The project combines institutional assessments, interviews and documented cases. Those forms of evidence answer different questions: a museum score measures performance against the ADL's criteria, while an interview describes a participant's experience and a case archive records selected events.
Forty Museums Assessed
The ADL said it evaluated 40 museums with input from an external panel of 15 specialists. It examined policies, representation of artists and work, and institutional programming and partnerships. Twelve museums received the lowest rating, while one received the highest.
The organization said 23 museums participated in a review process before publication. Participation does not necessarily mean agreement with a rating. The results concern the assessed institutions and criteria, rather than a statistical sample establishing the behavior of every museum in the United States.
Publishing and Performance
The Times of Israel reported that authors interviewed for the publishing research described pressure to remove Jewish elements from manuscripts, difficulty securing representation and exclusion from events. These experiences were reported by participants and assembled by the ADL; they are not findings by a court about each named institution.
For live entertainment, the initiative assembled 65 cases across 41 locations. The ADL described cancellations, harassment and disrupted appearances involving Jewish or Israeli performers. A collection of cases can document incidents without measuring the probability that any individual artist will experience the same treatment.
A Survey With Important Limits
The ADL's announcement described a July survey of 951 American adults as not nationally representative. Its findings therefore should not be presented as a precise estimate of opinion among all Americans, even where respondents expressed support for Jewish and Israeli participation in cultural life.
That limitation matters when comparing the survey with institutional decisions. A survey response, a canceled performance and an author's account each provide different evidence. Combining them into one broad numerical claim would overstate what the project establishes.
Recommendations and Responses
The initiative offers recommendations for museums, publishers and venues, including explicit attention to antisemitism in institutional policies. Those proposals are the ADL's response to its research, not mandatory standards announced by a regulator.
The next developments will include how institutions respond and whether practices change. The launch establishes a new set of assessments and supporting material that can be examined publicly. Individual claims still need to be evaluated against their underlying evidence, and criticism of Israeli government policy should not automatically be treated as proof of discrimination against a Jewish or Israeli artist.
