ADL

ADL

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 by Sigmund Livingston, a Chicago lawyer, in response to the lynching of Leo Frank and rising anti-Semitism. Over more than a century, Adl built a permanent endowment—the Anti-Defamation League Foundation—to fund its advocacy, education, and legal work. Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama White House aide and entrepreneur, has run the organization since 2015, presiding over an endowment that Altss estimates at roughly $125 million in total assets. The endowment's investment posture is heavily weighted toward commercial real estate. The foundation holds the Adl National Headquarters at 605 Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, a property it has occupied and managed for decades. Additional owned offices include the Los Angeles Southwest Regional Office and a Jerusalem headquarters, giving the portfolio a tri-city real estate footprint across North America and Israel. The foundation also maintains an Art for Adl Portfolio, a collection likely used for fundraising and donor cultivation, alongside a Memorial to the Holocaust installation spanning Venice, Paris, and Kaunas. Adl invests across venture stages—from seed to late-stage expansion—though deal-level specifics are not publicly disclosed. The Adl endowment reports to Chief Financial Officer Susan Roberson. The Board of Directors is chaired by Ben Sax and Nicole Mutchnik, who oversee the fiduciary stewardship of the foundation alongside Greenblatt. Adl's Denver chapter joined the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce in 2021, an operational signal of local-level institutional relationship-building. The Leon and Marilyn Klinghoffer Memorial Foundation, named for the victim of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, operates as a closely affiliated philanthropic vehicle. Adl's structural differentiator is its endowment's real-asset concentration. Unlike most mission-driven foundations that default to public equities and fixed income, Adl's known holdings tilt heavily toward directly owned commercial real estate in gateway cities—a tangible, inflation-hedged allocation strategy that doubles as operational infrastructure for its advocacy work. The foundation's Israel and West Coast property exposure gives it a geographic diversification uncommon among peer civil-rights endowments.