In this episode we are joined by Emmaia Gelman, author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the ADL as a Cold War neoconservative institution. Gelman excavates the Anti-Defamation League's origins as a white, settler colonial institution founded by German-Jewish elites—not to combat antisemitism broadly, but to manage class respectability and suppress Eastern European Jewish immigrant socialists whom they viewed as a racial and social threat.
Gelman looks back at how early Jewish settlers had built fortunes through participation in 19th-century US territorial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and slavery's economic system, understanding themselves as white Europeans racially distinct from the "vermin" arriving from the Pale of Settlement. The ADL and its predecessor, the American Jewish Committee (founded 1906), operated as Progressive Era eugenicist charities designed to "correct and fix" rather than support self-determination, preemptively capturing Jewish political identity to prevent autonomous radical organizing.
Gelman traces how the ADL evolved from an instrument of McCarthyite purges—coordinating mass firings of Jewish leftists in 1951, offering its services to McCarthy committee members, and abandoning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to execution while denying antisemitism played any role in their prosecution (the judge who sentenced them sat on the ADL's Civil Rights Committee)—into a key architect of Cold War anti-communism and neoconservative "democracy promotion." The organization attacked Arab League representatives speaking about Zionist violence in Palestine as early as 1946, treating Palestinian and Arab organizing as "foreign insurgency" while framing Jewish fundraising for Israeli settlement as natural civic participation. After Israel's 1967 military victory, the ADL strategically re-racialized Jews as non-white within the framework of race liberalism, allowing it to cast Israeli militarism as defensive racial liberation and Arab calls for refugee return as antisemitic rather than anti-colonial. This racial pivot occurred precisely as European Jews had achieved economic whiteness through the GI Bill, suburbanization, and the collapse of university quotas—benefits systematically denied to Black populations through redlining.
Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism. Emmaia is co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City.
She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as levers in surveillance, "anti-terror", and war. Her teaching spans academic and community spaces.
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This conversation was hosted by Josh Briond, and edited and produced by Josh and Jared. The introduction is provided by Aminta Zea (website/IG) and as always the music is provided by Televangel.