What the ADL should have said in response to Elon Musk’s salute
The ADL should call balls and strikes, regardless of who is throwing the pitch.
Clockwise from upper left: A dance troupe performs a musical revue titled “Heil Hitler” circa 1938; Elon Musk on Monday; Adolf Hitler; a fan at a British soccer match in 2021; neo-Nazis in Australia in 2023; members of Blood Tribe and Goyim Defense League in Florida in 2023. Photo by Photos by Wikimedia Commons; by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images; PhotoQuest/Getty; Michael Currie/SOPA Images/Light Rocket via Getty; Northumbria police; and Stephanie Keith/Getty. Collage by Samuel Eli Shepherd via Canva.
By Jodi Rudoren January 24, 2025
This is an adaptation of our editor-in-chief’s weekly newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered to your inbox on Friday afternoons.
The most shocking thing that happened in this first week of the second coming of President Donald Trump was not the attempt to cancel birthright citizenship or the blanket pardons of Jan. 6 rioters. It was the Anti-Defamation League’s bizarre and baseless rush to declare Elon Musk’s post-inaugural performance an “awkward gesture” and definitively “not a Nazi salute.”
Musk thrusting his right arm out in what neo-Nazis around the world immediately recognized — and celebrated — as echoing a “Heil Hitler” salute was not such a surprise. This is a man who has platformed the white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the founder of the Daily Stormer; endorsed the Great Replacement Theory; and echoed antisemitic tropes almost too many times to count.
What was alarming was the ADL’s seeming abdication of its historic role spotlighting such problematic gestures wherever they occur, something CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frequently describes as “calling balls and strikes” rather than being on “the red team or the blue team.” It’s hard not to see this moment as clear evidence of the chilling effect caused by Trump and Musk’s authoritarianism, especially given Musk’s 2023 threat to sue the ADL for billions because it called out antisemitism on his social media platform.
The fact that the reaction to both Musk’s gesture and the ADL’s statement broke along predictable political axes is even more upsetting. Leftist Trump-criticizers Bend the Arc and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez rushed to lambast both, Trump-friendly Jewish leaders largely remained silent or, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, touted Musk’s pro-Israel credentials.
Antisemitism, like most complicated societal problems, is not linear or binary. We do not live inside a baseball game; our job is not to cheer one side and jeer the other. But we do need, now more than ever, leaders we can trust to call balls and strikes regardless of who is throwing the pitch — or making historically dangerous gestures.
Excuses for some
As many others have already pointed out, ADL’s own website is straightforward and unequivocal in describing the “Hitler salute” as simply “raising an outstretched right arm with the palm down,” which is what Musk did. Greenblatt, who took the helm at ADL in 2015 after working in Silicon Valley and the Obama Administration, has a long and strong record of calling out teenagers, corrections officers, sports fans, firefighters, teachers, athletes and political figures for doing so.
He wrote a 2019 column in The Hill that described photos of students doing the salute as “disturbing” and “shocking.” In 2022, he argued in an essay on Medium that an Alabama school’s decision to discipline a Jewish student for complaining when his teacher made the class “Heil Hitler” was “absolutely outrageous.”
“Antisemitism has shamefully become all too common in sports,” he tweeted after European soccer fans raised their outstretched right arms with palms down in 2022.
“It is absolutely despicable for anyone, let alone a law enforcement officer, to be giving the Nazi salute,” he posted after an incident in Belgium in 2020.
“Hate like this can NEVER become status quo for our youth,” he said in support of a California teen who wrote a 2019 essay in the Forward about seeing kids do the salute on Snapchat and at a soccer game.
“Disturbing that children think it’s acceptable to give Nazi salutes or say ‘Heil Hitler’ in a Jewish teacher’s classroom,” he said in February 2022. “Intervention is needed immediately to help ensure these children understand the seriousness of their #antisemitic behavior.”
And in December 2016, Greenblatt did not equivocate when people at a far-right political conference raised outstretched right arms with palms down in response to Richard Spencer’s hailing of Trump’s first election: “There is nothing fun or exuberant about Heil Hitler salutes unless u r a fascist, anti-Semite, racist or maybe all 3.”
Which is why it was so troubling to see Monday’s definitive excusal of Musk’s gesture within three hours of when he made it. Particularly because there was an easy alternative available that would not smack of capitulation to the world’s richest — and now seemingly second-most-powerful — man.
The danger of collaboration
The right thing to do would have been to say something like: “Look, we don’t know why Elon Musk made this gesture, and if he has a reasonable explanation, we’re eager to hear it. But this is a good time to remind everyone that it’s never OK to do such a salute, if only because it will inevitably be interpreted — as evidenced by the instant celebration by neo-Nazis online — as venerating Hitler and his Jew hatred.”
I texted Greenblatt the next morning asking how we could know for certain that Musk’s was “an awkward gesture” and “not a Nazi salute,” as ADL had declared. “How do we know anything?” he responded.
“Right,” I replied. “So why declare if we don’t know?”
“I said what I saw,” Greenblatt texted. “That’s all.”
“Like Elon Musk, I’ve been excited in public plenty of times. I’ve done exaggerated waves, clapping, finger snaps — but somehow I’ve never accidentally stretched my arms out stiffly at a 45-degree angle not once but twice.”Eric K. Ward, extremism expert
A lot of people on the left have been arguing for years, and especially since the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, that Greenblatt’s ADL has improperly focused on the antisemitism of the anti-Zionist left versus the white supremacist right. This column is not about that — partly because the accusation itself is part of the false binary baseball-game paradigm, and mostly because there is something much more important at stake.
The question Monday’s events brought to the fore is whether, as Trump and Musk move to circumvent the Constitution and otherwise undermine our democratic institutions and principles like free speech, we will continue to have trustworthy arbiters calling balls and strikes without regard to the pitcher.
This is as much about independent, non-ideological news outlets as it is about watchdog groups and whistleblowers. We need people to stand up to authoritarianism, not capitulate to it. Which is why I was also troubled on Monday by President Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons of family members and top aides. If leaders can absolve all around them of wrongdoing, how will we ever hold the powerful to account?
“That’s the danger of collaboration,” Eric K. Ward, a scholar of extremism, said when I asked him yesterday about the reaction to Musk’s gesture. “It may come dressed in the language of pragmatism, but it is a weapon of authoritarianism. It calls on us to sacrifice the most vulnerable to proximity to power. It makes us complicit in the activities of those who might seek to do harm.”
Ward, who has worked with Greenblatt and the ADL, did not equivocate about the gesture itself.
“Like Elon Musk, I’ve been excited in public plenty of times,” he told me. “I’ve done exaggerated waves, clapping, finger snaps — but somehow I’ve never accidentally stretched my arms out stiffly at a 45-degree angle not once but twice.
“I get awkward moments happen,” Ward added. “But I can’t normalize a gesture that evokes some of the darkest chapters in history.”
The silence of the bystander
A Forward reader named Jon Garfunkel shared with me the letter he wrote to the ADL this week to complain about its response to Musk’s gesture. In it, he cited a famous Elie Wiesel quote: “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.”
The ADL, of course, is not supposed to be a bystander, but a bold and brave advocate for Jews and against hate. It has done mostly that since its founding in 1913, and we will need it to keep doing so every day of this Trump 2.0 administration.
By Thursday, as Musk reveled in all the hullabaloo over his “gesture” with an emoji-filled post of crass Holocaust puns, I was glad to see Greenblatt return to his role.
“The Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it,” he wrote on X. “@elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”
I reached out to Greenblatt to ask whether, in retrospect, it had been a mistake to say so quickly and definitely on Monday that Musk’s move had not been a Hitler salute, and to talk generally about the challenge of calling out antisemitism in an age of threats and retribution. He did not respond on Thursday; this morning, he texted from the airplane as he flew back from Davos, where he’d been on a panel about antisemitism, and said we could talk more next week.
Meanwhile, I got an email from a Holocaust survivor named Alice Muller, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1932 and told her story in the 2023 book My Name is Alice,
At age 9, Muller told me, she saw her “father being taken by the Slovak Nazis” and then had to hide in an attic with her mother and brother. At one point, her mother and a Jewish neighbor paid off a Nazi official with a sweater and 500 kronen, and she had to give a Nazi salute in order to stay safe.
“Two things can be learned from this event: First is you pauperize yourself in order to save yourself,” Muller wrote. “The second thing is I knew how to make a Nazi salute.
Someone “who is trusted by most of the world should state that it is proper to avoid gestures that remind people of Nazi salutes even if unintentional,” she added. “Elon will not admit he was possibly wrong. It is up to us to indicate that the world would prefer to avoid such salutes in case they create upset for survivors and their progeny.”
It is, indeed, up to all of us, and it’s not even that hard.
