ADL Senior VP: ‘Kudos To My Former Boss, George Soros’

The more we peel back the curtain on the fraudulent ADL, the more evil we discover their machinations. I have written extensively on their attacks on Jews that they perpetrate while alleging to fight antisemitism. It’s to laugh, it’s to cry.

It is hardly surprising that ADL leadership colluded with the black hand of Soros. Soros has his own category here.

Back in October 2006, Atlas Shrugs posted about Soros’ extensive ties with the nazis, not just as a teen but in the very business dealings that built his fortune:

Atlas Shrugs October 2006; This exchange on 60 minutes between   (they were both ONE WORLDERS) after the war (more here.)

Extended quotation from the 60 Minutes transcript follows:

When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, George Soros’ father was a successful lawyer. He lived on an island in the Danube and liked to commute to work in a rowboat. But knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, he decided to split his family up. He bought them forged papers and he bribed a government official to take 14-year-old George Soros in and swear that he was his Christian godson. But survival carried a heavy price tag. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.

(Vintage footage of Jews walking in line; man dragging little boy in line)

KROFT: (Voiceover) These are pictures from 1944 of what happened to George Soros’ friends and neighbors.

(Vintage footage of women and men with bags over their shoulders walking; crowd by a train)

KROFT: (Voiceover) You’re a Hungarian Jew…

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.

KROFT: (Voiceover) …who escaped the Holocaust…

(Vintage footage of women walking by train)

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Mm-hmm.

(Vintage footage of people getting on train)

KROFT: (Voiceover) …by–by posing as a Christian.

Mr. SOROS: (Voiceover) Right.

(Vintage footage of women helping each other get on train; train door closing with people in boxcar)

KROFT: (Voiceover) And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.

Mr. SOROS: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.

KROFT: In what way?

Mr. SOROS: That one should think ahead. One should understand and–and anticipate events and when–when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a–a very personal experience of evil.

KROFT: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. Yes.

KROFT: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.

Mr. SOROS: Yes. That’s right. Yes.

KROFT: I mean, that’s–that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?

Mr. SOROS: Not–not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t–you don’t see the connection. But it was–it created no–no problem at all.

KROFT: No feeling of guilt?

Mr. SOROS: No.

KROFT: For example that, ‘I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.’ None of that?

Mr. SOROS: Well, of course I c–I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was–well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets–that if I weren’t there–of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would–would–would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the–whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the–I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.  (George Soros, 60 Minutes interview transcript, December 20, 1998)

“ADL Senior VP: ‘Kudos To My Former Boss, George Soros,'” by Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage, February 8, 2022

Obama’s career of political activism began in some ways when he met Eileen Hershenov. He graduated from Columbia University, and as David Remnick put it, “got it into his head to become a community organizer.” After a brief stint actually working for a living, he answered an ad and joined Ralph Nader’s left-wing New York Public Interest Research Group.

His supervisor at the time, Eileen Hershenov, describes having “some really engaged conversations about models of organizing”. After a year, Hershenov pleaded with him to stay, “I asked him if it would help if I got on my knees and begged–and so I did,” but Obama moved on.

So did Hershenov who went on to become the general counsel for the Open Society Foundations, serving “as chief legal officer for one of the nation’s largest private foundations and for the global network of 40 foreign affiliates founded by financier/philanthropist George Soros.”

Hacked emails from the Open Society Foundations show that it bragged of its successes in “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies” in international forums. By then Hershenov was no longer affiliated with the Soros network, but she appears to be unrepentant.

These days, she “oversees” the ADL’s  “policy, program and civil rights work” as the former Jewish organization’s Senior Vice President for Democracy Initiatives. Hershenov was a recent hire who was brought on board during the Jonathan Greenblatt era. Greenblatt, the ADL’s new leader, was a veteran of the Obama administration who has been accused of jettisoning its focus on the Jewish community and Israel in favor of playing the identity politics of the Left.

No single executive may embody the new ADL better than Hershenov who mentored Obama when he was just starting out and proudly worked for George Soros.

“I think I never really understood before as well as I do now that the fight for an open society will never ever end. Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she recently declared.

Now, Hershenov “oversees ADL’s civil rights team, its government relations and community engagement team, the Silicon Valley-based Center for Technology and Society” as well as “the Civil Society Fellowship (a partnership of ADL and the Aspen Institute).”

The Aspen Institute has received significant support from Soros. The Center for Technology and Society is funded by Pierre Omidyar, the Franco-Persian eBay founder who also funds The Intercept which regularly gushes defenses for antisemitism and terrorism against Israel.

The ADL’s Center of Technology and Society board of tech experts include Eli Pariser, the board president of MoveOn and a co-founder of Avaaz. Avaaz, which is also Soros backed, promoted BDS and teamed up with JVP: an anti-Israel hate group that hosted a murderous terrorist, and an anti-Israel activist who claimed that Jews drank Christian blood and republished a bizarre claim that “the Zionists who created Israel and still run it are descended from the Khazars.”

This is the sort of thing that any Jewish organization or any civil rights group concerned with antisemitism ought to be condemning, instead of collaborating with and rewarding.

But the old ADL, flawed as it was, is largely defunct. Like so much of the old liberal institutional infrastructure, it’s being sucked into the black hole money machines of billionaire activists like Soros and Omidyar who have destroyed liberalism and replaced it with their radical politics.

It’s why Eileen Hershenov, who boasts of working for Soros, a lead funder of anti-Israel groups, who has blamed antisemitism on Jews, is now in a key position at a group fighting antisemitism.

At least on paper. The ADL spends more time on everything else, including defending Soros.

“If your favorite politician is attacking George Soros,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL boss warned at the former Jewish group’s Never is Now 2018 conference, “you must stand up and tell them to stop. And do so even if they profess love for Israel up and down.”

If only the ADL defended Jews and Israel half as vigorously as it defends George Soros.

Once upon a time the ADL had condemned Soros’ antisemitism. When Soros blamed antisemitism on Jews, Abe Foxman, the ADL’s former leader, had denounced Soros’ comments as “absolutely obscene.”

But at the new ADL, you are expected to pledge allegiance to Soros and to place him above the Jewish community or the Jewish state. The ADL has more pages defending Soros than it does defending Jewish students facing leftist and Islamist antisemitism on college campuses.

It’s not just Hershenov.

The ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Society has produced the Civil Society Fellowship whose fellows include Julie McCarthy, a leader in the Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program, the Open Society Foundation’s Fiscal Governance Program, and the Open Society Foundations’ Revenue Watch Program. Another Soros network retread, Danielle Keats Citron, who serves as a board member for the Center on Technology and Society and on the ADL’s Task Force on Hate Speech & Journalism had reviewed grants for the Open Society Institute.

Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, had come through the Aspen Institute where he founded the Impact Economy Initiative. Soros is an Aspen backer, but the specific initiative was backed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Greenblatt’s wife, Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute which used to be a centerpiece of the Arab Lobby’s anti-Israel push. (Due to the Abraham Accords, the MEI is still hostile, but somewhat less so.)

It’s unsurprising that Greenblatt and his allies are remaking the ADL into just another of the interchangeable leftist groups looking for handouts from Soros, Omidyar, the Rockefellers, Buffets, Gates and others that have hijacked and are controlling American politics and society.

Institutional capture is an ongoing process. Greenblatt joined the ADL in 2014. Hershenov came on board in 2018. The recent controversial hiring of Tema Smith as Director of Jewish Outreach, despite tweeting, “Jews have to be ok with Palestinians explaining why some turn to terrorism”, and the redefinition of racism to exclude Jews are just the latest in a series of ADL betrayals.

While the ADL bemoans conspiracy theories about Soros (much more so than conspiracy theories about Israel or Jews) there is no denying the fact that what used to be an open society is closing in no small part due to his Open Society networks. Soros is not alone in this regard, he is one of a number of wealthy men of various ethnicities and backgrounds who have managed to centralize public policy through chains of non-profits in much the same way that tech industry monopolies like Amazon and Google have centralized our culture and economy.

What’s happening to the ADL is what has happened to countless Jewish, Christian and non-sectarian organizations that were once liberal and are now just leftist fronts. What the Soviet Union failed to accomplish in its infiltrations, two generations of activists backed by powerful and wealthy men have done by turning every liberal group into the same front.

The ACLU no longer believes in free speech, the Sierra Club no longer favors limiting immigration to protect the environment, Planned Parenthood casually tosses aside its founder, and the ADL no longer defends Jewish civil rights. Indeed Hershenov condemned the Supreme Court for intervening in Gov. Cuomo’s persecution of Jews and Christians….