The Anti-Defamation League kicked off “Never Is Now,” its annual summit on antisemitism and hate, at the Javits Center in Hudson Yards on Monday morning. Some 4,000 people gathered to hear from speakers like Israeli writer and social media influencer Hen Mazzig, CNN host Van Jones and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.
By sundown, however, more than 100 Jews had gathered at a park around the corner in protest, waving signs and chanting “Trump and Musk are bad for Jews” to a klezmer soundtrack.
Organized by a coalition of progressive Jewish groups that included IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire and Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, the aim of the rally was to call out the ADL and its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, for what they perceive as the organization’s support for President Donald Trump and his powerful billionaire adviser, Elon Musk.
While the optics of Jews protesting outside an anti-antisemitism conference might have looked muddy, rallygoers said that their gripe is not with combating antisemitism. Rather, at issue, they said, are the ways in which ADL is fighting the fight.
“ADL nationally, as represented by Jonathan Greenblatt, I think has continued to move rightwards since the first Trump administration,” Rabbi Andy Kahn, who participated in the rally on behalf of Rabbis for Ceasefire, told the New York Jewish Week. “Since the election, at least on the national level, the ADL has kind of been in lockstep with Trump.”
“So really, the rally’s protesting the idea that the ADL speaks on behalf of American Jews writ large,” he added. “The overwhelming majority of American Jews did not vote for Trump in 2024.”
On Monday evening, demonstrators braved the blustery 30-degree evening holding signs with messages like “ADL STOP LICKING BOOTS” and “JEWS SAY NO TO DEPORTATIONS,” eventually marching toward the Javits Center to the rhythm of a marching klezmer band’s drum, tuba and trombone. Hand warmers and groggers, the noisemakers used in the upcoming holiday of Purim, were distributed on tables around Bella Abzug Park, which is about a half-block away from the Javits Center.
(Perhaps ironically, the park — located in the heart of upscale Hudson Yards, Manhattan’s glossiest new neighborhood and home to a high-end shopping mall — is named for the late, Bronx-born Jewish activist and politician who championed women’s rights and social justice.)
A key issue for many in attendance was Elon Musk’s stiff-arm gesture on Inauguration Day, which ignited comparisons to a Nazi salute. The ADL, which historically renders judgments on public accusations of antisemitism, wrote on social media that Musk’s was “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” That drew the ire of many Jewish observers who said it ignored Musk’s record of elevating bigots and antisemites on his social media site, X.
“Mr. Greenblatt, you shouldn’t need us here to say this,” Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for IfNotNow, a Jewish group that “aims to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system,” according to its website, said to the crowd. “You cannot fight antisemitism by enabling antisemitism!”
Following the rally at Bella Abzug Park, demonstrators marched toward the Javits Center, where ADL was holding its “Never is Now” summit on antisemitism and hate, Mar. 3, 2025. (Joseph Strauss)
Demonstrators joined in on the chant, repeating the words, “ADL, don’t deny, we saw the salute with our own eyes!”
Rabbi Koach Baruch Frazier, founder of the Black Trans Torah Club and one of a handful of speakers to address the crowd, said he’d taken part in ADL programs.
“Now let me tell you I was trained by the ADL,” he told the crowd. “I have used their curriculum with folks inside and outside the Jewish community. I actually believe in their mission to combat antisemitism, counter extremism, and battle bigotry wherever and whenever it happens — however, especially now, they have been doing the opposite of what they claim to believe.”
Political differences also made their way inside the “Never Is Now” conference, where earlier that day, Elise Stefanik, Trump’s U.N. ambassador-designate, spoke. She touted the recent executive order on campus antisemitism, which threatens foreign-born students who endorse terrorism with deportation. Her statement received loud cheers from the room.
One of those who left the room was Jewish musician Ari Axelrod, who was named to the New York Jewish Week’s 36 to Watch list in 2021. “I thought that she said a lot of things that were really necessary to be said,” he told JTA, adding that he found Stefanik’s hypothetical statement about Trump and Oct. 7 offensive.
“It seeks to make it an American political issue, and it is neither,” he said. “She should know better.”
While the ADL “deliberately avoids partisanship,” as it declares on its website, the organization has been drawn into ideological battles in recent years. At the “Never Is Now” conference in 2016, when Trump first took office, Greenblatt, alluding to Trump’s proposal idea to create a registry of Muslims, vowed to register himself as a Muslim in solidarity.
On Monday, meanwhile, Greenblatt called Stefanik — the upstate Republican who had previously made comments that echoed the white supremacist “great replacement theory” — “exactly what we need” at the United Nations.
“I don’t think I’m partisan,” Greenblatt told podcaster Joe Lonsdale last October. “My job here … isn’t to play for the red team or the blue team. It’s to play for the Jewish team and the human team. I think my job is calling balls and strikes, so I regularly call out people from the Republican Party, [and] the Democratic Party. And I am often criticized for that.”
Some of that criticism centers around how ADL has responded to pro-Palestinian protests. Playwright Kuros Charney, 49, who attended the rally, said there’s “been a lot of reporting about how the ADL references any Palestinian solidarity event as an antisemitic incident, which really runs the risk of diluting the true meaning of antisemitism.”
Kahn surmised that the ADL has lately shifted to stay in “the good graces” of the current administration. “I don’t know if that’s because [Greenblatt] has become more right wing, or if it’s just a strategy,” Kahn said. “But it does seem that it’s moving in that direction along with the government.”
At the rally, which began at 5:15 p.m. just as conference attendees were hearing from the afternoon’s slate of mainstage speakers, many demonstrators were focused on Musk and his arm gesture. Gary Gulman, the Jewish comedian who recently starred in a very Jewish and very emotional one-man off-Broadway show, “Grandiloquent,” said that was his primary reason for joining the group.
“I mean, we should have been in the streets ever since that day,” Gulman said. “I’m just so outraged, and I feel energized by being around like-minded people, who share similar ideas of morality and ethics and the Jewish way of thought.”
With the Jewish holiday of Purim just over a week away, Frazier called for the crowd to spin their groggers upon hearing the names “Trump” and “Musk,” just as they would for the name “Haman,” the villain of the Purim story, when the Book of Esther is read on the holiday. Unprompted, attendees also booed names of several speakers at the ADL conference, including Gallant and Stefanik.
“We are proud to have more than 4,000 people — young and old, students and community leaders, and people of all backgrounds and faiths – gathered here in New York in support of our mission to combat antisemitism and hate,” an ADL spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week. “We are standing in solidarity against hate in all forms, including the barbarism of Hamas.”
The spokesperson continued: “That’s the real story, not the small number of people associated with a fringe radical group who are not representative of the Jewish community.”
Meanwhile, on the park’s perimeter, 20 or so counter-protesters holding Trump signs gathered on the other side of a police barricade waving a mix of American, Israeli and MAGA flags.
Jewish New Yorker Tim Rosen, 40, said he’d heard about the rally from a WhatsApp group that notifies members about counter protests to attend.
“I try not to miss a chance to show up for Israel, and for America,” said Rosen, pointing out his American flag. “I also tell people, you know, the Islamic terrorists that want to destroy Israel, pretty much also want to destroy America. So basically, that’s why I’m here.”
Another counter-protester held the flag of Betar, a militant, right-wing Zionist group which the ADL added to its extremism database. Another blew loudly on a horn in an effort to drown out the demonstration, while others yelled out chants like “ICE! ICE! ICE!” — that was after a rally speaker referenced Trump’s executive order to deport foreign students deemed to be supporting terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah — and “One more term!”
Rallygoers shot back with their own chants. “The ADL defended Trump, that endangers all of us!” they repeated, occasionally with Musk’s name in place of Trump’s.
“We believe that the ADL’s approach to fighting antisemitism is deeply misguided,” said Morriah Kaplan, co-director of IfNotNow, who called antisemitism “a real and pressing issue.”
“We are deeply committed to fighting antisemitism,” she told the New York Jewish Week, “and in order to fight for the safety and wellbeing of Jews, and fight for the safety and wellbeing of Israelis, we can’t believe the lie that Jewish safety is at odds with other people’s safety.”
Kaplan added, “I don’t think the way to fight [antisemitism] is to excuse Elon Musk’s Nazi salute.”
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