Pros
Great mission. Really smart, deeply expert and dedicated and nice colleagues. We are doing things that really matter. Team members have your back. We get deserved respect and have real influence with government officials and tremendous access to them in Administration and Congress and States. We are getting better at other campaigns. We have really great volunteers in the field. Our staff do all the programmatic work and many fundraise fantastically. Our professional Fundraising department is terrific, and our Communications team particularly amazing. We are a real player in our issue areas. Offices all over the country so we are not just in NY and Washington. And we have a global focus too. We produce some excellent research and reports on antisemitism, domestic extremism, online hate. Challenging environment in many good ways.
Cons
Extremely hierarchical and lots of bottlenecks because CEO has to make nearly every decision. CEO is very smart person and great fundraiser. Entrepreneur. Some super strategic ideas. Creative and great media presence. Not a natural for running a people organization but has worked on it. But CEO can also chase too many shiny things and news cycles. Sometimes policy is made by tweet. Jerks everyone around to protect right political flank and then wham! our left one, depending where incoming is coming from at any given time. That can smack staff around and for some it can make it hard to chart a consistent or longer term course. And occasionally he can be a bully. Though admittedly sometimes a lovely person too. Some staff say they are scared to speak up because they worry about retaliation. May not happen but feels like it could. At times our CEO seems to have maybe not disdain but maybe impatience for the civil rights part of our mission and those in education and regional offices and civil rights and government relations groups who are tasked to pursue it. The organization’s pattern of bad process makes it hard if you are center left to progressive and certainly if you are a person of color. Example: ADL said just about nothing after the murder of George Floyd for about a week until staff blew up and then only after that resulted in a terrible morale hit and some huge anger and chaos did the organization begin to meaningfully respond. By the way, we are allowed to say we support Black lives matter but at same time we can’t use the #BLM hashtag. We also can’t say Occupied Territories but we can say Territories. And we can say Israel-Palestinian conflict but we can’t use the word Palestine so we can’t say or write Israel-Palestine conflict. Example: ADL had for decades a policy supporting reproductive freedom but our CEO now wants us to downplay that since we got criticism from the right because we asked - as apparently we did for many years - the Congressional Judiciary Committee to question Kavanaugh about his position on abortion. Jewish women may be the group of women most in favor of reproductive choice in terms of percentage, polls show. And this is such a civil right issue. So we no longer can include mention of it around Supreme Court nominations. And when Texas passed a horrific abortion law we couldn’t even support our allies by retweeting a single statement from them. Many staff went crazy and the CEO relented after a huge almost mutiny and then we tweeted. After all. Just a tweet in an area we supposedly supported. The CEO later got angry and scolded a bunch of us saying we should have been grateful that he offered to pay if any Texas staff needed an abortion. Whoa. Not the point at all. Example: anti Critical Race Theory laws. Right in our portfolio many think because of what we do in Education. We do anti-bias training that talks about systemic racism. CEO says it’s too partisan and we need to keep our head down. Staff goes nuts and there is a partial sort of OK after huge distress to do a few things. Not a great process, to say the least. Again. Example: there is public pushback from right wing critics on the ADL education document on our website defining racism that makes whiteness and its privileges and the oppression of people of color central. Acknowledges racializing of Jews and others. Acknowledges there can be terrible racial prejudice against people generally considered white like most American Jews. Six months of process and deep expertise went into it our Education experts’ work on this definition document. But it’s suddenly found and publicly criticized as being too woke. In 72 hours the CEO appears to cave into in addition to others right wing trolls and right wing donors who threaten to pull funding. There is no inclusive deliberative process that includes our organization’s experts in any meaningful way. It’s terribly rushed and a public cave in and the CEO puts up an “interim definition” that is very flawed and not backed by our experts. No more about whiteness. Nothing about systemic racism. Some of our staff of color in particular are now saying they will look for other jobs. Example: we don’t do law enforcement exchanges with Israel any more but we can’t say so publicly because it would give Jewish Voice for Peace and Deadly Exchange a public win. So we have contorted things we can say. No one Black in senior leadership. Only three women out of 11 on the C suite executive team.