Join us Thursday, September 3rd from 7:00 – 8:30pm for a book talk and Q&A with Emmaia Gelman about her book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. Doors open at 6:45pm.

Register here.

About the Book
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.

About 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.