The ADL’s Medicine Is Causing the Disease

Frames that divide the world into the oppressors and the oppressed create 15 times more antisemites while reinforcing sectarian division and hate on both the left and the right. The cure is a return to the universalist values on which America was founded.

Oct. 7 is behind us, but the moral wreckage it revealed is not. On campuses and in newsrooms, moral clarity has dissolved into factional reflex. The speed of that collapse has exposed something long in the making: a society trained to sort every question through the logic of identity and power.

In recent years, Americans have been told that justice lives in the arithmetic of oppression. We built institutions around that belief. It promised fairness but produced suspicion. When real moral tests arrived, those suspicions split the country into tribes instead of citizens. 

What began as a language meant to protect the vulnerable hollowed out the Democratic Party itself, wrenching Jews from a coalition that once defined liberal America. The same moral logic now corrodes the right, where a counterfeit version of patriotism exalts grievance politics and sectarian resentment. Across both extremes, identity has replaced citizenship.

The Anti-Defamation League has become the most visible symbol in the Jewish world of that shift. In schools across the United States, students are now taught to “challenge bias” and “explore identity” through the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate curriculum. 

The program asks children to examine their “unconscious prejudice,” map their place in “systems of oppression,” and reflect on how “intersecting oppressions” shape their worldview. Middle schoolers complete assignments such as the “Identity Iceberg,” which invites them to reveal the parts of themselves that lie “below the surface.” 

What was once a movement to fight antisemitism has evolved into an educational framework built on the language of DEI. Its central lesson is not moral conviction but self-classification within hierarchies of power.

In two national studies, participants exposed to the ADL’s anti-oppression messaging grew more defensive and in fact expressed more antisemitism than they had prior to being “educated.” Those results mark more than the failure of one organization. They signal the exhaustion of an era. 

The frameworks that claimed to cure bias are now being proven by data to deepen it. 

If we want to rebuild moral coherence, we need a new paradigm rooted not in grievance but in shared human values, the same ideals that helped shape the American experiment and long sustained Jewish moral life in this country.

For more than a decade, schools and corporations have adopted what they call the anti-oppressive framework, the belief that morality lives in the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. The goal of this approach was ostensibly to eliminate bias. The result has been rising suspicion and hostility and the fracturing of the once-robust American middle into warring sectarian tribes.

Our research tested how the framework of oppressed and oppressors works in practice to reduce bias. Partnering with Rutgers Social Perception Lab, in a study titled “Instructing Animosity,” we exposed thousands of participants to training materials drawn from anti-racist, anti-Islamophobia, and anti-casteist curricula. 

Across all three domains, the pattern was the same. People who read those texts became more likely to believe that racism or prejudice had occurred when there was no evidence of it. 

Perceptions of microaggressions in neutral situations rose by roughly 30%, and willingness to punish others for imagined offenses increased sharply. 

The interventions reproduced the same psychological profile found in people who score high on measures of authoritarianism: suspicion, intolerance, and punitive impulse. The effect was not tied to any group or cause; it was tied to the frame itself.

When we applied the same method to the ADL’s antisemitism curriculum, the results were even clearer. 

Participants who read ADL materials reported much higher irritation and stronger feelings of being attacked than those who read neutral or values-based text. Their written responses contained 15 times more antisemitic statements than those in the control conditions.

Both studies revealed the same underlying process: Exposure to anti-oppressive rhetoric increased defensiveness and moral reactivity. However, the direction and expression of hostility differed greatly between the anti-racism and the antisemitism studies. 

While exposure to anti-racist materials led subjects to reproduce the moral and political orientation of the materials themselves - condemning racism, even when it wasn’t there - exposure to the ADL’s materials produced the exact opposite effect, rendering subjects 15 times more hostile to Jews than they had been before.

Why do materials structured in the same way produce such radically opposite effects when the “oppressed” group is Jewish? One plausible interpretation of their differences draws on Jonathan Haidt’s moral-foundations theory. Anti-oppressive interventions may cue a coalitional mode of moral reasoning, shifting the question from What is good? to Who are the good people?. 

In this frame, moral emotion is directed toward identity rather than principle, and the language of justice becomes a search for the righteous and the condemned.

In anti-racism contexts, where the narrative clearly identifies an oppressor and where public sanction reinforces that boundary, hostility finds a sanctioned outlet. Condemnation of the “bad group” is socially rewarded and even expected, while reproducing “racism” results in social sanction and even the possibility of being targeted with violence.

However, in the case of antisemitism, that same moral circuitry operates in a very different social and political context. Jewish life, historically organized around education and civic participation rather than mob politics, lacks a stable coalition capable of enforcing moral standing through collective power. No one is actually afraid of being punished by Jews—or being physically confronted by them. The mob logic never coheres into protection but instead amplifies vulnerability. 

Each round of moral accusation deepens the perception of instability and, paradoxically, blames Jews for the precarity itself. 

These hypotheses remain tentative but suggest that where moral sanction is unstable, anti-oppressive frames do not resolve into coherent moral conflict; they multiply it, producing a self-reinforcing cycle of reactivity and blame.

The same moral logic that governs DEI programs has filtered into national institutions and street movements. It teaches people to read conflict as oppression, disagreement as violence, and identity as destiny. Once that logic takes hold, it spreads suspicion through every social bond, whether on the left or on the right.

The ADL did not create this framework, but it amplified it. While hostility toward Jews and other groups escalated, its own programs continued to describe “whiteness” as privilege and to problematize mainstream organizations like Turning Point USA with accusations of extremism. 

This year, the FBI ended its partnership with the ADL, stating that it would not work with political fronts posing as watchdogs. That decision confirmed what the data already suggest. The old paradigm has exhausted itself. The public no longer trusts it, and the evidence shows why. The data show the medicine is worse than the disease.

The same science that exposes the damage done to American Jews and the wider society by the ADL’s bias education programs also points toward a remedy: a moral vocabulary rooted in the universal ideals that once anchored both Jewish and American life.

The founders of this country made a discovery so simple and so radical that it still startles the modern mind. They declared that human beings are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. It was a moral revolution that broke every hierarchy of power and taught that dignity does not come from ancestry or position but from the soul itself. From that truth flows not only moral right but also moral responsibility, the duty to see that same dignity in others.

We tested what happens when people are reminded of that principle. In our experiment, participants read a short essay titled “Universal Human Values.” It spoke of fairness, honesty, conscience, and the shared duty to act with integrity. It argued that goodness does not come from fear or ideology but from conviction. 

Compared with those who read anti-oppressive or DEI-based texts, participants exposed to this values-based message showed no rise in defensiveness, antisemitism, or toxicity. They rated the message as 20% more meaningful, 19% less exaggerated, and 17% less biased. They were also 12% less likely to describe Jews as racist.

The difference was visible in their words. “It reminded me that compassion is a shared duty as well as a personal decision,” one participant wrote. Others described feeling hopeful and inspired to act with integrity. 

The same science that revealed how anti-oppressive messaging breeds resentment now shows that shared moral language restores connection.

The evidence points to one conclusion: Moral education must return to universal American values. 

That means rebuilding the institutions that teach it. The same voices that sold identity politics cannot credibly offer its cure. It is not believable that Black Lives Matter can now deliver moral coherence, or that the ADL is the best candidate to undo the divisions it helped create. Their frameworks were built around hierarchy and guilt. They cannot now lead a movement based on equality and responsibility.

The challenge ahead requires constructing new institutions rooted in both data and moral truth, institutions that see the human being before the category. America’s original moral discovery still waits for completion. It begins with the same conviction that founded the nation and animated its prophets: that we are created equal and are therefore accountable to one another.

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Joel Finkelstein is the co-founder and chief science officer of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which innovates methods in social cyber sciences to better meet threats in the information age. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where his doctoral work focused on the Psychology and Neuroscience of addiction and social behavior. He currently directs the Network Contagion Lab, at the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University.