In December 2023, during a monthly call with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) education team, Clara Hess, the vice president of education for the nonprofit, announced a major change: The organization would be phasing out its flagship anti-bias education program, A World of Difference (AWOD). In a document shared with education staff and obtained by Jewish Currents, the ADL said AWOD-focused staff would now be working on other programs, most of which were about antisemitism education. “They told us that it took too much time to coordinate, and it wasn’t an efficient enough program,” said Danielle Bryant, the former education director for the ADL’s Austin, Texas, chapter, who resigned from the organization in protest last year after it gave an award to Jared Kushner. An ADL spokesperson blamed the decision to shutter AWOD on the “resource-intensive nature” of the program, which they said made it difficult to “scale nationally.” The organization said it is “focusing our efforts on more scalable models of education that can reach a broader audience.”
Founded in 1985 and led largely by regional ADL chapters, AWOD sought to train students and teachers to recognize bias in all its forms, explore the value of diversity, and improve relations between ethnic groups. In recent years, AWOD had been the ADL’s largest training program, with tens of thousands of participants annually; it has garnered praise from the likes of Bill Clinton, and has been exported to Europe, Japan, and Israel. The news that the program was shutting down—which has never been announced publicly by ADL National and went unremarked upon in the press—alarmed many in the education department, who viewed their anti-bias work as a key part of the ADL’s anti-hate mission. “Different forms of hate do not exist in a vacuum. Where you see antisemitism, there’s probably other forms of hate. Fighting them in isolation is not going to be successful,” said Bryant. “At the same time, when you go from having a broad lens on hate to one that only focuses on antisemitism, you’re telling a story that this is the only type of fight that matters, which causes a lot of harm, too.” One former ADL education staffer who requested anonymity to protect their career said that AWOD was a key reason why the ADL was welcomed into schools and that the ADL’s shift to focusing largely on antisemitism would greatly reduce their reach. “Schools are not necessarily looking to focus on one form of hate. They’re really looking to educate their students about all forms of hate,” they said, which makes a program that only deals with antisemitism “a really hard sell.”
The elimination of AWOD is not the only recent change to the ADL’s education offerings. The organization has taken down its page dedicated to providing anti-bias curriculum guides. A comparison of the organization’s website with earlier versions shows that since the summer of 2023, it has also deleted 134 model lesson plans on topics such as transgender identity, white privilege, how the Covid-19 pandemic fueled anti-Asian racism, school integration, and the impact of boarding schools on Native Americans. In a content note posted on its website this month, the ADL said they are updating their education resources to focus “on antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Jewish identity.” They added: “While we are no longer hosting many of our broader anti-bias resources, we remain deeply committed to fostering inclusive school communities.” The ADL spokesperson told Jewish Currents that while some of these changes were permanent, much of the content was only “temporarily removed” during a “content review” process and that “ADL retains more than 130 updated lesson plans, discussion guides, and digital tools addressing bias and discrimination in all forms.” But former education staffers say that the anti-bias programs that remain have significantly shrunk the footprint of the program—they do not cost as much and require less staff time than the ADL’s antisemitism programs, which are growing in number and scope. Furthermore, the removals follow a right-wing backlash campaign against the ADL’s anti-bias materials that started in 2022. Following those attacks, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt pledged that the organization would review its educational content—angering education staffers who saw this as undercutting their work, former employees say.
The reallocation of resources is a shift away from what the ADL has long viewed as its dual mission: fighting antisemitism alongside other forms of hatred. When Greenblatt first took over the organization in 2015, he seemed poised to continue this approach. “When fair treatment is secured for all, democracy is strengthened and that is good for its Jews and other minorities,” he wrote. But in a 2024 address, Greenblatt said it has “become clearer and clearer that we must prioritize the first part of ADL’s mission: ‘stop the defamation of the Jewish people.’” The spokesperson insisted, however, that “ADL’s mission has not changed,” and that while the organization “has placed increased emphasis on antisemitism education due to alarming trends in recent years,” it remains “committed to helping educators address bias and bigotry in all forms.”
The “increased emphasis” on antisemitism comes at a fraught time, amid a broad right-wing attack on civil liberties, academic freedom, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs—which is often done in the name of fighting antisemitism, and which the ADL itself has participated in. Since October 7th, the ADL has ramped up its support of repression of anti-Zionist activism. Greenblatt has called for Students for Justice in Palestine groups to be investigated for providing “material support” to Hamas, urged the National Guard to crack down on student protesters at the Columbia encampment, and applauded the Trump administration’s move to deport former Columbia student activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil over pro-Palestinian activity. The ADL has also been notably less outspoken than it oncewas on Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-refugee moves, which other civil rights groups say are illegal or unconstitutional—and which may, in the past, have been taken up by the ADL’s civil rights division.
“The civil rights division is not engaging on any civil rights issues,” said the former ADL education staffer. “The division has been reduced as it no longer aligns with the current strategy. The only issues ADL speaks out about are related to antisemitism.” In this context, sources say the shifts in education appear less like an incidental administrative update and more like a concerted effort to back away from the organization’s broader mission. “The ADL appears to be responding to the political winds shifting,” said a former senior education executive at ADL National who requested anonymity to protect their professional reputation. “Why have a dual mission when one of them is increasingly out of favor and one of them is increasingly rewarding in all senses of the word?”
The ADL has long had an outsize presence in schools. In 2023, the organization said its materials on antisemitism and anti-bias reached seven million students, while 24,000 teachers participated in an ADL training program or utilized its online education resources. Their programs run the gamut from Holocaust education to anti-bias and anti-bullying programs like AWOD and No Place for Hate, helping the ADL cultivate a reputation as a leading anti-bias organization in schools.
Such initiatives have long been critiqued by progressive critics of the ADL, who say that the anti-bias work has given the ADL cover to promote a pro-Israel agenda. “I speak with educators all over the country who say, ‘We know the ADL is bad politically, but their anti-bias work is good.’ That tells me that the ADL is successfully hiding behind their reputation with schools to allow them to get away with their anti-Palestinian political work,” said Nora Lester Murad, a writer and educator who organizes with Drop the ADL From Schools. Indeed, the ADL’s education work is not entirely separate from its pro-Israel mission: The ADL’s curriculum on antisemitism includes, for example, a lesson plan on anti-Zionism and antisemitism that posits that “much of contemporary anti-Zionism, or the delegitimization of Israel and its supporters, draws on and perpetuates antisemitic tropes,” as well as a primer on Israel’s contemporary history that makes no mention of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Some ADL education staffers have said the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism has impacted their work in other ways: A second former ADL education staffer, who requested anonymity to protect their career, reported that superiors directed them to reach out to schools to try to curb planned student walkouts protesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, because, in their colleagues’ eyes, it would “‘upset Jewish students and make an unsafe environment,’ even though there were Jewish students participating and sometimes leading the walkouts.”
The left has also criticized the ADL’s more general anti-bias work for underplaying the structural, state-sponsored nature of discrimination: The ADL’s resources argue “that biased attitudes—not capitalism and white vested interests in preserving power arrangements—are the foundation of racism,” the educator Andom Ghebrehiorgis and academic Emmaia Gelman wrote in a 2020 article in Truthout. But within the organization, education department staffers tend to be a more social justice-minded set, who have joined the ADL on account of their anti-bias work. “The education staffers in the regional offices tend to be younger than their bosses, are much more likely to be young people of color, and tend to have an anti-racist framework,” said the former senior education executive. As a result, as the ADL has become even more conservative under Greenblatt, these staffers have frequently clashed with senior leadership.
The anti-bias programs overseen by those staffers have been vulnerable within the ADL for a number of years due to right-wing backlash. In January 2022, right-wing social media accounts and websites attacked the ADL after they came across its definition of racism, which the organization defined as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” As this pressure campaign mounted, a group of education and civil rights staffers sent a letter to senior leadership urging them to stand by the definition. The letter, obtained by Jewish Currents, argued that the current definition was aligned with expert scholarship, and that changing it would damage the ADL’s credibility as an anti-hate group, negatively impact employees of color, diminish the ADL’s ability to recruit diverse employees, and cause schools in need of anti-bias education to withdraw from partnering with the ADL. They also argued that any change to the definition would be misaligned with other ADL definitions, such as one that stated that sexism is the “marginalization and oppression of women, based on the belief in a natural order based on sex that privileges men.” Despite these warnings, the ADL’s senior leadership changed their definition of racism to mean “when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity,” thereby eliminating reference to a white supremacist system of oppression. Greenblatt explained in a Medium post that he made the change because the prior definition was so “narrow” as to exclude, for example, German racism against Jews or Turks. Today, there is no definition of racism anywhere on the ADL website.
Later the same year, a Fox News article charged that the ADL’s educational materials were promoting “critical race theory,” a scholarly field positing that racism and white supremacy are embedded in the American legal system, which has become a catchall in conservative circles for any discussion of race and whiteness. The article highlighted a number of ADL lesson plans on topics such as white privilege, reparations, and women’s rights. The ADL responded by telling Fox News that some of its education material was “misaligned with ADL’s values and strategy” and that the organization would launch “a thorough review of our education content.” This response outraged many staffers within the education department, who felt that the ADL was caving to right-wing actors and undercutting what they saw as important anti-bias work, all without consulting the education department, Bryant said. “We were never listened to or seen as experts in our field,” said the first former ADL education staffer. “The people above us who were making these decisions had absolutely no pedagogical experience teaching this content. The CEO and others in senior leadership wanted to push certain agendas, but didn’t really understand how education or school systems work.” Today, the lesson plans mentioned in the Fox News article are no longer listed among the ADL’s offerings, though some are still findable through a Google search.
The capstone to these events was the ADL’s elimination of AWOD at the end of 2023, which in turn led to the layoffs of six education staffers and the shifting of another six staffers into non-education roles, according to the second former ADL education staffer. It also led to the closure of the ADL’s Albany, New York, chapter, which only employed education staff. Those layoffs shrunk the power of a department that had long been internally outspoken against senior leadership. (Some have gone on to be publicly outspoken, too, including Bryant, who authored a New York Daily Newsop-ed about her concerns earlier this month.) “The regional education staffers—and the regional leadership that oversaw them—created a whole bunch of headaches for Jonathan,” said the former senior education executive. “The more that he can shift the center of gravity from the regional offices to the national offices, the easier it is for him.”
Staffers say that after AWOD’s shutdown, they were asked to solely focus on antisemitism work, even though that did not align with schools’ needs. “In Austin, we were being asked for help with navigating social media anti-LGBTQ+ bullying, and bullying towards students receiving special education services,” said Bryant. “Antisemitism training was not what schools wanted or needed.” The second former staffer echoed Bryant. “I had a lot of difficult conversations with schools asking for help on bias incidents that were not solely antisemitic where I said, ‘I can’t help you,’” they said. Dove Kent, the US senior director for Diaspora Alliance, a group that fights antisemitism and its weaponization, said the narrow focus on anti-antisemitism education won’t succeed in combating anti-Jewish bigotry. “Most Americans don’t spend any time thinking about Jews,” or “even know any Jews,” which makes it strange, she argued, to teach about antisemitism “in isolation—outside any context of their own lived experiences.” Kent stressed that “teaching about antisemitism in conjunction with racism and other forms of bias gives people an understanding of how discrimination operates,” which they can then apply more broadly.
The ADL appears set on continuing the shift away from general anti-bias work. In a presentation from February 2024 obtained by Jewish Currents outlining the pillars of ADL Onward—the name given to the ADL’s strategic plan for the coming years—education is only mentioned as a means to fight antisemitism. Jamie Beran, CEO of the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc, said that the ADL’s choice to separate an understanding of antisemitism from all other forms of prejudice and systems of supremacy ensures that the organization can push their no-strings-attached support of Israel and stay in the Trump movement’s good graces. “By promoting this approach, the ADL is assisting MAGA in using antisemitism to divide the progressive American majority, so it can advance a despotic agenda that harms Jewish people and everyone else in this country,” she said.
Ultimately, the changes to the ADL’s education work will hurt educators, said Bryant. “The ADL spent decades building trust with schools, teachers, and communities that they were the go-to resource for fighting hate in schools,” she said. “At a time when education is under attack, they are leaving teachers who are in need high and dry.” But for Murad, the organizer with Drop the ADL from Schools, the shift presents an opportunity for progressive critics. “It’s a good thing that they are explicitly walking back their anti-bias focus, because it will be easier for us to show that the ADL does not belong in schools—the ADL is not a true anti-bias organization,” she said. “It’s a pivot we can leverage.”