As head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt brought savvy about digital media to a nonprofit that had stopped changing with the times.
The phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
Jonathan Greenblatt always carries his phone in case of emergency, but answering it last Saturday morning during services at his synagogue wasn’t possible. It buzzed until he stepped outside and got the news: A gunman had interrupted services at a Pittsburgh shul with gunfire. The grisly scene at Tree of Life synagogue soon became the site of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, with 11 people dead and several others wounded.
For the past century, the Anti-Defamation League, where Greenblatt serves as national director, has maintained a mission to protect Jews and others against such hate. In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jew from Georgia, was convicted of murder despite little evidence. That verdict sparked the ADL’s founding. His lynching two years later demonstrated the need for a group dedicated to shielding Jews.
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Miriam Alster/Flash90/Redux
As head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt brought savvy about digital media to a nonprofit that had stopped changing with the times.
The phone wouldn’t stop buzzing.
Jonathan Greenblatt always carries his phone in case of emergency, but answering it last Saturday morning during services at his synagogue wasn’t possible. It buzzed until he stepped outside and got the news: A gunman had interrupted services at a Pittsburgh shul with gunfire. The grisly scene at Tree of Life synagogue soon became the site of the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, with 11 people dead and several others wounded.
For the past century, the Anti-Defamation League, where Greenblatt serves as national director, has maintained a mission to protect Jews and others against such hate. In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jew from Georgia, was convicted of murder despite little evidence. That verdict sparked the ADL’s founding. His lynching two years later demonstrated the need for a group dedicated to shielding Jews.
After the Tree of Life shooting, Greenblatt found himself reciting that history and pointing out the parallels between Leo Frank’s time and our own. In 2017, anti-Semitic incidents rose 57 percent in the United States, and hate crimes grew by 5 percent. And on that Saturday, Greenblatt felt the culmination of a national moment suffused with hate.
“Look, I’ve often said my worst nightmare is that I would wake up one morning and open my phone and begin to read about some horrible incident in Europe where Jews were murdered in a synagogue or a school and wonder whether we at the ADL were doing enough to stop the scourge of anti-Semitism,” Greenblatt says. “I never would have imagined that kind of scenario would unfold right here in the U.S.”
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After canceling his family’s plans to attend a bar-mitzvah luncheon, Greenblatt assembled his team on a conference call. Those colleagues later got in touch with the ADL’s regional workers, community leaders, Pittsburgh police, national civil-rights leaders at the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund, and leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union.
He rushed to his Manhattan office and delegated duties to his leadership team and then responded to a wave of media requests. Within a few hours of the murders, Greenblatt talked with anchors at CNN and MSNBC. He almost immediately wrote an op-ed on the killings for the New York Times, in which he expressed a worry that “anti-Semitism is being normalized in public life.” The next morning, Sunday, he was interviewed on network-news shows.
Meanwhile, the ADL social-media team gathered and posted reactions on hate websites. The organization’s Center on Extremism began investigating the shooter, Robert Bowers, as soon as police identified him. It pulled together his online activity and that of supremacist sites where comments about the shootings were mounting and then made all of that information available on the ADL’s website.
‘A Digital CEO’
The ADL’s rapid multimedia response reflects the influence of Greenblatt, who took his job in 2015, ascending to the stop spot in a legacy civil-rights group that had stopped changing with the times, some say.
Greenblatt’s deep grasp of digital media, the tech industry in Silicon Valley, and the spread of hate via social media have become key to the ADL’s transformation into a modern organization, observers say. “We can’t overstate just how much of a digital CEO he is,” says Henry Timms, president of the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish culture and community center here. “The battles ADL is engaged in are being fought on digital platforms.”
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But not just there. Greenblatt says he understands that the ADL will sometimes need to battle against government policies and face-to-face bigotry. The problem, he says, is that the fight is everywhere now.
“A lot of my peers who have been here for much longer tell me, they’ve never seen this kind of a moment, one with so much normalization of bigotry,” Greenblatt says.
Leading in an Era of Nonstop News
Even before the tragic events in Pittsburgh, outbursts of hate were mounting, including the violence of the Charlottesville alt-right rally in August 2017. Government policies targeting some non-Jewish groups, such as the forced separation of Latino immigrant families seeking refuge in the United States and the administration’s edict against travelers from some majority-Muslim countries, began to pile up, too, as did events of police violence against blacks. Greenblatt has put the ADL in a position to respond to each of those situations, observers say, giving the organization a higher — or at least wider — profile.
As he has done so, Greenblatt has had to take on another challenge, one familiar to those who run advocacy organizations these days: How do you lead a group during a time when crises and opportunities come in waves, and seemingly by the minute? And how can leaders keep their policy-minded organizations from being swallowed up by the 24-hour news cycle, or their voices from becoming little more than another element amid the clatter of modern-day discourse?
“It’s not easy to manage in an environment of turbulence,” Greenblatt says. “These days, everything is political, even for nonprofits. The question is, How do you stay above the fray?”
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At a time when people with prominent profiles are often expected to square off against each other, Greenblatt’s high-mindedness may have saved him from some negative exposure. And yet he and the ADL still function as lightning rods.
Raising Money Without Exploitation
Along with more opportunities to expand the nonprofit organization’s work came a flood of new donors.
The ADL, which maintains a $75 million annual budget and an endowment of around $115 million, benefited financially from the fallout of last year’s alt-right rally in Charlottesville.
Though fundraising jumped because people’s fears of violence and bigotry were made manifest in Virginia, the ADL is mindful of how it portrays the problems it deals with.
“We walk a fine line to make sure we’re not exploitative,” Greenblatt says. “I’m much more interested in telling people about the work we do, day in and day out. We won’t put neo-Nazi images in our campaigns just to get people to give.”
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(ADL officials say at least $360,000 in online contributions were made in the days after the Pittsburgh shootings.)
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
People gather outside the Tree of Life Synagogue after a shooting there left 11 people dead.
Foundations and large donors responded to the Charlottesville moment as well. Last year, the ADL welcomed first-time grant makers, most of which offered operating support, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($200,000) and the Rockefeller Foundation ($500,000). Apple gave $1 million, as did Fox’s James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn.
A few grant makers, some with ties to Greenblatt from his West Coast days, also bought into his plans to modernize the organization, including the Omidyar Network ($250,000) and the Craig Newmark Foundation ($100,000). The ADL used that money to start its Center for Technology and Society, based in Silicon Valley. Its goal is to build relations with the tech industry to find ways to slow the growth of online bigotry and abuse, as well as review social-media companies’ terms-of-service agreements for weaknesses.
“When I came on board, there was a marked rise in cyber-hate and online harassment,” Greenblatt says.” I made a bet that that’s where a lot of the growth in hate would continue. It was the right bet, unfortunately. We’ve decided to engage with industry because we can’t do it alone or via legislation.”
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Greenblatt has assembled a staff with varied ethnic backgrounds to run his cyberspace-centric operations. A former federal terrorism expert, George Selim, a Lebanese-American, now runs the Center for Extremism, one of several tech-focused programs Greenblatt has set in motion.
Though momentum from Charlottesville has slowed a bit, the ADL’S fundraising over all has continued to grow in recent years. In 2014, the ADL raised $44 million. Last year, that figure mushroomed to $58 million — a 30 percent hike.
When Greenblatt arrived in 2015, online fundraising was a mere blip — 1.4 percent — of the ADL’s annual take. Now, it’s at 6.6 percent, in part because of a new, tech-savvy fundraising platform. “Getting our fundraising up-to-date was one of the first things I did,” Greenblatt says. “Before that, we were using duct tape and yarn to hold it together.”
Critics From Left and Right
As successful as the Anti-Defamation League has been with donors, Greenblatt faces plenty of opposition. His critics come not just from hate groups but from the byzantine world of U.S.-based Jewish advocacy organizations. His composure is often tested, he says, by “groups whose agendas you sometimes have to question.”
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People on the Jewish political right say the ADL does little to battle Muslim anti-Semitism, which affects the rights of Jews in Israel, Europe, and the United States and can foment an atmosphere of terror.
On the other side, some groups have described the ADL as a tool of Israel. Greenblatt’s attendance at the opening of the relocated U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in May, which coincided with Palestinian riots and the deaths of 59 protesters, also raised some eyebrows — as does an ADL program that brings federal law-enforcement officials and police chiefs from major American cities to Israel for training with Israeli antiterrorism forces.
Some groups have accused the organization of tarring activists who fight for Palestinian rights.
“The ADL uses its cred as a civil- rights group to say that certain conversations, like those about the rights of non-Jews in Israel, shouldn’t be happening,” says Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that advocates for the human rights of Israelis and Palestinians. “The ADL has something of a split personality. It does a lot of civil-rights work for many groups. On the other hand, it has consistently acted to back the Israeli government.”
What’s more troubling, Vilkomerson says, is the ADL’s equating left-wing groups’ fight for Palestinian rights with the work of hate groups: “It’s something the ADL shouldn’t be involved in.”
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Greenblatt denies creating false equivalencies and adds that the ADL has been critical of the Israeli government, including its treatment of Palestinians. The ADL is calling out anti-Semitism wherever sees it, and fairly, he says, adding that urging boycotts, divestment, and sanctions — the BDS movement — of Israel have led to harassment of Jews, including those on some U.S. college campuses by left-leaning activists.
“Many of these groups have begun to use the same tropes as right-wing extremists,” Greenblatt says. “The problem arises when criticism of Israel isn’t just about a policy or government but the existence of the Jewish state itself.”
Avoiding the Daily News Cycle
Closer to home, the ADL was buffeted in April when some black activist groups criticized its involvement in an anti-bias training program for Starbucks employees.
Following the arrest of two black men in a Philadelphia coffee shop, it was announced that the ADL would be one of five groups that would provide training to Starbucks employees on how to handle situations involving race and potential bias. As part of its mission, the ADL routinely operates programs that teach police about bias and how to avoid it.
Though some media outlets reported that the organization had been disinvited from the training as a result of complaints made by other groups, Greenblatt told the Chronicle that the ADL did take part in the program and that news accounts were not accurate. But by then, criticism of the organization by African-American groups that decry its work with police forces in the United States and Israel had become part of the public conversation.
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While Greenblatt’s desire to keep the ADL in the political center may have yielded mixed results, his philosophy toward public engagement hasn’t changed.
With the exception of events such as the synagogue murders, “I’ve tried very hard to stay true to our principles and not get caught up in the daily news cycle,” he says.
A Wealth of Experience
A compact man with a stern and deliberate bearing, Greenblatt, 47, brings a variety of experiences to the ADL — as a social entrepreneur, web business developer, and two-time White House aide (under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). Among his talents, those who know him say, is an ability to match a passion for justice with a need to remain mission-driven, even as much of the world appears to be losing its bearings.
Those who have watched Greenblatt closely say he has succeeded in repositioning the ADL as a defender of all groups whose rights are being denied, strengthening the organization’s finances, and modernizing it, both internally and online. In the process, the organization has run smoothly enough to tackle emerging issues and grow its base.
“It’s a tough gig — there’s no way you can do that job and not be criticized,” says Timms. “But he’s risen to the challenge. Jonathan doesn’t operate in the world of press releases. He’ll speak to issues as they arise, and that flexibility allows him to engage the wider world around the issues the ADL’s mission deals with. He realized early on that he’d need millions of people to get behind its mission for the ADL to be effective.”
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Mission Comes First
Greenblatt’s ability to create a presence at key times makes him an effective leader, others say.
“You could see his decisiveness during the Charlottesville moment,” adds Jeremy Heimans, chief executive at Purpose, a public-benefit corporation that helps support social movements. The corporation collaborates with the ADL in Oneday Against Hate, a new campaign designed to get disparate civil-rights groups working together. “He didn’t wait a week to craft a release. He almost instantly launched a campaign based on his idea of what America should be.”
Greenblatt has earned the respect of many civil-rights groups because of his focus on the work, Heimans adds: “A lot of nonprofit leaders are consumed with their group’s reputation. I’ve seen Jonathan put mission before brand repeatedly.”
At times like these, Greenblatt says, it’s all about the work — and working together with other groups. With hate exploding in real life and on social media, immigrants reporting more harassment, and anti-Semitic incidents continuing to increase, “we have to shift from being on defense to offense. Marginalized communities need to find a way to lock arms and work toward shared goals,” he says.
Entrepreneur and Obama Aide
Growing up in a family of observant Jews in Connecticut, Greenblatt had few thoughts of civil-rights work. “The ADL is the last place I thought I’d end up,” he says.
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Greenblatt has spent much of his career in business and focused on social enterprises. He started All for Good, a web platform that listed volunteer opportunities online, and he co-founded Ethos Water, a bottled-water company that includes facts about the worldwide fresh- water shortage on its labels and donates half of its after-tax profits to charity.
Starbucks bought the company for $8 million and invited Greenblatt to sit on the board of its foundation, where, he says, he learned a good bit about grant making and getting charitable donations from investors.
While working in the Obama administration, Greenblatt developed My Brother’s Keeper, a program designed to help boys and young men of color do better in school and find work. It is now run under the auspices of the Obama Foundation.
Even though his life and the ADL have intersected in many ways, Greenblatt says he was staggered when a recruiter contacted him at the White House in 2014 and asked if he’d consider taking the top job.
“It was the farthest thing from my mind,” he says.
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Since then, his fresh approach to a once-fusty organization has earned it more admirers.
“Jonathan has been extremely successful at returning the ADL to its roots as a civil- rights organization that fights bigotry of many kinds,” says Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah, a group of 2,000 rabbis and cantors that works on human-rights issues in Israel and the United States. “He understands you can’t fight anti-Semitism in a vacuum. Bigotry doesn’t exist in one.”
Greenblatt hearkened back to the 1950s when the ADL’s work to aid immigrants and refugees led it to ask a junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts named Kennedy to write a book on the contributions newcomers have made to American life. (John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants will be re-released this month with a foreword by Greenblatt.)
Inspired by that time, Greenblatt started programs to help Latinos in the United States who have been threatened or attacked. When the Mexican foreign ministry approached Greenblatt with concerns about how undocumented Mexican immigrants were being harassed, Greenblatt and his staff developed training for officials at Mexican consulates, with a focus on how U.S. laws can protect them. To date, the ADL has trained more than 1,500 of Mexico’s consular employees.
But Greenblatt has eschewed parts of ADL’s recent history as well. When he spoke out against hatred against aimed at Muslim Americans and President Trump’s ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority nations, he rejected the harsh stance of Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s firebrand leader for 28 years, who often locked horns with Muslim American groups and fought against plans for a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks here.
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“I said that if there was going to be some kind of Muslim registry in this country, I, as a Jew, would be the first to sign up,” says Greenblatt. “I don’t see that as anything political. I thought it was principled and represents the values we’ve had for decades, which have to do with fighting bigotry wherever we find it.”
As Greenblatt prepares for the next round of challenges in fighting bias, he will rely on the talents he has displayed over the years as an entrepreneur, innovator, and public servant. And although he may have never imagined himself being a soldier in the war against hate, he has come to appreciate his role in the moment, and perhaps in history.
“It’s a privilege to have a job like this,” he says. “I feel lucky.”