RJC Director Matt Brooks
RJC Director Matt BrooksEthan Miller/Getty Images

The top official of the Republican Jewish Coalition said the Anti-Defamation League had potentially compromised itself with its criticism of President-elect Donald Trump’s words and actions during the campaign.

The attack by the RJC on the ADL signaled difficult times ahead for the more progressive-left members of the American Jewish community as they seek to establish ties with the nascent Trump administration.

“It seems to me at critical times [in the] course of this campaign, a pattern emerged that the ADL put their thumb on the scale in a way that hadn’t been done by [Jonathan] Greenblatt’s predecessor, Abe Foxman,” Matt Brooks, the director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Wednesday in a post-election conference call, referring to the current national director and his longtime predecessor.

“The ADL has put itself in a potentially compromising position going forward” in terms of its relations with the next administration, Brooks said. “We’ll have to see about that.”

Responding to Brooks, the ADL said its bailiwick was to point out anti-Semitism and bigotry wherever it was manifested.

“The Anti-Defamation League has never taken sides in elections,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “For more than one hundred years, we have called out anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry whenever we see it and wherever its source. This is not a matter of politics, but of principles. As President-elect Trump said last night, ‘it is time for us to come together as one united people,’ and we look forward to working with the new Administration — and all Americans — toward that goal.”

Jewish Democrats on social media have routinely called out mainstream Jewish groups for remaining silent on Trump. The groups in turn have said that their tax-exempt status could be put at risk if they weighed in. Bend the Arc, a left-wing activist group that openly attacked Trump through an affiliated political action committee, repeatedly called on Brooks’ RJC to speak out against the candidate.

The contretemps between the ADL and RJC also signaled that Republican Jews, who have been ambivalent about the success of the political outsider who assumed the leadership of their party, may gingerly be seeking a way into his good graces.

Trump’s top Jewish aides have angrily dismissed the ADL’s claims against Trump, accusing it of being partisan. Brooks in the conference call said that attaching the stigma of anti-Semitism to Trump, whose daughter is Jewish, was a “bridge too far.”