Over a hundred years ago a lawyer stopped by a Chicago vaudeville theater to see a show. The ethnic comedy on display offended him so much that he helped create the ADL.

Both the ADL and antisemites like Candace Owens like to link the organization to the Leo Frank case in which a Jewish man in the South who was lynched after being falsely accused of the murder of a young girl, to make the ADL seem more important.

But the ADL actually had its origins in the B'nai Brith's 'National Caricature Committee' and preceding organizations such as the 'Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee' whose mission was to fight 'ethnic comedy' featuring Jews.

Often being performed by Jews.

The ADL was not founded as a civil rights organization, let alone an anti-lynching group, but, as an anti-defamation group. Hence the name the 'Anti-Defamation League'. Its founding charter began by complaining that "a tendency has manifested itself in American life toward the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage" and declared that the "immediate object of the League is to stop…the defamation."

In the 1900s and 1910s, vaudeville was booming, and successful 'comedians' could record their own phonograph records, cartoons were also taking off and silent movies added another form of entertainment. And about the easiest way to get laughs was with ethnic comedy: Germans, the Irish, blacks, Swedes, Italians and Jews were among the many stereotypes to appear on stage.

While we tend to take free speech, including offensive speech, for granted, this was an era where multiple censorship boards, local ones like those in major cities, and 'voluntary' national ones, along with local and federal law enforcement, not to mention church groups, could decide whether movies would be released and whether theaters would be allowed to put on a show.

Catholics, the Irish, Germans and Jews deployed pressure groups to get the theaters to stop demeaning them. The NAACP had been at it well before the B'nai Brith launched the 'National Caricature Committee' at the initiative of Sigmund Livingston, a member of the German Jewish lodge, who saw an offensive show in Chicago, and Adolf Kraus, a B'nai Brith leader trying to take the local Chicago efforts of the 'Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee' nationwide.

The 'Chicago Anti Stage-Jew Ridicule Committee' was not even the most awkwardly worded ethnic comedy pressure group name, that honor likely went to the elongated 'Society for the Prevention of Ridiculous and Pervasive Misrepresentation of the Irish Character'. The 'National Caricature Committee' streamlined the name and the 'Anti-Defamation League' streamlined it further. Today the ADL and the NAACP prefer their initials over their awkward full names.

But the much more awkward thing about the ADL was how much of its focus was spent on 'shande' politics, policing the wrong kind of Jewish people who were seen as causing antisemitism. Much of the material that the ADL and allied groups objected to was coming from Jewish comedians, theater owners and movie studios. While most of the targets are entirely (and probably deservedly) forgotten, they included future mainstream stars like Fanny Brice who was accused of contributing to "the recrudescence and continuance of the spirit of Anti-Semitism in America".