Earlier this year, the Asian American Foundation (TAAF), a new philanthropic nonprofit co-founded by billionaires of Asian descent, hosted an invite-only summit in Manhattan. The event was timed to coincide with Asian American heritage month, and featured celebrities such as the actors Michelle Yeoh and Steven Yeun. TAAF had launched in the spring of 2021, in response to a wave of violence directed against East and Southeast Asian Americans. The organizers hoped to defend, and be the leading voice for, a beleaguered community, with the goal of ending “discrimination, slander, and violence.”

In a number of ways, TAAF was closely tied to and modelled on the Anti-Defamation League, which, since its founding, in 1913, has pursued a twofold mission, “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” The A.D.L. was active in the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, and later advocated on behalf of Japanese Americans who had been held in internment camps during the Second World War. It has also been criticized for gathering information on Arab American, Black, and anti-apartheid organizations, for which it settled a civil lawsuit and denied wrongdoing. TAAF appointed the A.D.L.’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, as the only non-Asian member of its board. The foundation borrowed office space from the A.D.L., and its “anti-hate analyst” was trained and coached by a manager in the A.D.L.’s Center on Extremism, which conducts an annual audit of antisemitic incidents.

In the run-up to the summit, the relationship between TAAF and the A.D.L. had become a focus of controversy. More than seventy Asian Pacific American and allied groups called on TAAF to “drop the A.D.L.” based on Greenblatt’s public criticism of some pro-Palestine activists and his support for Israel, whose military, using American bombs, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. When, at the A.D.L.’s own summit, in March, the organization honored Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, TAAF pulled its anti-hate analyst from the program. At the TAAF event, invitees were given only the barest outline of an agenda. “They didn’t even share their programming,” an employee of one grantee group told me. “I was, like, I don’t understand what’s going on.” Some in attendance said that this was an attempt to prevent demonstrations, though protesters carrying an “Asians for a Liberated Palestine” banner showed up outside the venue anyway. (TAAF disputes that it withheld the agenda for that reason.)

On the first day of the summit, a panel titled “State of Hate: How Do We Fight Extremism Right Now?” aimed to call attention to prejudice not just against Asian Americans but against all minorities. The speakers included Remaya Campbell, the A.D.L. manager who mentored the TAAF analyst. When the panellists took their seats onstage, there was a ripple of confusion: Campbell, who is African American, had draped a kaffiyeh around her neck. Others in the room were wearing the scarves, too, but Campbell worked for the A.D.L., and Greenblatt was seated at the foot of the stage.

Since October 7th, Campbell, like some other A.D.L. employees, had objected to Greenblatt’s denunciation of student protesters—some of whom he referred to as “campus proxies” of Iran—and to his emphatic equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. “The Jewish community was in a lot of pain,” a former A.D.L. employee told me. “But literally overnight, the A.D.L. came up with a response that many of us found very alarming.” The methodology for the antisemitism audit, for instance, was changed to count various “expressions of opposition to Zionism.” (An A.D.L. spokesperson told me that the group is “very exacting in what we consider antisemitism. Criticizing the State of Israel is not inherently antisemitic; criticizing Bibi Netanyahu, criticizing settlements in the West Bank, criticizing policies toward Arab Israelis—none of that is antisemitic.”) Staff in the Center on Extremism sent a letter to their boss, explaining that the A.D.L. was losing trust with “other extremism researchers, media outlets, anti-hate organizations, civil rights groups and—perhaps most concerningly—large swaths of the Jewish community that we are committed to serving.” In January, an A.D.L. executive, Yaël Eisenstat, reportedly resigned over Greenblatt’s public praise of Elon Musk, who had recently promised to suspend users who invoke certain pro-Palestinian terms on X—but had also endorsed an antisemitic, white-supremacist conspiracy. (Eisenstat wrote on LinkedIn that she was leaving for another job.)

Immediately after the TAAF panel concluded, Campbell received an e-mail from the A.D.L.’s human-resources department, summoning her to a meeting. (The A.D.L.’s spokesperson said that the group would not comment on personnel matters; Greenblatt has clarified that the kaffiyeh is “not a symbol of hate.”) Others at the summit told me that Campbell had confided in them that the A.D.L. would probably make her life difficult until she quit. Within three weeks, she did. The episode reflected a crisis of mission at the A.D.L., which was now spilling over into TAAF. Was it possible to advocate for the rights of a single marginalized group and be broadly humanitarian at the same time?

During the past year of protests and signature-gathering on behalf of Palestinians, I’ve noticed the enthusiastic involvement of many Asian Americans—an identity group that encompasses people of broadly Asian heritage, Pacific Islanders, and Native Hawaiians, including a significant number of Muslim Americans. In progressive political spaces, Palestinian Americans have also been considered part of this coalition. I joined in solidarity efforts last fall, as the war became bloodier. I went to rallies, helped to circulate a letter condemning Israel’s discriminatory treatment of Palestinians and its U.S.-funded war on Gaza, and signed grassroots petitions opposing the killing of Palestinian journalists and calling on reporters to provide fair coverage.

There’s a bit of an irony here: over the years, many Asian immigrant groups have looked to the Jewish community as a template for making it in America—being seen, getting organized, and exercising power. Gish Jen’s satirical novel, “Mona in the Promised Land,” which takes place in the nineteen-sixties, tells the story of Mona Chang, a teen-age Shanghainese American in Scarshill, an upscale suburb of New York, who becomes so enamored of the Jewish culture around her that she decides to convert. As Jen’s narrator observes: the Chinese are “the New Jews, after all, a model minority and Great American Success.”

In 2020, when anti-Asian incidents were on the rise, Greenblatt offered the A.D.L.’s expertise in tracking hate to a group of prominent Asian Americans. Li Lu, the Tiananmen Square activist turned head of Himalaya Capital; Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo; Joe Tsai, the chairman of Alibaba; Joseph Bae, the co-C.E.O. of the investment firm KKR; Peng Zhao, the C.E.O. of Citadel Securities; and Sheila Lirio Marcelo, the founder of Care.com, all joined Greenblatt in creating TAAF. Amid the calamities of the pandemic, these wealthy leaders wanted to support Asian American causes. As Bae explained in an episode of the interview series “Goldman Sachs Talks,” during the beginning of the pandemic, “I had all four of my kids back. We were out at our summer home for six months together. And that’s really when you started seeing a lot of these articles, things on social media around anti-Asian hate. . . . Asian Americans don’t have the equivalent of the N.A.A.C.P. for the Black community. We do not have the equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League for the Jewish community. That needs to be built.” (TAAF and the A.D.L. denied my requests for on-the-record interviews. This article is based on conversations that I had with more than twenty people knowledgeable about the organizations, including former employees.)

TAAF seemed to replicate many aspects of the A.D.L. It initially decided to focus on three areas: anti-hate programs to prevent violence, education in Asian American history, and “narrative change.” It would conduct an ongoing public-opinion survey of attitudes toward Asian Pacific Americans and make grants to nonprofits and academic institutions that serve the community. These grantees would turn out to be primarily liberal, if not left-wing: an orientation shaped by the history of the Asian American movement and Asian American studies, going back to the late nineteen-sixties. (A spokesperson for TAAF told me that the group reflects the “range of ideologies” in Asian Pacific America.)

TAAF launched with the claim of having raised $1.1 billion—money that was badly needed, given the lack of philanthropic capital for Asian American causes. The spokesperson told me that, in its first three years, it has disbursed thirty-one million dollars to support community responses to Anti-Asian violence, anti-hate trainings for prosecutors, the prevention of youth bullying, K-12 teacher training, and media and pop-culture projects, such as a fellowships in film and television with the Sundance Institute, among other initiatives. The foundation later clarified that the billion-dollar figure included third-party corporate and philanthropic commitments related to Asian Americans.

The early days of TAAF have also been marked by internal political disagreements. In the summer of 2023, when the Supreme Court was poised to side with the conservative activist Edward Blum to strike down what remained of affirmative action, TAAF struggled to formulate a response. Some board members felt that affirmative action did disadvantage Asian students, and that as an advocacy group for Asian Americans, that should be their chief concern; many employees disagreed and favored an expression of solidarity with Black, Latino, and other populations who benefitted from the policy. After extended deliberation, TAAF issued a statement that tried to have it both ways, saying that it “supports race-conscious admissions” and condemns “practices where a discriminatory lens targets Asian Americans and/or other underrepresented communities.”