June 16, 2026
in conversation with Laura Whitehorn
Register here.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From “correcting” the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.

​This history presaged the ADL’s work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the “War on Terror,” the “antisemitism scare,” and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL’s history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL’s outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.

ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER

Laura Whitehorn spent fourteen years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy case,” which included attacks on U.S. government targets, law enforcement organizations, and institutions of South African and Israeli apartheid. Released in 1999, she helped co-found Release Aging People in Prison/RAPP (RAPPCampaign.com); she was part of a prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016.