Examining the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit

JVL Introduction

Is the United States experiencing a tsunami of antisemitic incidents?

You would think so if you believe the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the self-appointed watchdog of “the American Jewish community” whose recent audit claimed a 140% increase in antisemitic incidents in 2023 over the previous year.

Just after it released the audit it joined calls for the police to shut down campus Gaza solidarity encampments as hotbeds of “antisemitic vitriol”.

But can they be trusted? The short answer is no.

The authors of this article revisited the ADL’s data line-by-line using the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism as a touchstone rather than the IHRA one to avoid the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel with which the ADL analysis is riddled (it uses the IHRA definition).

It result in a radical reclassification of the ADL’s 8,873 antisemitic incidents with a little over half—4,948—emerging as straightforwardly antisemitic.

Some others might also have been, but the data to assess them accurately is lacking. In some instances the ADL misapplied its own standards.

On top of this the ADL’s audit excludes white nationalist incidents that don’t explicitly name Jews, all of which, the authors believe, should probably be classified as antisemitic. Were these included it would almost double the total number of antisemitic incidents to 15,564.

The ADL generally fails to assess incidents according to reach, impact, and structural or political factors. So it fails to differentiate random, uncoordinated incidents from those tied to a public movement to spread antisemitism.

“Since we found that most alleged antisemitic incidents in the Palestine solidarity movement lacked merit, the legitimately antisemitic Palestine-related incidents would appear as mere statistical noise when compared with the stunning growth of organized white nationalism.”

RK

PS. Surveys of antisemtism in Britain are similarly slanted – see assessments of the recent CST figures here and here.

This article was originally published by Jewish Currents on Mon 17 Jun 2024. Read the original here.