ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks onstage ADL’s national conference in March. Photo by Getty Images for Anti-Defamation League
By Arno Rosenfeld
June 13, 2025
For 30 years, Steven Ludwig supported and volunteered for the Anti-Defamation League, including by tracking the spread of hate in his city.
He didn’t expect to see a shift in how the ADL handles authoritarianism, and now he is – with evident pain – quitting its Philadelphia chapter’s board to make a point.
Ludwig, an attorney, served on the local board since the 1990s when a neighbor asked him to join the young leaders section of the civil rights organization. In May, he fired off a scathing resignation letter to Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO.
“Historically, the ADL has been a premier civil rights organization and working in concert with other civil rights organizations,” Ludwig said in an interview. “That focus seems to have been abandoned and there seems to have been a decision made to ally the organization with a very misguided use of antisemitism as cover to implement authoritarianism.”
The ADL said in a statement that it has 23 regional boards with roughly 800 members and that it typically sees 1-2% turnover each year. “We are, of course, disappointed and saddened anytime a volunteer leader chooses to step down, including our board member in Philadelphia,” a spokesperson added.
Ludwig’s resignation came before Greenblatt generated a flurry of criticism for remarks to the Republican Attorney Generals Association last week during which he compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to terrorists.
Steve Sheffey, a Democratic consultant who writes an influential newsletter about Israel and Jewish politics, said in last week’s edition that the “ADL is no longer the same organization it once was and does not deserve the respect it once received.”
After taking a harder line against anti-Zionism, especially since 2022, Greenblatt has directed the ADL to adopt a forceful response to perceived antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations related to the Israel-Hamas war.
That has included calling on universities to investigate whether student clubs were providing material support to Hamas, issuing report cards grading schools on their approach to antisemitism and, more recently, cheering the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate, a permanent resident who has been detained since April when the federal government sought to deport him over his role in campus protests against Israel.
Greenblatt later walked back some of his support for the Trump administration’s approach to campus antisemitism. He said in a note to ADL leadership following his remarks to the Republican attorneys general group that “I will also make a point to continue to call out to the administration the need and constitutional right for due process.”
Ludwig, 66, said he continued to support the ADL’s work monitoring extremism and in schools, including its “No Place for Hate” campaign, some of which the organization has rolled back in recent years.
During his time on the board, Ludwig said he served on its civil rights committee and monitored local events like a speech by Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, when he spoke in Philadelphia. “It was all smooth sailing until recently,” said Ludwig, who works as a management-side employment attorney at Fox Rothschild.
But Ludwig’s letter argued that Greenblatt had abandoned its historic commitment to civil rights issues like voting and immigration rights, rule of law and free speech during the second Trump administration.
“In the past four months, the ADL has failed to stand up against the spread of hatred, the erosion of the rule of law, and the threat of authoritarianism,” Ludwig wrote in the letter, which he shared with the Forward.
He repeatedly cited passages from Greenblatt’s 2022 book “It Could Happen Here,” which condemned authoritarianism.
“Not only could it happen here, Jonathan, it is happening here,” Ludwig added in the letter. “Read your damn book.”
