ADL affiliate JLens launches tracker ranking 100 US companies on Jewish employee support

The tracker evaluates companies across three core categories: Jewish Experience in the Workplace, Religious Accommodations, and Workplace Protections.

JLens, an ADL affiliate and SEC-registered investment advisor, has launched the inaugural JLens Workplace Tracker ahead of the High Holy Days. The transparency tool is designed to assess whether the 100 largest US public companies have adopted the 14 key policies and practices that support Jewish employees.

The tracker evaluates companies across three core categories: Jewish Experience in the Workplace, Religious Accommodations, and Workplace Protections.

Specific metrics include the presence of a Jewish employee resource group (ERG), antisemitism training, protection against ancestry-based and religious discrimination, floating holidays, prayer or reflection spaces, and confidential reporting mechanisms.

Out of the 100 companies evaluated, 30 received medal designations based on publicly available and company-reported information, while the remaining 70 were designated as “Not Rated” due to insufficient public data.

Gold, silver, bronze designations

The recognized companies include Amazon, Bank of America, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase, KKR, Pfizer, S&P Global, Spotify, and Uber in the Gold category.

Silver designations were awarded to Accenture, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly, GE Vernova, Intuit, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Bronze designations went to AbbVie, Adobe, Alphabet, American Express, Apple, Citigroup, CrowdStrike, Medtronic, Morgan Stanley, Netflix, Palo Alto Networks, and Texas Instruments.

In a press release issued last Wednesday, Ari Hoffnung, managing director of JLens, emphasized the practical challenges faced by Jewish employees during the holiday season and when requesting religious accommodations.

“Asking for religious accommodation is not easy. A new Jewish employee who has not accrued enough time off, facing the Jewish High Holidays a few weeks into the job, has to decide whether to raise it with a manager they barely know,” Hoffnung stated in the release.

“When a company publishes its religious accommodation policy and walks new hires through it at orientation, that employee is asking for something routine rather than something extraordinary.”

JLens Workplace Guide

Alongside the tracker, JLens released The JLens Workplace Guide: Practices that Support Jewish Employees at Work, which highlights examples such as KKR’s Jewish Heritage Network, Alphabet’s holiday scheduling guide, Citigroup’s floating Heritage Day, and Salesforce’s multi-faith prayer space.

The initiative comes amid growing data highlighting workplace gaps and hiring biases. According to Clal’s Jewish@Work 2024 survey, 13% of Jewish employees reported considering leaving a job due to their experiences as a Jew at work.

Furthermore, a field experiment sponsored by the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research claimed to have found that Jewish American and Israeli American job applicants faced measurable disparities in positive response rates compared to peers with Western European backgrounds.

JLens stressed that the Workplace Tracker is an informational tool rather than a ranking or a measure of employee experience. It also noted that companies can submit updated information for review at any time.