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After a long career at the Anti-Defamation League, Aryeh Tuchman has left for a senior role at the Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog group that is often critical of the ADL
(JTA) — Aryeh Tuchman, a veteran antisemitism researcher who spent nearly two decades at the Anti-Defamation League, is joining the Nexus Project, a rival watchdog, to lead a new center devoted to researching antisemitism.
The move brings a senior figure from the country’s most prominent antisemitism watchdog to an organization that has repeatedly challenged the ADL’s approach to defining and responding to antisemitism, particularly in debates over Israel, campus activism and political polarization.
The most recent example came last November, when Nexus publicly criticized the ADL for launching an initiative to “monitor” the administration of Zohran Mamdani for antisemitic bias following his election as New York City mayor. Nexus called the move “divisive, hyperbolic and aggressive,” warning that it risked deepening Jewish communal divisions and playing into far-right hands.
Nexus announced this week that Tuchman will serve as the inaugural director of its new Nexus Center for Antisemitism Research, which the organization says will focus on improving the quality, rigor and nuance of research used by policymakers, Jewish institutions and the public.
Tuchman has most recently worked as a senior leader in the ADL’s Center on Extremism, where he helped oversee research on antisemitic incidents, extremist movements and conspiracy theories. He frequently served as a key methodological authority for the ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents, an influential report widely cited in the media.
For Tuchman, the move represents both continuity and change.
“I’ve spent my career trying to understand antisemitism in all its forms,” he said in an interview. “This is a chance to take everything I’ve learned and apply it in a new setting, with the hope of contributing something constructive to a very difficult moment.”
Nexus is known for challenging the ADL over how antisemitism should be defined. The group promotes the “Nexus Document,” a framework that seeks to distinguish antisemitism from most criticism of Israel while acknowledging that some anti-Israel rhetoric can target Jews as Jews. The ADL, by contrast, has strongly backed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which has been widely adopted by governments and institutions but criticized by some scholars and civil liberties groups for blurring the line between antisemitism and political speech.
Nexus leaders rejected the idea that Tuchman’s move represents a rebuke of the ADL.
“If we really wanted to repudiate the ADL, it would be hard to argue that the best way to do that was to hire one of their senior researchers,” said Alan Solow, the chair of the Nexus Project’s board of directors. “Our intent wasn’t to make a statement about the ADL. Our intent was to find the best person in the field to build something new.”
Founded in 2019, Nexus describes itself as an antisemitism watchdog that also seeks to defend democratic norms and free speech. The organization is fiscally sponsored by the New Israel Fund and has often been associated with liberal or progressive Jewish politics, though it does not describe itself using those labels and says its positions reflect views held by most American Jews.
The new research center will not attempt to replicate the ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic incidents or conduct real-time tracking of extremist groups, according to Nexus. Instead, it plans to focus on public opinion research, analysis of existing studies and original scholarship aimed at what its leaders see as unresolved questions in the field.
Tuchman said the opportunity to build a new research institution from the ground up was the primary reason he left the ADL, where he began working in his mid-20s after earning advanced degrees in Jewish history and receiving rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University.
