or the Anti-Defamation League, a topic that Jewish Currents has covered many times. But this time we will be focusing on the group’s impact specifically beyond the Jewish community. Notably, in the past decades, there has been a proliferation of ADL-lookalike groups as other communities seek to model the ADL’s political success. One such lookalike is called HAF, or the Hindu American Foundation, which was founded in the early 2000s with the aim of addressing discrimination against Hindu Americans, but which, like the ADL, also has a second ethnonationalist agenda, which is to silence critics of Hindu supremacy in the US.

AG: There has been a lot of recent reporting, including in Jewish Currents, about how the HAF uses its status as the voice of an ethnic minority to conceal its embeddedness in Hindu nationalism. In the past two weeks, there has been a new report by the anti-Hindutva group Savera, which is called “HAFway to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry as Minority Rights,” which once again really meticulously shows how the group has managed to replicate the ADL model of combining a liberal appearance with highly conservative politics.

AG: The second lookalike we’ll be discussing today is called TAAF, or The Asian American Foundation. This group was formed in 2021 in response to assaults on Asian Americans in the wake of COVID; like the HAF, TAAF formed in explicit conversation with the ADL, and as such, imbibed the ADL’s hate crimes approach, which positions racism against Asian Americans as a unique ethnic issue which is in need of carceral solutions, rather than a form of racism that’s continuous with other forms of discrimination across the US and requires solidaristic organizing. A new report in the New Yorker titled the “ADL of Asian America” surfaces some of these tensions within the TAAF, especially as they have escalated since October 7th. This episode delves into these new reports about these ADL lookalike groups, and talks about how, in a moment when the ADL itself is coming under fire for its support of the genocide in Gaza, how the politics of these different groups that are modeled on the ADL are evolving and responding to this moment.

AG: I’m so excited to welcome our guests for this episode. First we have E. Tammy Kim, who is a contributing writer at the New Yorker, a contributing editor at Lux, and a Puffin Fellow at the Type Media Center. Welcome, Tammy.

ETK: Thanks so much, Aparna. Happy to be here.

AG: We also have Prachi Patankar, who is an anti-caste feminist writer and organizer and a member of the Savera Coalition. Her work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Jadaliyya, Jacobin, and several other publications. Thank you for joining us, Prachi.

Prachi Patankar: Thank you so much for having me.

AG: And finally there’s my colleague Mari Cohen, who is an associate editor at Jewish Currents and has extensively covered the ADL and Jewish institutions. Hi Mari.

Mari Cohen: Hi. Glad to be back.

AG: Well, let’s start our discussion actually with the ADL, which is, in many ways, at the heart of the model we’re discussing today. Mari, you’ve covered the ADL for Jewish Currents for many years, and many of our listeners will be familiar with your reporting on the organization’s antisemitism statistics, the internal fissures around Israel, and its role in the Jewish community. But for those who are unfamiliar, I wonder if you could say a little bit about the ADL’s dual model, under which it operates both as a civil rights group on the one hand, and as an Israel advocacy group on the other, and if you could say a little bit about how those two functions have coexisted over the years.

MC: Yeah, absolutely. There was some really great in-depth reporting that our colleague Alex Kane did along with his co-writer Jacob Hutt on this in 2021. So we will put that in the show notes because it’s a very useful primer. But I’ll give a little bit of an overview of how this operates. And honestly, what’s quite helpful is a lot of this is actually laid out on the ADL’s website itself, just if you go to the section about their mission and history, you can see how they narrate the history of their activities.

MC: And so the ADL’s official mission is to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all. Specifically, this “stop the defamation of the Jewish people” part of it, this has obviously included a lot of standard anti-antisemitism work—so, things like trying to counter various types of discrimination against Jewish people at times when it was prominent in the US, or violence against Jews—and then also just like trying to counter broader cultural portrayals that they thought were negative about Jews. But then, especially since the Six Day War in 1967 (which is a high watermark for American-Jewish identification with Israel, and really, the mainstreaming of American Zionism among Jews), the ADL has really seen defending Israel as part of this mission of stopping the defamation of the Jewish people.

MC: So in general, based on how they act, it’s clear that they believe that, quote, unquote, “defaming” or critiquing or challenging Israel in any serious way is akin to defaming Jews. For example, they say, “The agency exposes and takes the lead in combating the Arab boycott of companies that do business with Israel. Using all media at its disposal, ADL exposes Palestinian Liberation Organization and Arab links to terrorism.” So they’re basically doing a lot of this legal and rhetorical work to try to link Arab and pro-Palestine groups in the United States to terrorism. This was especially exemplified in a book, I believe, in the ’70s, that the president of the ADL at the time put out called The New Antisemitism, in which they basically argued that there was this new form of antisemitism that was mostly coming from not traditional white Christian antisemites or white supremacists, but really from Black and brown people advocating for Palestine. So, it focused a lot on Arab communities in the United States, and Palestine advocates, and also on the Black community as a new source of antisemitism. And this is a thesis that’s become very popular, especially in the right wing of the Jewish community. But that was originally very much part of the ADL’s conception of things.

MC: So they’ve been doing this for a very long time. But what’s interesting is that’s also always been paired with this civil rights model that speaks to the other part of the mission, which is securing justice and fair treatment for all. And so the ADL has always been really strongly advocating for abortion rights, which they see as part of a religious freedom issue for Jews, and also just like a general broader civil rights issue. They were pretty involved in getting the United States government to apologize to Japanese Americans for internment during World War II. In recent years, they’ve been very heavily pro-affirmative action, pro-gay marriage, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, generally pro-immigration and trying to fight against anti-immigrant rhetoric. So, they’ve paired it with this broader civil rights mission. They also have this very big operation investigating neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremist groups. And they’re probably like—outside of the Southern Poverty Law Center, they’re the main organization that does that research in the United States.

MC: But as you can see in the report that Alex and Jacob did in 2021, these two parts of the mission often really come into conflict with each other because they are expressing an intent to be involved in this liberal civil rights mission, but then, in pursuing the Israel advocacy stuff, they’re actually supporting a lot of suppression, a lot of criminalization. That really counters this idea that they’re going to be able to easily partner with and support other minority groups in the United States and that they’re going to be able to support racialized people. There was a big scandal. They were found to have basically been involved in surveilling various Arab American and other activists (including anti-apartheid activists) in the ’80s, as well as Jewish anti-Zionist activists, Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Middle East Research and Information Project—there was like a huge settlement. In more recent years, they’ve endorsed legislation prohibiting boycotts of Israel, which has really caused a lot of tension with people in their civil rights office, because there always have been people who come to the ADL to work in this more civil rights-oriented area and then find themselves uncomfortable or frustrated with these parts of the mission that go along with Israel advocacy and that are really about trying to suppress and criminalize dissent and contribute to racism, especially against Arab Americans.

MC: And I think an important note on that, too, is that even with the civil rights work, the ADL’s approach has always been a mainstream liberal, not a particularly radical approach. Not particularly focused on structural discrimination, and instead being a lot more of a liberal interpersonal analysis. One of their huge projects was basically pioneering increased hate crimes legislation in the United States. So they created a model for that, I think, in the ’70s and ’80s, and basically were very influential in getting hate crime statutes implemented around the country, which is something that’s come under criticism from a lot of criminal legal system reform advocates, in terms of the way that it actually can increase criminalization and be a more carceral approach. And then also, their model has always heavily relied on collaboration with law enforcement; beyond collaborating in order to criminalize pro-Palestine activists, it’s also just about sharing their information on hate groups with law enforcement and promoting this model that’s like anti-hate but pro-police, pro-carceral system in order to combat hate.

AG: Thank you so much. That is so comprehensive and helpful and brings me to Tammy’s new report in the New Yorker, in which basically, we see yet another group come up that is using this model of like trying to combat racism, trying to actually be a progressive group in a civil rights group—in this case, for Asian Americans—but really drawing inspiration from the ADL and, in the process, inheriting some of the limitations of the ADL’s frame. So, Tammy, I’m wondering if you can say a little bit about The Asian American Foundation (or TAAF, as they call themselves), their hate crimes model, addressing anti-Asian bias and discrimination, and just their relationship with the ADL and how that has shaped what they are.

ETK: Sure. So what got me interested in The Asian American Foundation, which was founded in 2021, was its very intimate connections to the Anti-Defamation League and its role in trying to consolidate some of the both feelings and material needs of Asian Americans—and particularly their focus really has been around East Asian Americans— coming out of the pandemic period, or in the height of the pandemic period, where there was an uptick in what were perceived to be hate crimes—street crimes, elderly people being assaulted, women being pushed into oncoming trains, just horrific things—that were related to the coming of COVID: Trump talking about “China virus,” “Kung Flu,” all these sorts of things.

ETK: And so a lot of Asian Americans who hadn’t previously engaged with or identified with Asian American politics (which is a primarily progressive politics that was coming out of Third Worldism in the late 1960s) were suddenly wanting to be in the game of what it meant to be Asian American, to support Asian American causes. And so The Asian American Foundation was formed by like the most famous, the richest Asian Americans in the United States. So we’re talking about Joseph Bay, Joe Tsai, Li Liu, Jerry Yang—just huge figures. And what was curious about the formation of this foundation is that Jonathan Greenblatt, who is the head of the ADL, was one of the founders and the only non-Asian board member. So structurally, that’s interesting: Why? What was going on here? And there are different narratives about the origins of The Asian American Foundation, but one of them is that Jonathan Greenblatt, in the process of tracking hate crimes, was seeing that there was an uptick in the assaults and language against Asian Americans and reached out to his friends in Asian America—who happened to be these extremely high profile and wealthy men—and together decided: Well, we need to have something that’s like this in Asian America. We don’t have a NAACP, we don’t have a Jonathan Greenblatt and Al Sharpton speaking for us whenever there’s a thing that happens. And we need a hero in the media with the concept.

ETK: And then, I think, the hate crimes tracking piece of it was also extremely enticing. One of the early grantees of the Asian American Foundation was a group called Stop AAPI Hate. So, Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate, which was tracking hate crimes, but in a way that, methodologically, raised some concerns. A lot of it was based on self-reporting. There was a little bit of a tendency in the media coverage of these incidents to glom together extreme violence with comments like, “Go back to China,” or some stray ethnic comments like that. So, what I was interested in is: What does it mean that Asian America, at this moment of political inflection, is drawing its inspiration in both political organizing and documentation of legal and social events, from the Anti-Defamation League? And I think the question for Asian America right now is: As we are developing into a more political, and social, and demographic constituency, what is the political direction we’re going to take? And what is the dominant narrative going to be about who Asian Americans are and who they stand with?

AG: Thank you. That’s really helpful and I think actually echoes a lot of what Mara is saying. But it also really reminds me of another community (one that, actually, I’m part of) that is at a crossroads like that, which is Desi Americans or South Asian Americans who are really faced with a similar moment, in terms of either identifying with groups in power and really accessing this hate crimes cachet in the ADL model, or creating interracial, interreligious solidarities which are from below. So I want to turn to Prachi next and ask a little bit about another organization (which is actually older than TAAF), which has also been modeling the ADL and has been doing very similar work to some of what TAAF does, basically, which is really hate crimes-focused work, specifically focused on Hindu Americans, not on South Asian Americans. This group is called the Hindu American Foundation, or HAF. In addition to using this hate crimes model and basically reenvisioning what safety looks like, what HAF does is also drawing on the other prong of the ADL model that Mari talked about, which is really just laundering ethnonationalism abroad into acceptable liberal politics here in the US. In the case of HAF, it’s really Hindu nationalism in India that is the home project for them, and home base. And they are basically bringing that politics and conflating it completely with Hindu safety in the US, so really taking a page out of the playbook of the ADL and other American Zionist groups. So, Prachi, I want to talk a little bit about the new report that just came out from the Savera Coalition, which is linked in the show notes. What does the report show us about what the HAF is doing that echoes some of what we’ve heard? And what is it trying to achieve through this modeling?

PP: Yeah, certainly. First, before we talk about what HAF is, I think we do need to talk about what Hindu supremacy or Hindutva actually is: It is a political movement which is really aimed at preserving the superiority of Hindus and namely, the dominant caste Hindus. What it does is seek to condense various faith traditions in India into this rigid and exclusionary interpretation of what Hindu practices are, and it negates internal diversity. And then it pushes this narrative of Hindu victimhood, which casts Muslims and Christians as outsiders. At the same time, it seeks to appropriate other traditions—so Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism—into its own form, as long as they’re not going against that. So if Sikhism is going against that appropriation, then they will be aggressive toward Sikhism also.

PP: So it resorts to aggression against religions that contest its supremacy, contest its assimilation, which is exemplified by what is happening to Sikh communities, including the transnational repression that we’re seeing in the United States today. But really, for almost five decades now in the US, these Hindu supremacist networks have existed, and they function through a series of front organizations which are numbering actually in the thousands. And our other Savera reports show that their interfaith organizations are existing to demonize other faiths. Their civil rights organizations oppose civil rights legislation. Their educational charities are being used to spread hatred among children in India and actually grooming them for future participation in paramilitary organizations. Talking specifically about HAF, what Savera’s report is showing, and a lot of what we’ve talked about, is that HAF is an organization that is actually masquerading as a civil rights group with deep financial, organizational, and interpersonal ties with the Hindu supremacist actors.

PP: HAF itself was founded in 2003, and from the very beginning, it had this language of advocacy, of civil rights. HAF says that: We want to become the go-to group for Hindus in America. So they really stayed away from this supremacist narrative in order to create space in the liberal and democratic field, which greatly values multiculturalism, which greatly values representation. And it tapped also into this desire among the second generation of Hindu Americans. So a lot of HAF’s constituency is actually second generation who want to connect to their culture. They want to have a sense of pride in their culture. So, early on they had this campaign called Take Back Yoga in 2010. Second-generation Hindu Americans were already feeling like: Oh, our culture is being appropriated. We face these microaggressions, and all these white people are doing yoga and saying “namaste.” And like, how could they, right? And so HAF is tapping into that. And soon after that, in 2014, Narendra Modi announced the creation of the International Yoga Day. So these things are very connected.

PP: HAF has really cleverly used this deceptive appeal to, I would say, white liberal guilt, through these campaigns like Take Back Yoga, to build influence, to build multicultural legitimacy, which has been useful for their real agenda, which is supporting Islamophobic and casteist Hindu right-wing narratives. And so the Savera Report is exactly showing that that is actually a second-generation Hindu American project, which is founded by Hindutva activists who cut their teeth in Hindu supremacist organizations and their ideologies. They have direct connections to these groups. And the goal of HAF is just to craft a friendly liberal space for Hindutva to carve out legitimacy and push this narrative of Hindu victimhood.

AG: Thank you so much. Tammy, in your piece, somebody basically says the Asian American groups are looking at Jewish groups and saying: This is the gold standard. Like, this is what we want to do. This is how you take an ethnic community and you really give it real power. And I think that we’ve seen people in the Hindu American community say just the exact same thing about this being the goal—literally these words. I’m curious if all of you could really reflect on the extent to which this effort to model themselves on the ADL has yielded results. What are the most notable wins that we’ve seen these groups secure over the past few years, and what have been the most successful strategies? I mean, some of this might have to do with the metrics. In the Hindu American community, for example, really normalizing the idea of Hinduphobia, which, actually didn’t exist 10 years ago or like 20 years ago, certainly not, and has now just come into existence truly out of nowhere and become a barometer that can be inserted into all kinds of institutions. And this is something I reported on educational institutions. There can be bills passed around it. So I’m curious about other kinds of indexes of success that come from this modeling.

ETK: So because The Asian American foundation only started in 2021, it’s a little bit of TBD on this question of impact, but one of its earliest decisions was to place an anti-hate analyst inside of the ADL’s Center on Extremism to absorb the ADL’s methodology for tracking hate, and to then apply that to the Asian American community. And so I think that one of the priorities of the organization, in addition to its grant-making, is to develop its own centralized expertise around hate as a constitutive political category. And that is like obviously a direct importation from the ADL model. There was, during the pandemic, federal legislation to drive more funding to law enforcement, from local to federal, to look at anti-Asian hate crimes and hate incidents and organizing in particular. So that also, again, the law enforcement partnerships, the focus on that—and that’s not brand new in Asian America. They had partnered with Jewish and queer groups in the past as well. But this is certainly something that’s not disappearing from the terrain of action of The Asian American Foundation.

ETK: And I would say, in addition to that, a thing that they now seem to be more interested in—and this is taking off from a couple of other related groups. One that you guys might have heard of is Gold House, which is doing a lot of, like, Asians in Hollywood parties and film stuff. The Asian American Foundation now is very interested in cultural interventions. So that’s both, like, educational funding, but like a Sundance film fellowship, and cozying up to celebrities, and trying to make sure that Asian American narratives are properly in media and cultural spaces. So the ADL is certainly not the only one doing that. But I think they’re taking these different pillars of action that the Jewish community has pursued in becoming politically powerful, from the Asian American point of view, and trying to emulate that.

AG: I mean, some of that might sound really innocent. And I’m just curious: Is there a capital-p Political Agenda, or exclusions? Because with the ADL, right, anti-defamation is never just anti-defamation. It’s always something else. And that’s true for the HAF too. And I’m curious if there’s a way in which that’s true, or is this a difference?

ETK: No, I think you’re totally right, and I don’t mean to make it sound all sinister. I mean, I actually think a lot of it is innocent, or naïve, or well-intentioned. Because it is true that there’s very little money in philanthropy for, broadly, Asian American causes. There isn’t that much visibility, or hasn’t been (perhaps until now), visibility of Asian American stories. So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But yes: What is the political direction of that? I think one indicator of the way that The Asian American Foundation is going is that, in its name—first of all, there’s a “the,” so it’s asserting itself as a singular voice and representing this community. And then “foundation,” which implies that they’re primarily a grant-making organization that’s supporting existing work. Well, they’ve slowly started moving away from the grant-making part of that, and why that’s significant is that most organizations to date (like pre-pandemic) that were doing organizing in Asian American communities are progressive, or liberal at least. And if you start moving away from funding those and you’re developing just like your own in-house politics, there are some question marks around that—because you’re led by billionaires—you know, like the foundational ethics of this organization. So I think that’s the thing that people concerned about what these otherwise innocuous projects mean would want to be looking at.

PP: Yeah, I mean I think, for HAF, it’s two parts. I think foreign policy as an example, and the domestic sphere is one example. I think if you look at foreign policy, say, the more overt Hindu supremacist groups like VHPA, their capacity is significantly limited to fight on behalf of the Modi government, in some ways, because they can’t avoid speaking the language of supremacy. When Modi government’s human rights violations are challenged, for example, groups of VHPA, they will have much less power within Democrats to do that, and mobilize domestic constituencies in a way that HAF can. Because Democrat won’t touch VHPA-types of groups, because they’re overtly Hindu supremacist. But Democrats might be okay with it, as long as HAF-type groups come in, and it’s is hidden, and it’s not overtly there. So its ability to fight on behalf of the government is much more, in that sense.

PP: In the domestic sphere, if we know and understand that Hindu supremacy, at its very core, is a caste-supremacist project—that’s what it’s about—and so if you look in the domestic sphere, what you see is that their first front of attack always is around attacking the people who are—or organizations and movements—that are fighting for protection against caste discrimination. Right from the beginning, we’ve seen this. So in pursuit of this Hindu victimhood, HAF narrative looks at any assertion by Dalit groups, Sikh groups—and, of course, Muslims—as fundamentally detrimental to the rights of Hindus. So that’s the constant theme here. And it’s a zero-sum logic, right? So the civil rights and religious freedoms of Hindus are framed and always in opposition to other communities.

PP: And so in SB403, which is the bill to prohibit caste discrimination, the bill had massive support. It went through both houses. But HAF was able to mobilize and able to stall the bill and get the bill vetoed for several reasons. One, they had power and money, and they were able to support Democrats in that sense, and use that to stall the bill at the end, and get it vetoed. But in the process, they claim that the bill actually violated civil rights of Hindus, and therefore it needs to be stopped. And they specifically use this language: “We’re a multi-diverse group of people. Nothing wrong with that. There’s no oppression. It’s just we’re divided into these beautiful categories.” But you’ve seen this from the very beginning. Like I said, HAF’s first major actions: They opposed education on caste in California textbooks. This is a while ago, in 2005, playing into this politics of victimhood, again. And then in 2022, they pursued legal action—HAF pursued legal action against the California Civil Rights Department, contending that the discrimination case concerning Dalit workers (who had filed a suit because they were facing discrimination from dominant caste Hindus in the company called Cisco), and so HAF actually sued the California Civil rights department in 2022. And then most recently, if you look at California, what’s happening—HAF has been talking to law enforcement locally and saying that Sikh communities should be monitored in case they have ties to Khalistani terrorists. And HAF’s outreach director actually is quoted saying that these communities could be tied to organized crimes and drug trafficking. And so this is not dissimilar to the efforts post-9/11, where there were law enforcement saying these Muslim communities need to be monitored at this time, and all Muslim communities need to be monitored. It’s manufacturing this narrative that demonizes Muslims. So they’re trying to manufacture a narrative that demonizes Sikh communities, too.

AG: Yeah, it really echoes there, of both post-9/11 moments and the moment right now, when we’re back in a War on Terror in a very explicit way, which really is beginning with and drawing on antisemitism accusations at its very base. But then, of course, can be transformed into accusations of any other terrorism that suits the US State and its interests.

AG: I want to talk a little bit about this specific moment. So we’ve talked a lot about different forms of legitimacy that these groups construct as being the sole spokespeople of the groups they’re saying they represent, and how a lot of the legitimacy, in the case of TAAF and the Hindu American Foundation are really modeling the ADL. But this is obviously also a moment when the ADL itself might be having the biggest threat to its legitimacy, perhaps since its founding, because of its positioning in the post-October 7th context and its really vocal criticism of anti-genocide protesters on campus and just in general. And specifically, Jonathan Greenblatt and his work in really exposing the ADL’s politics—which really were not that unclear, as Mari, you pointed out, like it was on the website. But at this moment, it really seems like this is something that has broken through the mainstream in a different way. And I’m curious, Mari, if you want to talk a little bit about whether the ADL really is facing an unprecedented threat to legitimacy, and what the impact of that might be. And then I would love to hear from Prachi and Tammy : What that might mean for these other groups, which really have been very proud of their ties to the ADL and, basically, propped themselves up with these kinds of linkages but now maybe find themselves on a shakier ground.

MC: Yeah, I think in terms of this crisis of ADL legitimacy, the story even starts a little bit before October 7, 2023. Beginning in 2022, the ADL really publicly announced its intention to begin targeting anti-Zionists as antisemites, and basically, Students for Justice in Palestine, Council on American Islamic Relations, and Jewish Voice for Peace were all basically going to be identified as hate or extremist groups by the ADL starting in 2022. And so this is like a big moment where they were being very quiet part out loud In many ways, they had been tacitly approaching these groups that way for a while, but there was a little bit more equivocation on whether anti-Zionism was equivalent to antisemitism in their view.

MC: And then, in this May 2022 speech, Greenblatt says it out loud. It gets a lot of coverage. We published some internal discussion at the ADL. There was clearly a lot of concern by staff about whether this was the ADL’s position, and whether people who didn’t agree with it could still work there. There were starting to be more rumblings of this dissent, just in a more public way, that I think (in liberal America) had just been ignored for a long time. Even though obviously, a lot of leftist groups had been pretty critical of the ADL for a long time, it just was not a particularly mainstream concern. And then you have this speech in 2022, and that starts to change a little bit. I mean, you saw—there was a big piece, for example, in The New Republic by the reporter Eric Alterman that drew on a lot of the reporting that we’d been doing in Jewish Currents, about the ways in which the ADL statistics are not particularly methodologically sound. So it’s all building up.

MC: But I do think that, since October 7th, there’s been the biggest challenge to the ADL’s legitimacy. I mean, partly because right away you basically saw Jonathan Greenblatt accusing Jewish anti-genocide protesters at the US Capitol of being hateful, and being extremists, and all of that. You have the ADL joining the right-wing Brandeis Center and basically urging universities to investigate SJP chapters for terrorism. And then this past winter, one interesting thing is that Greenblatt’s ADL invited Jared Kushner to be a keynote speaker at its gala. And that’s like one of those things where, if there were anti-Trump liberals who were on board and were fine with everything at the ADL before—now they’re mad too. And basically, it’s a good example of Greenblatt putting this pro-Israel policy agenda ahead of any of the domestic, civil rights, liberal concerns that the ADL had supposedly been invested in.

MC: So that was a big fault line, where there was a lot of dissent among liberal Jewish groups. And then most recently, I think maybe in some ways the biggest indication of this, is that Wikipedia officially downgraded the ADL. They basically said the ADL is not a reliable source on Israel. And then there was a forthcoming discussion on whether the ADL is a reliable source on antisemitism. And I don’t actually know if they’ve made a decision on that yet, but that was a huge deal. Because in our times, I think Wikipedia is a pretty big reflection of where public sentiment is on certain sources. And they have this very rigorous team of editors that debate these things. The ADL fought back and tried to get the Wikipedia board to intervene, and the Wikipedia board was like: Absolutely not, we don’t intervene in our editor’s decisions. And so I do think that reflects a changing popular sentiment and an understanding of the ADL as really existing to promote pro-Israel politics above everything else.

MC: That said, I still have some pessimism about what that actually means in terms of the ADL’s legitimacy being challenged, both in mainstream media and also just in terms of political advocacy. I think that those things lag behind these other types of popular sentiment. So I can totally see the ADL being continued to be cited as a reliable source in stories about antisemitism in The New York Times and CNN and various mainstream outlets. And also just like, thinking about how these things work in Congress. I mean, these establishment Jewish organizations, including the ADL, really have a lock on a lot of those congressional relationships. So I think that public officials are just going to continue to feel like they would face consequences for reputing the ADL, and that, in order to be seen as not antisemitic, that they have to work with ADL and respond to the ADL’s lobbying. So I think that there’s a pretty big lag time when it comes to actually losing real political power. But I do think we are much more in that direction than we have been at any other time in recent decades.

AG: It seems like the ADL being 100 years old and actually having a civil rights legacy, versus HAF starting and just doing like, the yoga thing—there really has never been a golden era that people can point to and say: Oh, that was the old HAF and they were doing amazing things and now we have been corrupted, or something. So in some ways, it seems like it would actually be an easier thing for these groups to really be challenged. And yet, in some ways, perhaps harder. Because the weaponization of anti-Asian hate, or something, isn’t a thing in the same way that the weaponization of antisemitism is an established practice, and that can be pointed to, and that can be connected to Israel—that there’s less clarity around these other groups in the mainstream American public. So I’m curious how you both, Tammy and Prachi, are assessing the legitimacy crisis, either spilling over from the ADL, or whether these groups are resistant to it.

PP: Yeah, I mean, it is the time, I think, to challenge, because this narrative of Hinduphobia is not strong enough. It hasn’t gained traction in a policy sense. It hasn’t gained traction in the public opinion sense. Hindu communities are coming in and claiming that: Actually, no. What they’re saying in terms of Hinduphobia, it is an invented category. It is invented to appropriate racism, and real xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment felt by Indian Americans and other South Asian Americans. Hinduphobia is used to say: That is what Hinduphobia is. But in fact, while there are instances of anti-Hindu bigotry, it’s not a structural issue like Islamophobia is, or antisemitism is, or anti-Blackness is. And that’s what we need to be challenging, because at its core, it is used to challenge other communities. And so, I think it is the time to challenge it.

PP: And the other factor I think, even the Hindu supremacist groups are worried about is, thanks to Black Lives Matter movement and other movements that have been going on, young South Asian Americans and young Hindu Americans have been inspired by that. And they’re also making these connections back to India saying: Oh, caste is similar to race, so, therefore, we need to interrogate casteism within our own communities. And so they’re being politicized in different ways, right? So they’re seeing the contradictions in their own families. They’re saying: Oh, I see my parents being these Modi Democrats, supporting the Democratic Party in the US and supporting Modi—this is not congruous, this is not a right thing. And so this is what we need to do is to come together. If the Steve Bannons of the world are saying we need to include a multiracial community into the white supremacist or white nationalist movement (he says “inclusive nationalism”), then the antidote to that is actually multiracial communities coming together and challenging that. And that’s why I think South Asian communities coming together, Asian communities coming together, and other communities coming together is very important to challenge this other formulation of what we’re seeing, the multiracial far right coming together.

ETK: So my story begins in May 2024, where TAAF is holding a big gala. Michelle Yeoh is there, Steven Yeun is there. Very fancy. They have a panel on fighting hate, and they bring an ADL employee named Remaya Campbell, who’s African American and who is a high-up in the Center on Extremism, which is tracking hate. She comes out in a keffiyeh, which is very interesting because she’s representing the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt is sitting a few feet away from her in the audience. This is very shocking to the audience. Everyone’s confused about what’s going on. But what it seems like she was trying to do, according to sources, is say there are still people in the ADL who are concerned with Palestinian rights, who have a different view of what civil rights is than what Greenblatt is projecting to the world. Within a few weeks, she’s gone from the ADL.

ETK: At that same gala, there’s a meeting of grantees of The Asian American Foundation, and one of them is a New York-based group called DRUM: Desis Rising Up and Moving, which is a longtime group in Queens that primarily organizes working-class South Asians, many of them Muslim. So that is part of Asian America. And the director of DRUM, Fahd Ahmed, goes to this meeting with TAAF and says: Your partnership with ADL, on the one hand, is helping to create an environment where pro-Palestinian activists are being demonized and arrested, and then you are funding us to help bail those people out of jail. So there was a direct link, a direct contradiction that was being processed within the confines of this TAAF gala and summit. And I think that is such an intense distillation of larger trends in Asian America and this larger provocation of the genocide, which is—in a bunch of different Asian American organizations, there have been fractures over what Asian America’s relationship is supposed to be to the Palestinian question.

ETK: And so groups like Kundiman, which is a poetry/literary organization, the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, the Noguchi Museum in Queens, I could go on—they’ve all had fractures because some of the younger employees, in particular, are saying: We consider Palestine essentially part of Asia—if not geographically, in our social and political imaginations of what Asian America is. You can’t divorce what we’re trying to do domestically to what’s happening abroad. And of course, the employers are saying foreign policy has nothing to do with us, Palestine is not Asian. What is this? Right. And so I talked about the inflection point of the pandemic. Well, this is a year where this horrible cruelty happening abroad is bringing this focused question before Asian Americans, about: What are we going to do, and what is our relationship to that? And it’s interesting in that you would think that the foreign policy question that’s most germane to especially East Asian Americans would be China, or the China/Taiwan conflict. But no. It’s Palestine, and it’s telling us it’s Palestine. And so there is a crisis happening in lots of different organizations.

AG: Often we think about like: Oh, we share an adversary, it’s a multiracial right, and to combat that, we need to make a multitude left. But I feel like some of the ways that the multiracial left has already been made is through Palestine, like you’re saying. And that is becoming the issue that is fracturing all of these groups that don’t have to do with Palestine, and in the process, really materially creating a crisis for all of these different far rights at the same time. And I think there’s something really promising, or really rich there.

MC: I think something that’s interesting in this discussion is the question of how to create alternatives. I do think what we’ve seen in the past few years is that there are people who are really looking for some sort of analysis of antisemitism and some sort of understanding of certain experiences of antisemitism that doesn’t plug into this ADL model. And I do think we have seen some of these groups, at least in the Jewish community, be able to permeate the ADL’s hegemonic grasp on political power in certain settings. I’m thinking about in 2023, the White House put together this domestic plan on antisemitism. And it was like this big strategy paper on all these things they were going to direct different federal agencies to do. And there was a lot of interesting drama because the White House invited certain more left-aligned groups like Bend the ARC and then also Diaspora Alliance to give feedback, and talk about their theories of antisemitism, and basically try to push back against these more right-wing, both carceral and then also anti-anti-Zionist versions of antisemitism that the ADL and other mainstream groups are trying to push. And the result, definitely, was not a particularly progressive approach by any means, but it also, I think, avoided some of the most right-wing interpretations that these mainstream groups had hoped the White House would put in there.

MC: Which is obviously, like, a small victory. But I do think the fact that they’re now at a point where they recognize that they actually can’t just invite one big Jewish group into the room to represent everyone is, in some ways, an evolution from where we might have been even a decade ago. And I do have a sense that, because of the increased fractures over the past year, I wouldn’t be surprised if some more official left/progressive alternative to the ADL starts emerging. So I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen there. And I’m really interested in this question of creating alternatives, and to what extent that ends up being a useful way to force public attention to a different interpretation, or disrupt this idea that they have a monopoly on antisemitism conversations.

AG: Yeah. And it feels, actually, to some extent, the Savera Coalition is one of those alternative formations, for example. And some of the groups that—Tammy, you were talking about as being the grantees and the groups that are actually fighting from inside TAAF are all seeds of a different approach to racism. A more structural approach to it, which includes questions of Hindu nationalism, questions of Palestine, bigger questions of abolition, and don’t just revert to the same defensive, neoliberal, carceral model. So, yeah, thank you all so much for doing really important reporting on decentering the hegemony of these groups, and also for joining us in this conversation. It was great to have you.