It’s my honor to welcome Dr. Emmaia Gelman back to Speaking Out of Place. Today we will be discussing her new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State. This massive and detailed work of history argues that the Anti-Defamation League, popularly known as a civil rights organization fighting White Supremacy and anti-Semitism, is better understood as promoting a particular set of interests. The ADL is seen consistently promoting an intensely individualistic notion of rights while undermining and attacking structural critiques of racism, thereby preserving the colonial project. More and more, the ADL’s interests construct Jewishness as synonymous with Zionism, and its exclusive aim is to fuse three keywords: hate, terrorism, and anti-Semitism, in order to suppress anti-Zionist activism, preserve the on-going genocide and expand the Zionist state. This is a book that demands attention if we are to understand the US-Israel nexus which has brought us the war on Iran, and repressed dissent.
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.
