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anti-defamation league
'Open Bigotry': ADL Condemned for 'Mamdani Monitor' Aimed at Rooting Out Criticism of Israel
The initiative appeared to be intended to prevent "people who are critical of Israel from getting hired by city government," said one critic.
Nov 06, 2025
Advocates denounced an initiative launched by the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's electoral victory as "awful scaremongering," as the group founded more than a century ago as a civil rights organization announced it would be monitoring Mamdani's government for antisemitism—which the ADL has explicitly equated with anti-Israel sentiment.
The ADL, whose executive director, Jonathan Greenblatt, earlier this year falsely accused Mamdani of refusing to visit synagogues during his campaign, said its "Mamdani Monitor" would "track and monitor policies and personnel appointments of the incoming Mamdani administration and protect Jewish residents across the five boroughs during a period of unprecedented antisemitism in New York City."
Hate crimes driven by both antisemitism and Islamophobia have been on the rise in recent years in New York City. Mamdani has pledged that as mayor, he will work to represent all New Yorkers regardless of religion or ethnicity, and in his victory speech on Tuesday he said: "We will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism."
He repeated that commitment on Wednesday after a drawing of a swastika was found at a Jewish day school in Brooklyn, saying: "This is a disgusting and heartbreaking act of antisemitism, and it has no place in our beautiful city. As mayor, I will always stand steadfast with our Jewish neighbors to root the scourge of antisemitism out of our city."
About a third of Jewish people who voted in the election supported Mamdani, many actively campaigned on his behalf and joined him in his criticism of Israel, and a striking poll released by the Washington Post last month found that more than 60% of Jewish Americans agree with the mayor-elect's assessment that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza since it began bombarding the exclave in October 2023.
Launching a project preemptively accusing Mamdani of bringing harm to Jewish New Yorkers, said journalist Sana Saeed, "is extremely—and expectedly—racist. There is no other way this should be talked about."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was among those pointing out that the ADL "has never established a special monitor to harass any other elected official, including politicians who have actually expressed real bigotry against Jewish Americans."
"Singling out Mayor-elect Mamdani is an act of hypocrisy and anti-Muslim bigotry, pure and simple," said the group. "We strongly condemn the ADL’s increasingly unhinged, desperate attacks on American Muslims and other advocates for Palestinian human rights, and we call on New York community leaders to do the same.”
Dylan Williams of the Center for International Policy also called the "Mamdani Monitor" a display of "open bigotry" and noted that no such tracker has been established to keep tabs on the Trump administration, which has joined the ADL in attacking pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemitic while elevating numerous officials to top White House roles despite their ties to groups that espouse anti-Jewish views.
During the campaign, the ADL joined former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani's top opponent in the race who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary in June, in attacking Mamdani for stating that the phrase "globalize the intifada" is not a call for violence but rather a demand to end Israel's occupation and apartheid policies in the Palestinian territories.
In response to the ADL's initiative targeting his incoming administration, Mamdani reiterated his commitment for standing against antisemitism and expressed doubt that Greenblatt will lead the group's new effort "honestly," considering his past lies about Mamdani's campaign.
"Anyone is free to catalog the actions of our administration," he said. "I have some doubts in Jonathan's ability to do so honestly, given that he previously said that I have not visited any synagogues only to have to correct himself."
A ‘Mamdani Monitor’?? Zohran RESPONDS to the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt for vowing to “track” his admin for antisemitism.
“I have some doubts in Jonathan's ability to do so honestly, given that he previously said I had not visited any synagogues only to have to correct himself.” pic.twitter.com/rWdaqh45nz
— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) November 5, 2025
While the ADL still attempts to portray itself as a leading group fighting against anti-Jewish hate—despite its refusal to condemn billionaire Trump megadonor Elon Musk's apparent Nazi salute at an inauguration event in January, and its recent removal of a commitment to "Protect Civil Rights" from its website—Yonah Lieberman of the Jewish-led Palestinian rights group IfNotNow said the Mamdani Monitor "should be the final straw to any liberal that has ever supported them."
The ADL is "treating the NYC mayor’s office like a hate group—because the next mayor is Muslim and believes Israel should follow international law," said Lieberman.
Peter Sterne of City & State NY added that the ADL's new feature appeared to be "its own version of Canary Mission"—the anonymously run pro-Israel website that identifies and targets pro-Palestinian students and professors.
The ADL's aim, said Sterne, appears to be "to prevent people who are critical of Israel from getting hired by city government."
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GOP Investigation Pressures Wikipedia to Reveal Identities of Editors Accused of 'Bias' Against Israel
The effort furthers the goals of the Heritage Foundation, which has launched a plan to "identify and target Wikipedia editors" using a number of underhanded tactics.
Aug 28, 2025
A pair of House Republicans is moving forward with an investigation that will seek to reveal the identities of Wikipedia editors who have edited articles to include information that portrays Israel negatively.
On Wednesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that owns the free encyclopedia.
The representatives asked Wikimedia's CEO, Maryana Iskander, for "assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics."
The letter requested information about "nation state actors" or "academic institutions" that may have been involved in efforts to "edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies."
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation told The Hill that they were reviewing the request.
"We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform," the spokesperson said.
The GOP investigation coincides with a long-standing objective of the far-right Heritage Foundation, which has accused Wikipedia of anti-conservative bias and promoting content that portrays Israel in a negative light, and sought to unmask the identities of the internet users who run it.
The letter sent by Comer and Mace requests that Wikimedia provide Congress with "records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors" who have been "subject to actions" by Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, which resolves internal disputes between editors.
It was, in essence, a request by Congress for Wikipedia to "dox" many of its editors.
"In the culture of Wikipedia editing, it is common for individuals to use pseudonyms to protect their privacy and avoid personal threats," wrote tech writer and Wikipedia expert Stephen Harrison for Slate in February. "Revealing an editor's personal information without their consent, a practice known as doxing, is a form of harassment that can result in a user's being permanently banned from the site."
Of chief concern to the legislators is investigating Wikipedia's handling of content related to Israel. They cited a report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a pro-Israel lobbying group, which the legislators said "raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the state of Israel."
The ADL report makes the allegation that 30 "bad-faith" Wikipedia editors, whose identities are not public, were collaborating to edit pages about the Israel-Palestine conflict by "spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism," and in the process violating Wikipedia's commitment to neutrality.
That report, however, has been heavily criticized, including by some of the academics it cited. In a piece for The Forward, Shira Klein, whose research on Wikipedia's documentation of the Holocaust appears in the report, said the ADL "inaccurately" used her work, and the work of others, as part of its "ramped-up efforts to police public discourse about Israel," and quoted other researchers who felt the same.
Klein described the study's interpretation of the facts as "very skewed" and said it was reliant "on a faulty premise: that criticism of Israel or Zionism is inherently antisemitic."
"To establish foul play, the ADL would need to demonstrate that Wikipedia content about Israel and Zionism regularly expresses as fact ideas that diverge from broadly held scholarly opinions on the matters in question," Klein said. "But where is the evidence of editors repeatedly misrepresenting or contradicting peer-reviewed literature? There is none. The report simply wants us to take the ADL's word for it."
The ADL's report, as well as a similar report from the Atlantic Council alleging that Wikipedia editors had conspired to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda, are the sole pieces of evidence cited by Comer and Mace in their request for identifying information on Wikipedia's editors.
However, right-wing efforts to undermine Wikipedia's independence and attack the privacy of its editors go back much further.
In January, documents obtained by The Forward's Arno Rosenfeld revealed a secret plan by Heritage, the think tank behind the authoritarian Project 2025 playbook, to "identify and target Wikipedia editors" who the organization said were "abusing their position."
Among the methodologies it directed Heritage employees to use include "analyzing text patterns, usernames, and technical data through data breach analysis, fingerprinting, [human intelligence], and technical targeting."
The targeting methods also included "creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them."
According to Rosenfeld, "The Heritage Foundation sent the pitch deck outlining the Wikipedia initiative to Jewish foundations and other prospective supporters of Project Esther, its roadmap for fighting antisemitism and anti-Zionism."
Jewish Voice for Peace has described Project Esther as Heritage's "blueprint for using the federal government and private institutions to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement and broader US civil society, under the guise of 'fighting antisemitism.'"
"Even if you take issue with how the site is currently framing the conflict, that doesn't justify Heritage's plan," Harrison wrote. "Targeting Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform, marks a dangerous escalation."
Coming amid the Trump administration's crackdowns against campus protests and efforts to deport immigrants over pro-Palestine speech, critics have described the House Republican investigation as the latest GOP attempt to censor criticism and the spread of unflattering information about Israel.
Adam Johnson, a co-host for the political podcast Citations Needed, described it in a post on X as "House Republicans working with the ADL and Atlantic Council to discipline Wikipedia into parroting the Israeli and NATO line."
Johnson noted that this push was coming as the clear majority of Americans, including an overwhelming number of Democrats, now oppose US support for Israel, with many now believing the country is committing a genocide.
"Rather than end the genocide," Johnson said, "the response instead is to continue firing, doxing, smearing, and attempting to censor inconvenient narratives."
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ADL Director Condemned for 'Dishonest and Bigoted' Attacks on Mamdani
"What angers Greenblatt is that Mamdani isn't courting HIM," said one advocate. "By winning the bulk of the young Jewish vote while condemning Israel, Mamdani is exposing how out of touch Greenblatt is."
Aug 20, 2025
The largest Muslim civil rights group in the U.S. on Tuesday was among those condemning the latest attacks from the Anti-Defamation League on New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whom ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt this week accused of not reaching out to the city's Jewish population.
On CNBC Monday, Greenblatt claimed Mamdani, a Democratic state assembly member who stunned former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by winning the primary in June by nearly eight points, has not visited "a single synagogue... one Jewish neighborhood" or "any of the mainstream Jewish institutions."
A number of observers pointed to several instances in which Mamdani has visited Jewish centers and places of worship during his campaign, including attending Shabbat services in Brooklyn in February, taking part in a town hall with the Jewish Community Relations Council in May with United Jewish Appeal Federation, and attending candidate forums at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in June.
Greenblatt later published a post about the interview on the social media platform X, saying this time that Mamdani had not visited Jewish synagogues or other communities since the primary in June—but Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, suggested the head of the ADL attacks Mamdani not for things he has or hasn't done, but because many Jewish people have embraced him as their candidate of choice.
"Of course Mamdani has visited synagogues and Jewish communities," said Beinart. "What angers Greenblatt is that Mamdani isn't courting HIM. By winning the bulk of the young Jewish vote while condemning Israel, Mamdani is exposing how out of touch Greenblatt is with many of the people he claims to represent. That's what makes Mamdani a threat."
As Common Dreams reported last month, Mamdani led Cuomo—who is running in the general election as an independent following his primary loss—by five points in a poll by Zenith Research. More than two-thirds of likely Jewish voters between the ages of 18 and 44 said they planned to vote for Mamdani, who has condemned Israel's apartheid policies and its US-backed bombardment and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.
Beinart added that while Greenblatt may be "unaware" of Mamdani's relationship with Jewish voters, "his unawareness says nothing about reality. It says a lot about him."
In the interview, Greenblatt also doubled down on attacks that began in June regarding Mamdani's refusal to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada," which pro-Israel groups have claimed denotes support for violent attacks by militants against Israel—but which the mayoral candidate pointed out in a podcast interview is to many people "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights."
"Why won't he condemn 'globalize the intifada?' Because he believes it?" said Greenblatt, adding that the phrase suggests support for attacks by Palestinian militants who have "killed people simply because they were Jewish."
The Arabic word "intifada" means "struggle" or "uprising" and is associated by Palestinian rights advocates with Palestinians' fight for self-determination and freedom from Israel's occupation—which took the form of numerous non-violent protests including boycotts, labor strikes, and marches, as well as armed resistance, during the First and Second Intifadas.
Jasmine El-Gamal, a foreign policy analyst and host of the podcast "The View From Here," noted that "not one of the presenters corrected Greenblatt when he lied and said the intifada was a violent uprising that 'killed people simply because they were Jewish.'"
"The intifada was an uprising against an occupation," said El-Gamal. "Whether or not you agree with the concept of violent resistance, the fact is, Greenblatt blatantly lied and no one batted an eyelash."
Mamdani has never publicly used the phrase "globalize the intifada," and has said he would "discourage" others from doing so.
At the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), national deputy executive director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said Greenblatt's "dishonest and bigoted attacks on Assemblymember Mamdani represent the latest sign that the ADL director is an increasingly unhinged anti-Muslim bigot masquerading as a civil rights leader."
Referring to Greenblatt's refusal to condemn an apparent Nazi salute by former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk in January, Mitchell said Greenblatt "will bend over backwards to give real antisemites a pass so long as they support Israel's genocide while he goes out of the way to lie about and smear Muslim public officials if they dare to oppose Israel's genocide."
"Mr. Greenblatt's top priority is protecting the Israeli government from criticism," said Mitchell, "and no one should take his claim about American Muslim leaders seriously."
Basim Elkarra, executive director of CAIR-Action, said Greenblatt's comments "are not only misleading—they risk stoking division at a time when New Yorkers need unity."
"Subjecting Muslim elected officials to such bigotry is dishonest, dangerous, and diverts attention from substantive policy issues," said Elkarra. "We urge all public figures to condemn Jonathan Greenblatt and others who attempt to inflame bigotry against American Muslims engaged in politics."
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