The ADL’s new appointee has a shocking history of criticizing Israel and slamming Jews who oppose anti-Semitism as being racist. But, unfortunately, it seems that her bizarrely anti-Jewish statements are actually consistent with the organization’s new direction.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was established in 1913 with the expressed purpose of combatting the defamation of the Jewish people. This mandate has taken on a politically left-wing perspective and issues concerning Israel are problematic for the organization. But this Zionist ambivalence was settled with the appointment of Tema Smith as the ADL’s newest Director for Jewish Outreach. 

In a tweet that has since been deleted, Smith retweeted and praised an article published in Thought Catalog in August 2014 titled, “There Are No Good Guys In The Gaza-Israel Conflict”. While noting that Hamas had fired nearly 3,000 rockets at Israeli cities, it blamed the conflict on Israeli “settlements” and the blockade of Gaza.

She also retweeted another piece urging Jews to “repent for Gaza’s dead” while justifying Palestinian terrorism as a  valid option.

“Here’s the thing: Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism,” Tema Smith tweeted two years ago.

Smith’s anti-Israel bias is clearly apparent in her role on the  Board of Directors of the New Israel Fund of Canada. The New Israel Fund openly demonizes Israel, supports BDS, and has been cited by NGO Monitor as having troubling affiliations with Palestinian organizations. 

Smith was also a fellow at the Israel Policy Forum which engages in anti-Israel activism. 

But Smith’s anti-Israel sentiments seem to make her even more suited for a position with the ADL. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, was quoted in an article in Front Page Mag in 2016 praising BDS activists for “the earnestness of their motives.” Greenblatt also came out in praise of notorious anti-Semitic/anti-Israel congressman Ilhan Omar, calling her “inspiring”. 

Two years ago, Greenblatt and the ADL stood with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch against Israel. They also cosigned a Black Lives Matter letter alongside anti-Israel hate groups like JVP. This was one of several anti-Israel letters or letters with anti-Israel groups that the ADL had signed on to that year.

But Smith takes this even further by opposing Jews’ rights to defend themselves, even siding with openly anti-semitic actors. In December 2021, Wilkey, a British rapper, was kicked off of Twitter for refusing to retract statements about “Satanic Jews” and comparing Jews to the Klu Klux Klan. Smith criticized the negative Jewish response as being racist, tweeting that “the Jewish community’s reactions to antisemitism coming from black people is inherently tied to (implictly racist) fears of black violence.”

In December 2018, Smith also objected to increasing security at synagogues as being “based in white supremacy.”

Even more shocking was her defense of the Muslim murderer of Sarah Halimi in 2017. The Jewish physician was thrown out of her window by her assailant while he yelled, “Allahu Akhbar” and “I killed the Satan.” Smith tweeted that the English-language coverage of the murder was “misleading and inflammatory.”

After she was appointed, Smith responded to criticisms of her past remarks in an article in Medium. In her response, she explained that, as a women of color, she had suffered from racism and sexism and suggests that any criticism of her is based in racism and sexism.

“Declaring women who are both Black and Jewish prima facie as dangerous, illegitimate, and not worthy of space at our communal table is racist, and neither I, nor ADL will stand for it,” she wrote. At no point in her article does she relate to any of the specific criticisms. 

In the article, Smith refers to herself as a “staunch Zionist”, though she routinely refers to Israel as “the occupied territories.”

Smith’s overriding allegiance to left-wing anti-Jewish values was expressed last year when she described her role at 18Doors, an organization that connects with “interfaith families”*. She defined part of her role as working to “educate the Jewish community on race and racism as a speaker and writer.”

In this regard, she is entirely in synch with the ADL’s revised mission which came to the forefront in the recent controversy surrounding Whoopi Goldberg when she claimed the Holocaust was not racism as it was “between white people.” The ADL had, in fact, changed its definition of racism to that effect, defining on its website as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”.

The ADL came under fire for this after Goldberg’s egregious statements and subsequently changed its online definition of racism. It now reads, “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”

Though the ADL has updated its definition of racism, it is unclear whether Smith has followed suit. In an op-ed for the extremist Forward site, Tema Smith argued that black anti-semitism didn’t really exist because “antisemitism in the black community is shown to be the symptom of the structures of racism in the United States”. Last year, she attacked Jewish institutions that “platform speakers who call Critical Race Theory and antiracism inherently antisemitic.”

*It should be noted that Jewish law does not recognize the concept of interfaith marriage. By Jewish law, marriage may only be between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman.