Abstract: 

This dissertation historicizes the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a key producer of conservative ideas about race, identity, and “protecting rights” in the United States, and its deployment of those ideas to oppose antiracist organizing in domestic and global spheres. Contemplating the ADL’s history from 1913-1990 through the lenses of transnational American Studies, cultural studies, and critical race/ethnic studies, this research situates the ADL’s production of ideas and policy frameworks, which have guided US political culture on race and rights, in terms of the agency’s larger state and global interests.

During its first eight decades, the ADL produced knowledge and advocacy that set terms for US projects broadly defined as opposing racism and protecting rights. However, the ADL was often at odds with antiracist and anticolonial movements, contesting organizing projects and the very meaning of racism and rights. To make sense of these confrontations, I connect the ADL’s civil rights work with its other less-publicized undertakings, which variously encompassed domestic support for the preservation of US power arrangements, the advancement of US/Western military and political global dominance, and a wide-ranging anti-communism. Using the ADL’s vast catalog of public materials, institutional archives, and community archives and oral histories of Black, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and queer activists, I trace the production and deployment of narratives of ideas about race and rights through their contestation. Through this study, the ADL’s production of the Western colonial state as the protector of civil rights, and its naturalization of decontextualized, dehistorized meanings of race, identity, and “protecting rights”, appear not as contradictions but as integral elements of its larger projects.

A chapter on the ADL’s first decades examines its origins in 1913 as a white/elite organization to discipline the racial and political alterity of newer Jewish immigrants, then follows the ADL’s rise from WWII through the civil rights movement as an anti-communist organization and national moral authority on anti-prejudice and democracy. A chapter on the 1960s-80s follows the ADL’s turn to neoconservatism and its racial projects, constructing a new history of ADL surveillance director Irwin Suall and the 1993 “ADL spying scandal” that situate the ADL as an early member of the neoconservative firmament. Two chapters consider the ADL’s 1980s antisemitism discourse, anti-bias education, and campaign for hate crimes laws. These chapters explore the ADL’s success, facilitated by a moral panic over white nationalist violence, in establishing a conservative national anti-hate/anti-bias framework that extended racial power imbalances, diminished anti-Black, anti-Arab, and other dispossessive racial violence, and displaced proposals to redress structural racism.

Emmaia Gelman
NYU Dept. of Social & Cultural Analysis
Sept. 2021