Jonathan Greenblatt | |
---|---|
6th Director of the Anti-Defamation League | |
Assumed office July 20, 2015 | |
Preceded by | Abraham H. Foxman |
Director of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation | |
In office 2011–2014 | |
President | Barack Obama |
Preceded by | Sonal Shah |
Succeeded by | David Wilkinson |
Personal details | |
Born | Trumbull,Connecticut,U.S. | November 21,1970
Political party | Democratic |
Spouse | Marjan Keypour |
Children | 3 |
Education | Tufts University (BA) Northwestern University (MBA) |
Jonathan Greenblatt (born November 21,1970) is an American entrepreneur,corporate executive,and the sixth National Director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). [1] Prior to heading the ADL,Greenblatt served in the White House as Special Assistant to Barack Obama and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. [2]
Greenblatt was born on November 21,1970,in Trumbull,Connecticut,to a Conservative Jewish family. [3] [4] He graduated from Tufts University in 1992,earning a Bachelor of Arts. [5] [ better source needed ] After college,Greenblatt worked on Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign in 1992 in Little Rock,Arkansas. He went on to join the administration as an aide in the Clinton White House and later the United States Department of Commerce,where he developed international economic policy with a focus on emerging markets and post-conflict economies. [6] Greenblatt also holds a master's in business administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. [6]
In 2002,Greenblatt and his business school roommate,Peter Thum,founded Ethos Water,a premium bottled water social enterprise. [7] The company sought to help children around the world get access to free water by donating a portion of their profits to finance water programs in developing countries. [8] In 2005,Starbucks acquired the company for $8 million. [9] Following the acquisition,Greenblatt served as Starbucks Vice President of Global Consumer Products,scaling Ethos across the United States. Greenblatt also co-founded Ethos International,and served on the board of directors of the Starbucks Foundation,where he developed Ethos' global investment strategy that has invested millions of dollars to bring clean water to communities in need around the world,including Bangladesh,the Democratic Republic of Congo,Ethiopia,Honduras,India,and Kenya. [10]
Greenblatt also founded All for Good (AFG),the open source platform developed to enable more Americans to serve. [11] AFG is the largest aggregation of volunteer opportunities on the Web,and is supported by a coalition of leading companies,non-profits,and government agencies,all of whom shared a vision of using open data to increase the number of Americans that participate in service and volunteerism. Craig Newmark,the founder of Craigslist,helped to sponsor the organization,and the open-source code was utilized by [serve.gov]. [12] In 2011,AFG was acquired by the Points of Light Institute in a strategic partnership designed to help the organization scale. [13]
Greenblatt was formerly the CEO of GOOD Worldwide,LLC. [14] He led GOOD's transition from a publishing company to a diversified media company. Its products include the website GOOD.is and GOOD Magazine. [11] [15] As CEO,Greenblatt pushed a number of innovations at the company,including the launch of the GOOD Sheet,a broadsheet product distributed exclusively at Starbucks,and a name-your-own-pricing scheme that the company ran as an experiment. It is not clear whether this strategy was successful. [16] Greenblatt said in 2008 that the broadsheets were intended to be ideologically neutral. [14]
Greenblatt founded the Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute to help policy makers create an enabling environment for the emerging market of social enterprise and impact investing. The Initiative worked with thought leaders across impact sectors, including co-convening the Impact Economy Summit at the White House in October 2011. [17]
Greenblatt served as an operating partner at Satori Capital, a private equity firm focused on conscious capitalism, and was an active angel investor. [18] He also served as a member of the faculty at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, [19] where he developed and taught its coursework on social entrepreneurship.
In the fall of 2011, Greenblatt was appointed to serve as Special Assistant to the President for President Obama and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation (SICP) in the United States Domestic Policy Council. [20] As Director, he led the Office's efforts to utilize human capital and financial capital to bring attention to community solutions. The Office focused on issues such as national service, civic engagement, impact investing, and social enterprise. [21]
In his role as Director of SICP, Greenblatt took an active role in supporting AmeriCorps, [22] supporting social entrepreneurs, [23] and working with the G8 taskforce to support social impact investment. [24] Greenblatt was involved in a number of administration priorities, including preventing gun violence [25] and #GivingTuesday. [26] Greenblatt left the administration in 2014 and was succeeded by David Wilkinson. [27]
On September 30, 2020, Greenblatt was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", a group of academics, researchers and civil rights leaders created to counter the existing Facebook Oversight Board, an independent monitoring group over Facebook which they view as insufficient. [28]
Greenblatt was named CEO of the Anti-Defamation League in 2014. Under his leadership, the organization placed less emphasis on civil liberties and more on advocacy for Israel and the interests of donors. Greenblatt's tenure has seen increased partnerships with law enforcement agencies and support for anti-BDS legislation such as the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. His support for the Department of Education's assistant secretary for civil rights Kenneth L. Marcus and president Trump's Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism drew criticism from employees of ADL's Civil Rights Division. [29]
In a 2022 speech to ADL leaders, Greenblatt said that "anti-Zionism is antisemitism". [30] The Times of Israel noted that the "speech marked a rare moment of the organization unequivocally" making that assertion. [31] The remarks upset activists and Jewish groups critical of Israel, and also set off controversy within the ADL. [32] Internal ADL messages seen by The Guardian included a senior manager at ADL’s Center on Extremism writing in protest that: "There is no comparison between white supremacists and insurrectionists and those who espouse anti-Israel rhetoric, and to suggest otherwise is both intellectually dishonest and damaging to our reputation as experts in extremism." [32] The newspaper reported that the speech, which "put opposition to Israel on a par with white supremacy as a source of antisemitism", had sparked controversy. [32] The ADL told The Intercept that it did not consider the protests antisemitic, but Greenblatt labelled the protesting groups as hate groups. [33] [34] Greenblatt accused groups including Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine of being "Iranian proxies". [35] These statements by Greenblatt were cited by editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to support marking the ADL as "generally unreliable" on the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. [36]
Greenblatt is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. [37] He is married to Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, an Iranian Jewish political refugee to the United States who is the founder and director of The Alliance for Rights of All Minorities (ARAM), a non-profit. [38] They have three children. [37] [39] [40]
A number of organizations and academics consider the Nation of Islam (NOI) to be antisemitic. The NOI has engaged in Holocaust denial, and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade; mainstream historians, such as Saul S. Friedman, have said Jews had a negligible role. The NOI has repeatedly rejected charges made against it as false and politically motivated.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is a civil rights group and Jewish advocacy group established on November 11, 1906. It is one of the oldest Jewish advocacy organizations and, according to The New York Times, is "widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations".
Abraham Henry Foxman is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1987 to 2015, and is currently the League's national director emeritus. From 2016 to 2021 he served as vice chair of the board of trustees at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City in order to lead its efforts on antisemitism.
Jewish Voice for Peace is an American anti-Zionist left-wing Jewish advocacy organization that is critical of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, and supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
Different opinions exist among historians regarding the extent of antisemitism in American history and how American antisemitism contrasted with its European counterpart. In contrast to the horrors of European history, John Higham states that in the United States "no decisive event, no deep crisis, no powerful social movement, no great individual is associated primarily with, or significant chiefly because of anti-Semitism." Accordingly, David A. Gerber concludes that antisemitism "has been a distinctly minor feature of the nation's historical development." Historian Britt Tevis argue that, "Handlin and Higham’s ideas remain influential, and many American Jewish historians continue to present antisemitism as largely insignificant, momentary, primarily social."
Antisemitism has long existed in the United States. Most Jewish community relations agencies in the United States draw distinctions between antisemitism, which is measured in terms of attitudes and behaviors, and the security and status of American Jews, which are both measured by the occurrence of specific incidents.
Hannah Rosenthal is an American Democratic Party political official and Jewish non-profit executive who served as the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism from 2009 until 2012 during the Obama administration.
Defamation is a 2009 documentary film by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. It examines antisemitism, the way perceptions of antisemitism affect Israeli and U.S. politics, and explores the suggestion that claims of antisemitism are exaggerated or weaponized to stifle dissent against Israel. A major focus of the film is the Anti-Defamation League. Defamation won Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2009 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is a New York–based international non-governmental organization that was founded to combat antisemitism, bigotry and discrimination. ADL is also known for its pro-Israel advocacy.
Sharon Nazarian is an American social activist, academic and philanthropist. She is currently the Senior Vice President, International Affairs, for the Anti-Defamation League.
Triple parentheses or triple brackets, or an echo, often referred to in print as an ( ), are an antisemitic symbol that has been used to highlight the names of individuals thought to be Jews, and the names of organizations thought to be owned by Jews. This use of the symbol originated from the alt-right-affiliated, neo-Nazi blog The Right Stuff, whose editors said that the symbol refers to the historic actions of Jews which have caused their surnames to "echo throughout history". The triple parentheses have been adopted as an online stigma by antisemites, neo-Nazis, browsers of the "Politically Incorrect" board on 4chan, and white nationalists to identify individuals of Jewish background as targets for online harassment, such as Jewish political journalists critical of Donald Trump during his 2016 election campaign.
IfNotNow is an American Jewish group which opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Its membership demonstrates against politicians, United States policies, and institutions it perceives as supporting occupation, usually seeking to apply pressure through direct action and media appearances. It has been characterized variously as progressive or far-left.
Tamika Danielle Mallory is an American activist. She was one of the leading organizers of the 2017 Women's March, for which she and her three other co-chairs were recognized in the TIME 100 that year. She received the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award from the Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in 2018. Mallory is a proponent of gun control, feminism, and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Evan R. Bernstein is an American public figure and community leader, known for his work with Jewish NGOs. He worked for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 2013 and became the inaugural CEO and National Director of Community Security Service (CSS) in May 2020. Since November 2023, Bernstein has been the vice president of community relations at the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA).
Nathan "Nate" Perlmutter was the American executive director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from 1979 to 1987. Perlmutter joined the ADL in 1949, serving as regional director in Detroit, Miami, and New York until 1964. He became associate national director of the American Jewish Committee from 1965 to 1969. After that, he rejoined the ADL as assistant national director from 1973 to 1979, at which point he became national director. He served as ADL national director until his death in 1987. From 1969 to 1973 Perlmutter was vice president of Brandeis University.
Arnold Forster (1912–2010) was a prominent Anti-Defamation League attorney.
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) is an American left-wing non-profit grassroots Jewish organization. JFREJ describes itself as a "movement to dismantle racism and economic exploitation" and is based in New York City. It operates both a 501(c)(3), also known as JFREJ Community and a 501(c)(4) known as JFREJ Action.
Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America is a 2018 film directed, written, and produced by Ronald Dalton Jr. The film espouses antisemitic messaging and spreads misinformation. It contains antisemitic tropes, Holocaust denial, and claims of an international Jewish conspiracy.
The Nexus Task Force, created in November 2019, analyzes issues at the intersection of Israel and antisemitism. The task force has published the Nexus Document, described as "a resource designed for policymakers and community leaders, aiming to enhance their understanding of the issues that intersect at the nexus of antisemitism, Israel, and Zionism", the Nexus White Paper, titled "Understanding Antisemitism at its Nexus with Israel and Zionism", and the Nexus "Guide to Identifying Antisemitism in Debates about Israel".
On May 25, 2023, the administration of US President Joe Biden unveiled The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. President Biden called his administration's plan the “most ambitious and comprehensive U.S. government-led effort to fight antisemitism in American history.”
Critics of the group argue that these and other actions risk undermining the civil rights organization's counter-extremism work and say the group has foregone much of its historical mission to fight antisemitism in favor of doing advocacy for Israel.