Anti-defamation, if you think about it, is not the most facile formulation. But some things stick. Like (pardon the pun) Scotch Tape. Or Kleenex. Or Xerox copies. Brand names come to define a product, a market. And surely the Anti-Defamation League has come to define the market of leveling the playing field, of keeping things equal for everyone.
The Denver and later Mountain States branch of the ADL (ADL it itself is a brand) has fought the good fight for 70 years now. And when it began, there was a lot more overt anti-Jewish prejudice than there is now. The ADL fought a lot of discrimination in housing which the law could address and in country clubs and other private facilities which the law could not address, but which, nonetheless, the moral force of the ADL could and did influence.
Times have changed. For one thing, the Holocaust has entered our consciousness, and the need to remember it has been taken up by the ADL, among others.
The ADL has responded to a wide variety of new forms of discrimination, many of them directly or indirectly stemming from an attempt to delegitimate Israel. When insurance companies rated customers up if they traveled to Israel, the ADL helped convince the Colorado legislature to outlaw this insurance practice.
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ADL offices around the country respond to different challenges. The ADLin Arizona faces immigration challenges that, at least so far, Colorado does not.
An organization as multifaceted and large as the ADL will, on occasion, slip. Perhaps the largest such slip in recent memory was, on the national level, the attempt to deny the Armenian genocide; and, on the local level, the expensive pursuit of alleged anti-Semites who, the courts ruled, were engaged in protected behavior. It also seems that sometimes the ADL veers into political positions not dictated by the mission of anti-defamation.
Such are the occupational hazards of always trying to do the right thing. With its intelligence, passion and commitment, the ADL, at a minimum, always keeps the debate lively and focused. Then, to be sure, most of the time the ADL protects the rights of us all. It does so with zeal and love of liberty. For 70 years of this heroic effort, we say, simply, thank you.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
