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The historian who uncovered the ADL’s secret plot against the far-right John Birch Society
(JTA) — A historian leafing through files in an archive discovered how a Jewish organization helped bring down an influential far-right extremist movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s by going undercover and acting as self-appointed spies.
The discovery of the Anti-Defamation League’s covert operation targeting the John Birch Society is the basis of a chapter in a new book by political historian Matthew Dallek of George Washington University. Published in March, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right” is Dallek’s fourth book. It examines the roots of today’s emboldened conservative movement in the United States.
“Birchers” is a history of a group that at its height numbered as many as 100,000 members and “mobilized a loyal army of activists” in a campaign against what it saw as a vast communist conspiracy. He also examines how the Birchers’ mission to defend Christianity and capitalism morphed into a radical anti-civil rights agenda that groups like the ADL saw as an existential threat.
Dallek, who grew up in a Reform Jewish household in Los Angeles, recently sat with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to discuss the rise of the Birchers, how the ADL infiltrated their ranks and whether such tactics are justified in the name of fighting extremism.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
JTA: Before we get into the Jewish aspect of the book, meaning the chapter on the Anti-Defamation League’s relationship with the John Birch Society, let’s take a step back. Who are so-called Birchers? Why do they matter?
Mathew Dallek: The John Birch Society was a household name in the 1960s, becoming the emblem of far-right extremism. It didn’t have huge numbers, but it did penetrate the culture and the national consciousness. Its leader, Robert Welch, had argued at one point that President Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of a communist conspiracy taking over the United States. Welch formed the John Birch Society to educate the American people about the nature of the communist threat.
In its heyday, the group had about 60,000 to 100,000 members, organized into small chapters. They sent out literature trying to give members roadmaps or ideas for what they could do. They believed a mass education of the public was needed because traditional two-party politics was not going to be very effective at exposing the communist threat. They would form front groups such as Impeach Earl Warren [the Supreme Court’s chief justice] or Support Your Local Police. They tried to ban certain books that they viewed as socialistic from being used in schools. Some Birchers ran for school board seats and protested at libraries.
Critics feared that the Birchers were a growing fascist or authoritarian group and that if they were not sidelined politically and culturally then the country could be overrun. The Nation magazine wrote that Birchers essentially had given their followers an invitation to engage in civil war, guerrilla-style. Those fears sparked a big debate about democracy. How does one sustain democracy and, at the height of the Cold War and in the shadow of World War II, Nazi fascist Germany, and the Holocaust?
As you were researching, you came across a trove of historical internal documents from the ADL in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Why did you devote a chapter to what you found in those documents? What did those files reveal to you about the John Birch Society?
These papers are a goldmine. They’re this incredible and often detailed window into the far-right and, in particular, the John Birch Society. They show the ADL had an extensive, multi-dimensional counterintelligence operation that they were running against the Birch Society.
People knew at the time that the ADL was attending events where Birchers were speaking. But the ADL also had undercover agents with code names, who were able to infiltrate the society’s headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, and various chapter officers. They dug up financial and employment information about individual Birchers. And they not only used the material for their own newsletters and press releases, but they also fed information to the media.
Another layer is about a debate that’s been going on: Were the Birchers racist and antisemitic? The Birch Society always insisted that they did not tolerate white supremacy and didn’t want any KKK members. They said they accepted people of all faiths and races. And it’s true that they did have a handful of Jewish and Black members.
But what the ADL found was that a lot of hate was bubbling up from the grassroots and also leaking out from the top. The ADL was able to document this in a systematic way.
Some critics of the ADL today say the organization has strayed from its mission by focusing not just on antisemitism but on a wider array of causes. But from reading your work, it sounds like the ADL even then took an expansive view of its role, examining not just direct attacks on Jews but also how the political environment can jeopardize Jews. Am I getting that right, and why did the ADL devote so many resources to a group like the John Birch Society?
So, a few things: It’s the late ’50s and ’60s, and a civil rights coalition is emerging. Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL, was friendly with Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy went to an ADL event and praised the ADL for speaking out very strongly in defense of democracy and pushing for the equal treatment of all Americans.
Isadore Zack, who helped lead the spy operation, at one point wrote to his colleagues that it was only in a democracy that the Jewish community has been allowed to flourish and so, if you want to defend Jewish Americans, you also have to defend democracy.
There certainly were other threats at the time, but the Birch Society was seen by liberal critics, including the ADL, as a very secretive group that promoted conspiracy theories about communists who often became conflated with Jews.
Would you consider the ADL successful in its campaign against the Birchers?
They were successful. They used surreptitious and in some cases underhanded means to expose the antisemitism and the racism and also interest in violence or the violent rhetoric of the Birch Society in the 1960s.
The ADL was at the tip of the spear of a liberal coalition that included the White House, sometimes the Department of Justice, depending on the issue, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, labor unions, the union-backed Group Research Inc., which was tracking the far-right as well. The ADL was one of the most, if not the most effective at constraining and discrediting the society.
Clearly, however, the Birchers’ ideas never died. They lived on and made a comeback.
It’s somewhat ironic that you reveal the existence of this spying apparatus devoted to targeting an extremist and antisemitic group in the 1960s given the infamy the ADL would earn in a later era, the 1990s, for allegations that they colluded with police agencies in San Francisco to spy on and harass political activists. They eventually settled with the Arab American, Black and American Indian groups that brought a federal civil suit. I know you didn’t study these revelations, which are outside the scope of your book, but could you perhaps reflect on why undercover tactics were seen as necessary or justified?
It’s important to remember that in the mid-20th century, law enforcement in the United States was often led by antisemites or people who were much more concerned with alleged internal communist threats — the threat from the left.
From the ADL’s vantage point, one could not rely on the government entities that were by law and by design supposed to protect Jewish Americans. There was a sense that this work had to be done, at least in part, outside of the parameters of the government.
When I first discovered the ADL’s spying, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I realized they weren’t just spying to spy, they exposed a lot of scary things, with echoes in our own times — like easy access to firearms, a hatred of the government, a denigration and defamation of minority groups. And this was all happening in the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II. I became much more sympathetic; they were very effective, and they had a vision of equality of treatment for all Americans.
It’s obviously controversial. I try not to shy away from it. But they had a lot of good reasons to fight back right and to fight back in this nonviolent way.
That last thought brings to mind another, right-wing Jewish group that existed in this era of taking things into our own hands, that did use violence, explosives even.
You mean the Jewish Defense League, led by Meir Kahane.
Yes, exactly.
He was a Bircher. Toward the end of my book, I mention that he was a member for a while, under his alias Michael King.
Antisemitism is on the rise, and lots of initiatives are being organized to address it, both by existing groups like the ADL and new ones. The ADL’s budget has almost doubled over the past seven years. I am seeing Jews talk of fighting back and taking things into their own hands. And we are in this politically precarious movement in American history, all of which suggests parallels to the era you examined. What kind of wisdom can we glean from examining the ADL’s secret and public fight against the John Birch Society as people who care about the issues affecting Jews today?
A lot of liberals in the 1960s and a lot of the leadership at the ADL grasped the axiom that things can always get worse.
In 2015-2016, you’ll recall, there was Trump’s demonization of Mexican immigrants, and the so-called “alt-right” around him and his campaign and expressions of vitriol by people like Steve Bannon.
There was an assumption among a lot of Americans and among a lot of Jewish Americans that the fringe right — the antisemites, the explicit racists, the white supremacists — that there’s not a majority for them and they can never achieve power.
If you go back and you look at Trump’s closing 2016 campaign ad, it’s textbook antisemitism. He flashes on screen these wealthy Jewish international bankers, and he argues that basically, there’s a conspiracy of these global elites who are stealing the wealth of honest Americans. There’s also 2017, the white supremacists in Charlottesville, who said “Jews will not replace us” and Trump saying there are fine people on both sides.
The sense that democracy is incredibly fragile is not just a theory or a concept: It’s an actuality, the sense as well, that the United States has only been a multiracial democracy for not very long and a haven for Jews for not that long either.
The work that the ADL and the NAACP and other groups did to try to constrain and discredit as fringe and extremist still goes on today. It’s harder to do for all sorts of reasons today including social media and the loss of faith in institutions. But it still goes on. You see the importance of institutional guardrails including the Department of Justice that is prosecuting 1,000 Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
The last thing I’ll say is that one of the admirable things in the 1960s about the ADL and the liberal coalition it belonged to is that it built support for landmark legislation like the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of ’65. And a coalition eventually fell apart, but it was powerful, reminding us why Jewish American groups should care about or focus on issues that don’t directly affect Jewish people.
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The Mississippi synagogue arson suspect has a Christian fitness site. Here’s what that tell us
Stephen Spencer Pittman, the suspect in a Saturday arson attack at a historic Mississippi synagogue, targeted Beth Israel Congregation because of its “Jewish ties,” according to the FBI. In an interview, he called the shul the “synagogue of Satan,” and his recent social media posts included an antisemitic cartoon.
But on a Christian fitness site registered to Pittman and linked across his social media profiles, Hebrew is liberally sprinkled throughout workout advice and scripture study.
That a man who would burn a synagogue would also be so interested in Hebrew language study, or pepper it throughout his Christian fitness site, may seem surprising. But understanding the reference points of Pittman’s fitness website helps explain the cultural touchstones and media diet he was likely consuming, one that may have influenced his thinking.
Pittman’s site, called One Purpose, advertises “scripture-backed fitness.” It refers to its users as “brothers” who are building their “temple” — women are not mentioned and presumably not the target audience. Instead, it pairs a veneer of biblical truth and Christianity with rhetoric about masculinity.
At the top of the homepage is the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, one of the biblical names for God. The site also says that it has modeled its fitness program after the “biblical patriarchs,” listing some of the oldest men in the bible — Adam, Methuselah, Noah, and others — with their Hebrew names. The site also notes several Jewish fast days, including lesser-known days usually only observed by Orthodox Jews, such as the Fast of Daniel and the Fast of Esther, again with their Hebrew names.
A post on Pittman’s Instagram about a “Christian diet/testosterone optimization” advises eating only raw milk and eggs as well as limiting oneself to “God-made fats,” listing the Hebrew words for oil and butter. Clicking through the site’s instructions for its fitness regimen brings the user snippets of Hebrew vocabulary, such as derekh, meaning path in Hebrew, and ma’atzor, meaning obstacle, scattered among copy about striving to live up to one’s true manliness and strength as ordained by God.
But beyond the biblical sheen, the site — which costs $99 a month to access in full, or $599 for the year — is full of the kind of “grindset” hustle culture advice on masculinity, charisma and workouts that regularly populates the so-called manosphere. Advertised among the premium features are training modules for “looks-maxxing,” which promises a “complete aesthetic optimization” and “test-maxxing,” which is not about acing exams but instead about raising testosterone levels.
This rhetoric is common among influencers widely regarded as proponents of toxic masculinity, including self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested for sex trafficking in Romania; Myron Gaines, who wrote a book titled Women Deserve Less, and even Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a manosphere elder who regularly inveighs against feminism. They often alternate between “negging” — internet slang for insulting — their participants, and pumping them up, promising a whole new life full of sex and money if they follow the advice of these influences. If they don’t, they will be weak “simps” or “cucks.”
One Purpose uses similar tactics at each click, just with a religious overlay. Users are offered the choice to “take up the cross” and “walk in the purpose God created for you,” or else, if they do not sign up for the site’s weight-lifting, diet and prayer program, to “let your temple fall into ruin” and “drift further from God’s purpose.”
Over the past few years, much of the manosphere has increasingly merged with Christian influencers, particularly traditionalist Catholics, or “tradcaths,” and the TheoBros, adherents of Reformed Christian theology. The overlap is borne largely out of shared values over women’s subservience and male dominance — which manosphere leaders such as Tate believe is biological, and TheoBro leaders such as Joel Webbon believe is biblical.
Many of the TheoBros, such as Webbon or Brian Sauvé, run YouTube series and podcasts where they also discuss their lifting routines and beard care, aligning with the manosphere values. And these TheoBros are often openly antisemitic, viewing Jews as Satanists who have rejected Jesus, and endorsing numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial. Manosphere leaders including Tate and Gaines have done the same; Webbon and Gaines have also both hosted outspoken antisemite Nick Fuentes on their shows.
This manosphere interest among Christian influencers has grown alongside an increased attention to Jewish practice and the Hebrew Bible among many Christians, who see it as a way to grow closer to Jesus’ own practices and add a sense of mystery and spirituality via Jewish rituals that are unfamiliar, and feel esoteric, to most Christians.
Hebrew, in these contexts, largely serves to add a sense of authenticity to Christian practice — a way to advertise that their version of Christianity is ancient, from the time of Jesus. But it’s a mistake to see this interest in Hebrew and Jewish texts as philosemitism; while it sometimes manifests as friendliness toward Jews, it often has little relationship to Jewish people today.
Pittman’s One Purpose does not contain the overtly antisemitic or misogynist language that many TheoBro and manosphere influencers use. But the rhetoric of his biblical fitness site echoes their content, placing itself firmly in the same ecosystem. Its subtext aligns with a world rife with conspiracy theories about Jewish governmental control and Satanic rituals.
We don’t know yet exactly what Pittman’s media diet was. But his biblical fitness site’s imitation of Christian masculinity influencers indicates he likely consumed a lot of content that, alongside lifting routines or nutrition advice, contained antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Instagram, he follows numerous accounts that describe themselves as a “soldier of Christ” or a “watchman for Christ,” some of which also contain conspiracy theories. When the beliefs on what it means to be a “real man” and a good Christian combine, they paint a vision of Christian masculinity that requires defeating Satan — and Satan, in this case, is the Jews. As Pittman said, according to an affidavit, he was due for a “homerun.”
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Oklahoma board to vote on application for religious Jewish charter school, teeing up potential battle
(JTA) — A Jewish education group seeking to create the nation’s first publicly funded religious Jewish charter school took its case to Oklahoma’s charter school board Monday, reviving a high-stakes constitutional battle over whether government money can be used to run faith-based public schools.
The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, founded by Peter Deutsch, a former Florida Democratic congressmember known for endorsing Donald Trump in 2024, has applied to open a statewide virtual Jewish charter school serving grades K-12 beginning in the 2026-27 school year.
The proposal would integrate Oklahoma academic standards with daily Jewish religious instruction, including Hebrew, Jewish texts, holidays and religious practice.
The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board did not vote Monday but is expected to decide as early as next month whether the school can move forward.
Supporters say approval would give families a religious values-based option within the public school system. Critics argue it would violate the legal principle separating church and state and set a precedent that could reshape public education nationwide.
The proposal comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 in a case involving another Oklahoma religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. That tie left in place an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately run — are “state actors” and therefore must remain secular. (The deadlock resulted from a recusal by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who had ties to the Catholic charter school.)
Ben Gamla and its lawyers at Becket, a conservative religious-liberty firm, are seeking to reopen that fight.
“The opportunity is probably the best in Oklahoma of any state in the United States of America today,” Deutsch, who was wearing a kippah, told board members Monday. “And that’s really related to your statute and the implementation of that statute.”
Becket said in a statement after the meeting that Oklahoma is wrongly excluding religious schools from its charter program.
“Religious schools cannot be shut out of state programs just because they are religious,” said Eric Baxter, a senior counsel at Becket who represents Ben Gamla.
Deutsch, who founded a network of Hebrew-English charter schools in Florida nearly two decades ago, told the board that his schools have consistently ranked among the top public schools in that state. Those Florida schools, however, operate as strictly secular charters, teaching Hebrew language and Jewish culture without religious instruction.
The Oklahoma proposal is different.
Ben Gamla’s application describes the school as being organized “for educational, charitable, and religious purposes” and calls for daily Jewish religious studies alongside secular coursework.Teachers and staff would be expected to uphold Jewish religious standards in their professional conduct, with an additional expectation placed on those who are Jewish.
“Employees who are Jewish are expected to be faithful to the Jewish community and adhere to the teachings of the people and to the Torah in their lives,” the application submitted by Ben Gamla says.
Deutsch said that while Oklahoma has a relatively small Jewish population, many families — Jewish and non-Jewish — are seeking a values-based education.
“There are a lot of parents that are looking for a sort of a faith-based, rigorous academic program,” he told the board. “But there was nothing there.”
He said he had previously explored opening a physical Jewish charter school in Oklahoma but concluded that the numbers would not work. A virtual model, he said, would allow the school to operate with as few as 30 or 40 students and reach families across the state.
Board members asked Deutsch how the new Oklahoma nonprofit would relate to his Florida charter network. Deutsch said the two entities are legally separate but linked through him.
“They are separate corporations. They’re separate 501(c)(3)s,” he said. “The link is me.”
Deutsch, who his is one of the three directors currently serving on the board of Ben Gamla. The other two are Brett Farley, who was a member of St. Isidore’s board of directors, and Ezra Husney, a New York lawyer.
He also said a nonprofit backer has committed to cover any startup deficits and that he plans to seek federal charter-school startup grants.
He didn’t name the nonprofit, but Ben Gamla’s application includes a letter pledging financial support signed by Rabbi Raphael Butler, president of the Afikim Foundation, a New York based nonprofit aiming to “innovate and implement high impact global Jewish projects.” Butler is also president of Olami, a global Orthodox Jewish outreach group.
In a press release issued after the meeting, Becket framed the case as one of religious discrimination, saying the state is required under the U.S. Constitution to treat religious and secular schools equally in public programs.
Last year’s Supreme Court deadlock in the Catholic case left the constitutional question unresolved. Conservative justices have signaled sympathy for the idea that states may not exclude religious organizations from generally available public benefits — a line of reasoning Becket hopes to extend to charter schools.
“Our goal is to win here at the board, and if that doesn’t happen, we will bring a case in federal court,” Baxter told local media after the meeting.
Church-state separation advocates say the plan would cross a clear constitutional line.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which led the legal fight against the Catholic school, has already filed public-records requests seeking communications between Ben Gamla and the charter board and has signaled it is prepared to sue.
“Despite their loss earlier this year in the U.S. Supreme Court, religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, the group’s president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in November.
In Oklahoma, home to fewer than 9,000 Jews, the proposal has drawn skepticism from local Jewish leaders, some of whom say they learned about it from reporters rather than organizers. Rabbi Daniel Kaiman of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa told JTA last month that no one in the community had been consulted. “I was surprised to be learning about it through a reporter,” he said.
Kaiman said he worries about a national legal fight being waged through a tiny Jewish community with delicate interfaith and political relationships. Oklahoma already has Jewish day schools and synagogue programs, he added. “I don’t know who this new proposal is for,” he said.
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A century before Trump targeted Somalis, Jews faced the politics of blame
(JTA) — As President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ordered a surge in immigration enforcement because Somalis took part in a social-service fraud scheme, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back.
“’When a fraud takes place, when a crime takes place, you investigate it, you prosecute it, you charge it. You arrest the person that did the fraud or the crime, you put him in jail as an individual,” Frey told NPR. “You get held accountable as an individual. That’s how this works in America.
“You do not, however, hold an entire community accountable for the crimes of one.”
Frey’s remarks were echoed by other state and national figures. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who herself immigrated from Somalia to the United States as a child.
Frey, who is Jewish, didn’t mention his own background in standing up for Somalis, a community of whom Trump has said, “And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you.”
But had Frey turned to Jewish history, he may well have cited another instance in which a powerful political figure blamed an immigrant community for the crimes of a few, and an ethnic group was targeted by nativists who pinned the country’s ills on immigrants.
Frey might have reached back to 1908, when New York City Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham leveled what at the time was the most explicit, highest profile accusation of Jewish criminality made by a major American official since Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his military district to combat allegations of cotton smuggling and corruption.
That year, in an article in the North American Review, Bingham claimed Jews accounted for half of New York’s crimes, especially picking pockets, fencing stolen goods, arson and operating gambling and vice operations.
“It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of its population), perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider the ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor,” Bingham wrote with the stilted prose of a bureaucrat and the dubious authority of the then popular pseudoscience of eugenics.
Bingham buttressed his accusation with statistics: “Forty per cent of the boys at the House of Refuge and twenty per cent of those arraigned in the Children’s Court” are Jews, he claimed. “The percentage of Hebrew children in the truant schools is also higher than that of any other.”
Jewish leaders saw Bingham’s accusations as all the more dangerous because they were based on a shred of truth: “They knew, for one thing, that there was a crime problem on the East Side, not so lurid as Bingham had painted, but serious enough,” wrote Irving Howe in his history of the period, “World of Our Fathers.”
Like Somali-Americans in Minnesota, the Jews of the era were on the cusp — with one foot in the poverty of the tenements and the other in the growing prosperity of a rising working and business-owning class. But the Eastern European Jewish newcomers also had an important lever: the German Jews who had arrived earlier and established positions of power in finance and politics.
Jacob Schiff, the powerful banker and philanthropist, became one of the most forceful critics of Bingham’s article, publicly denouncing it as reckless and un-American. Joseph Seligman, founder of the investment bank J. & W. Seligman & Co., similarly condemned Bingham, insisting that crime was a function of poverty and dislocation, not religion or ethnicity, and pointing out the danger of a police commissioner racializing crime. Both men brought their own statistics and experts to show Bingham had exaggerated Jewish involvement.
The grassroots response was just as strong, with letters to the Yiddish and general newspapers, mass protests and heated sermons.
“Mr. Bingham has been indulging in mere generalities and he should be forced to give facts, including the names, residences, in fact the exact figures of any one week or month, to prove his statements, or else he will be asked to make a public retraction and apologize to the race he has injured,” fumed Rabbi Joseph A. Silverman of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El.
Bingham was, and he did. “By mid-September,” Howe writes, “under severe pressure, Bingham retracted his charges ‘frankly and without reservation.’” He subsequently lost the support of Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. and was forced to resign in July 1909.
Bingham wasn’t the only figure to hold the entire Jewish community responsible for the crimes committed by its members. Eleven years earlier, police commissioner Frank Moss argued in his book “The American Metropolis” that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.” Between 1907 and 1909, McClure’s Magazine published articles by the muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner claiming extensive Jewish involvement in the “white slave trade” — what today we would call human trafficking. While courts found little evidence of a wide-spead Jewish conspiracy to traffic women, “McClure’s used the white slavery investigation and grand jury to stoke anti-immigration and anti-Semitic fears throughout the city,” historian Mia Brett wrote in a paper for the Gotham Center at CUNY.
The Jewish elite counted Bingham’s retraction as a victory, but the incident left many with the impression that the Jewish community needed a better mechanism for organizing around the fight against antisemitism. In New York, that meant the formation of the Kehillah, an ambitious experiment to create a unified Jewish communal organization. The Kehillah included educational and political committees, as well as a “Bureau of Social Morals” — a sort of self-policing body meant to help law enforcement root out crime among Jews. When it sank in that the bureau was only reinforcing an impression that the Kehillah had been formed to dispel, the bureau was scrapped.
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, when it disbanded over — spoiler alert — ideological disagreements among its constituent groups. But it created a precedent for centralized communal organizations to come, including UJA-Federation of New York.
In Minnesota too there are signs that the president’s attacks are strengthening the Somali community by sparking solidarity and organizing.“I think it’s giving us a chance for many Americans to learn about the Somali community, and not only that, but also to see the resilience,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, told CNN. “Also, it’s giving Somali Americans a chance to own their American identity and fight for it.”
When the Bingham incident is remembered, it is often to illustrate how officials trade on xenophobic fears over facts — and why such scapegoating, once unleashed, can do profound damage to both the targeted community and the civic fabric.
“We know that when a few people commit crimes, it does not implicate an entire community and to say so is racist, is xenophobic and just wrong,” Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker of Mount Zion Temple in St Paul told Fox 9 in Minneapolis last month.Meanwhile, the current police chief in Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, has taken the very un-Bingham-like position that the “real problem” of social service fraud in the state doesn’t justify the “largely political” reaction of the federal government, especially immigration authorities.
“I had not known any Somali Americans until I moved to Minnesota,” O’Hara said Monday on “The Daily” podcast. “The Somali Americans that I have met here, including many of whom are police officers in this city, have been incredibly welcoming of me. From a personal perspective, [the immigration crackdown on Somalis] was just bizarre because I’m also aware that the overwhelming majority of people from that community are American citizens.”
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