ADL to Honor Jared Kushner With 'Major Award'

By honoring Jared Kushner, ADL suggests Trump is now kosher — and betrays its founding values

A second Trump term would be disastrous for American Jews. It couldn't be a worse time for the ADL to celebrate his son-in-law

By Peter Dreier | March 5, 2024

The Anti-Defamation League is about to make the serious mistake of signaling to Jews that it's OK to vote for former President Donald Trump in this critical election year — by giving his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a major award at its annual conference in New York City this week.

[...] In announcing the honor, an ADL spokesperson claimed that the 2020 Abraham Accords, which Kushner spearheaded, have proved "pivotal for hostage release and an end to the conflict post Oct. 7 terrorist attack." But those accords are partly to blame for that attack, by suggesting that Israel could ignore the Palestinian question while normalizing relations with other Arab states.

Kushner boasted that the accords were the "beginning of the end of the Israel-Arab conflict," and that tensions between Israelis and Palestinians "aren't as complicated as people have made them out to be."

Almost all the 23 members of the ADL board of directors who have donated to political candidates primarily support Democrats, according to public records. That's not surprising, given Jews' voting patterns (77% supported Biden in 2020). Even Jewish billionaires overwhelmingly support Democrats.

But ADL also has a few major donors who are among the relative handful of wealthy Jews who back Republicans, including Trump, and have been engaged in efforts to combat anti-Israel protests. These include Seth Klarman, a hedge fund manager; Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots; and Marc Rowan, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, the lead benefactor of the ADL's Civil Society Fellowship program.

Rowan, whose political contributions have in recent years tilted heavily toward GOP candidates, led a successful campaign to oust the president of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a trustee, over her response to anti-Israel protests and antisemitism on campus. That issue now appears to be at the top of the ADL's agenda.

Maybe the group simply wants to hedge its bets in case Trump is reelected. Because no matter the ADL's motivations for honoring Kushner, doing so is a way of telling American Jews that Trump is now kosher.

Apparently "noticing" is now banned on X.

What a joke. These levels of censorship are starting to outdo the old Twitter regime. pic.twitter.com/eFCywC9RoP

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) March 5, 2024