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The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
Past event
Featured Book
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
"A gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
Also Featured
Engineered Conflict
A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy
Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.
Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.
Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.
About This Event
Join us as we welcome author, educator, and activist Emmaia Gelman for an event celebrating her new book The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. David Stovall, UIC professor and author of the acclaimed book Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago, will join Emmaia for a conversation about how the ADL continues to shape harmful narratives and policies about race and civil rights - aligning itself with the far-right, enacting politics of disposability and knowledge erasure, and upholding U.S. Empire.
Attendees will have the opportunity to learn why the ADL is NOT a social justice organization, and how under the guise of being a reliable resource for educators and schools, the ADL instead weaponizes the IHRA's false definition of antisemitism in order to perpetuate anti-Palestinian and anti-Black racism, repress liberatory curricula, and punish educators and students. As part of the event, we will have time for some small group organizing and collaboration on next steps for resisting the influence of the ADL and adjacent right-wing organizations in our city.
Accessibility Note: For our collective safety and care, KN95/N95 masks are required and provided. Extra HEPA air filtration provided by Clean Air Club.
About The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State-
The first-ever history of the Anti-Defamation League and its determined, century-long alliance with Western empire.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From “correcting” the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
This history presaged the ADL’s work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the “War on Terror,” the “antisemitism scare,” and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL’s history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL’s outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.
“Emmaia Gelman’s gripping book sent chills down my spine. In meticulous detail, she documents how the Anti-Defamation League, in the name of combating hate, terror, and antisemitism, has defended Israeli policies of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, attacked the Left, assailed Black, Brown, and queer movements, given cover to US imperial crimes, and become a mouthpiece for neoconservatism. But this is not the tragic story of an organization that lost its way. Rather, the ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism. Emmaia is co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City. She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as levers in surveillance, “anti-terror”, and war. Her teaching spans academic and community spaces.
David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. He is the author of the recently published Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago.
Featured Authors
Emmaia Gelman
Emmaia Gelman is the author of The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution (UC Press, 2026) and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader (Pluto Press, 2026). She co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism. Emmaia is co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City. She is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She researches the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as levers in surveillance, “anti-terror”, and war. Her teaching spans academic and community spaces.
David Stovall, Ph.D.
David Stovall, Ph.D. is a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In the attempt to bring theory to action, he works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus. His work led him to become a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice (SOJO), which opened in the Fall of 2005. Furthering his work with communities, students, and teachers, his work manifests itself in his involvement with the Peoples Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. He is the author of the recently published Engineered Conflict: Structural Violence and the Future of Black Life in Chicago.
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
Visit store pageMore at Pilsen Community Books
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