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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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Michael Jackson biopic revives legend of Jewish music mogul who battled MTV’s ‘color barrier’
(JTA) — About halfway through “Michael,” the new blockbuster biopic of Michael Jackson, there is a scene in which Jackson (played by his nephew Jafaar) and his lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), are sitting with the president of his record label. It’s early in Jackson’s “Thriller” album cycle, as “Billie Jean” has been released as a single, and the “Thriller” video has been filmed, setting the scene sometime in 1983.
Seated in front of several gold records, CBS Records’ head honcho Walter Yetnikoff (played under heavy makeup by Mike Myers) congratulates Jackson on his breakout moment and asks what he can do for him. Jackson and Branca tell Yetnikoff they want just one thing: for Jackson to be featured on MTV, then a brand-new station broadcasting music videos.
Yetnikoff tells them that it’s “not possible” because MTV rarely plays Black artists. Jackson retorts that he is a “proud Black artist” who makes his music for everyone, and that he “won’t be shoved to the back of any bus by MTV or anyone.”
Yetnikoff says he has tried, and Jackson tells him, “Please try harder.” So Yetnikoff asks his secretary to get MTV founder and executive Bob Pittman on the phone.
The executive is then heard on the phone threatening, in colorfully profane terms, to pull all of CBS’s artists from the network unless Pittman agrees to run “Billie Jean” in the next 10 minutes and, subsequently, put the music video in heavy rotation.
In the next scene, it’s clear that the threat worked. Jackson would remain an MTV staple for many years after that.
So who was Walter Yetnikoff? And did things really go down the way “Michael” says they did?
Yetnikoff was one of the music industry’s most colorful figures. Born into a Jewish family in New York in 1933, Yetnikoff became president and CEO of CBS Records in 1975, after spending the first half of the 1970s running CBS’s international division.
Running CBS during a pivotal time for the music business, he shepherded artists such as Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan, in addition to Jackson, with whom he began working at the start of his solo career in the late 1970s. Yetnikoff wasn’t known for having a great ear for music, but he excelled at the business side of the music industry and at advocating for his artists.
Yetnikoff was the subject of two well-known books: Frederic Dannen’s “Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music,” published in 1990, and his 2004 memoir, “Howling at the Moon: The True Story of the Mad Genius of the Music World,” written with David Ritz. Also, a 1980 movie called “One Trick Pony,” which starred Paul Simon, had actor Rip Torn playing a fictionalized version of Yetnikoff named “Walter Fox.”
The “Michael” version of Yetnicoff is heard calling the MTV executive “that schmuck” — a Yiddish term in keeping with what both books about Yetnikoff make clear: his Jewish identity was front and center.
“The heart of Yetnikoff’s persona was his Brooklyn Jewishness. An outsized number of label bosses were Jews from Brooklyn, but Walter wore his ethnicity like a gabardine,” Dannen wrote in “Hit Men.”
Later, Dannen wrote, “He would stay late into the night, banging away at the phone, screaming in Yiddish. He shattered glassware, spewed a mixture of Yiddish and barnyard epithets, and had people physically ejected from the building.”
A profile in New York magazine in 1990, after Yetnikoff had fallen out of favor in the music world and given up the hard drinking that had caused him problems at home and at work, cited an array of Jewish antecedents to paint his picture.
“To cut an appropriate figure in the loud-and-dirty rock world, the shy Brooklyn Jew fashioned an indelible caricature for himself — the Orchard Street discounter as music-biz superman, a little Mel Brooks mixed with a lot of Jackie Mason, and dashes of Meir Kahane and Captain Lou Albano,” said the profile, by Eric Pooley. “He could be a mensch — warm, caring, generous — but he could also be a monster.”
So, did Yetnikoff really bring this famous rage to breaking the race barrier at MTV? And did it happen the way the movie “Michael” depicts?
By Yetnikoff’s own account, the answer is yes.
In “Howling at the Moon,” he wrote that “I screamed bloody murder when MTV refused to air [Michael Jackson’s] videos. They argued that their format, white rock, excluded Michael’s music. I argued they were racist assholes — and I’d trumpet it to the world if they didn’t relent.”
He goes on to say that, “with added pressure from Quincy Jones, they caved in, and in doing so, the MTV color line came crashing down.” (While Jones, the famed producer, appears elsewhere in “Michael,” he’s not part of the scene in which Yetnikoff calls MTV.)
Elsewhere in the book, Yetnikoff quotes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was trying to get him to write his book with her at Doubleday, as calling him “the guy who got MTV to break the color barrier and play videos by Black artists.”
“Don’t really know if Walter was bragging or accurate,” David Ritz, his co-author on “Howling at the Moon,” told JTA. “I have a feeling he was being accurate, but I can’t prove it.”
The Jackson family and estate, it’s clear, give Yetnikoff credit for getting Jackson’s music on MTV.
“It is difficult today to imagine the level of cultural apartheid at the music channels in 1983 when MTV refused to play Michael Jackson’s short film ‘Billie Jean.’ But Yetnikoff was ferocious on Michael’s behalf and didn’t hesitate to play corporate chicken with the powerful music channel,” the Jackson estate said in a media statement after Yetnikoff’s death at age 87 in 2021.
“In short order, ‘Billie Jean’ was added to MTV in heavy rotation, opening the floodgates for Michael’s extraordinary success and also for a whole generation of black artists. Walter forced that to happen, and with that decision, the wall came tumbling down.”
The family and estate were heavily involved in the movie’s production. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for the exact circumstances of the scene in the movie — Yetnikoff making that phone call to MTV, with Jackson and Branca sitting in his office in New York.
Dannen told JTA in an interview that, as told in the movie, “the story sounds fishy to me,” although he did remember an incident — included in “Howling at the Moon” — when Yetnikoff “had to coerce Jann Wenner into putting Jackson on the cover” of Rolling Stone, another music industry institution that hadn’t always given fair weight to Black artists.
Some on the MTV side have disputed the account. “It never happened,” Les Garland, then an MTV executive, has said, according to The New York Times. “Folklore, man, folklore.”
Garland, in a 2017 letter to Digital Music News, stated that “No, MTV did NOT refuse to air black musicians.” And indeed, the network had played a handful of Black artists, though not prominently, in its early years. But Jackson was not the only artist to push for more racial inclusion on MTV.
“Superfreak” singer Rick James had been pushing for videos by Black artists, declaring in an early-’80s interview, “MTV don’t play Rick James, they don’t play Michael Jackson, they don’t play the Commodores, they don’t play Earth, Wind, and Fire, they don’t play Stevie Wonder,” going on to even use the same “back of the bus” metaphor that Jackson used in the movie.
David Bowie famously called out MTV, live on its air, over the same issue, also in 1983 — yielding an unconvincing response from Mark Goodman, a Jewish VJ, about how the network was trying to “do what we think not only New York or Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or some town in the Midwest that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re playing, or a string of other Black faces and Black music. We have to play the music that we think an entire country is going to like.”
Bob Pittman, the then-MTV executive named in the movie as the recipient of Yetnikoff’s phone call, did not respond to an email from JTA requesting comment.
Arts industries are filled with historical examples of Jewish executives and creators going to bat for Black inclusion. George Gershwin, for example, insisted that the characters in “Porgy and Bess” be played by Black actors rather than white actors in blackface, while the Jewish sitcom creator Norman Lear was responsible for one of the first shows to focus on a Black family, “The Jeffersons.” Both men tied their advocacy to their experiences and values as Jews.
If Yetnikoff was motivated by his Jewish identity or a sense of justice to crusade for Jackson, the books about him, including his own, don’t say so. Dannen noted that Yetnikoff strongly pushed for all of his artists, including Jackson.
“At the Grammys, when Jackson won the Grammy for… Album of the Year, he took Yetnikoff up on stage with him, which was a big deal.” Dannen told JTA. Yetnikoff’s Guardian obituary noted that at those Grammys, Jackson had called the label boss “the best president of any record company.”
Jackson went on to work with other Jewish producers and executives throughout his career. He performed in Israel during the “Dangerous” tour in 1993, visiting an Israeli army base and even donning an IDF uniform.
In 1995, he drew allegations of antisemitism after releasing the song “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” Under fire, he denied any antisemitism and agreed to change the lyrics. He also partook in the early 2000s fad of non-Jewish celebrities embracing Kabbalah, even sporting a red string during his 2005 criminal trial.
Yetnikoff, too, had a spiritual side. In his biography, he frequently wrote about God, whom he referred to as “Heshie.” Why?
“I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because Heshie is a familiar Jewish name that I could easily say,” he wrote. ‘‘When a rabbi pointed out to me that perhaps I wanted to say Hashem, I wondered whether my unconscious was playing games with me. Either way, I was trying to connect.’’
The biography was meant as a bit of a mea culpa after a career characterized by the kind of rage shown in that scene in “Michael.” And indeed, Yetnikoff made enemies along the way. But Dannen said the movie’s depiction, which shattered worldwide box-office records for a music biopic during its opening weekend, pointed to a quieter impact as well.
He noted that Jackson’s first solo album, “Off the Wall,” was nominated for an award in the R&B category, despite not really being an R&B record — a dynamic he said “shows sort of the residual racism of the music business” that assumed any Black artist was making traditionally Black music. But by the time “Thriller” came out, Jackson was being ranked in the pop category.
“I would like to believe that Yetnikoff exerted some influence in that area,” Dannon said. Indeed, in the “Michael” scene, Yetnikoff says that “Thriller” is dominating the charts — both R&B and pop.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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DOGE’s cuts to Jewish humanities grants were unconstitutional, judge rules
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation last year of the majority of federal humanities grants, including to several Jewish projects, was unlawful and unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
In her 143-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon called out the agency created by President Donald Trump specifically for its targeting of Jewish projects, including Holocaust research.
“At a time when the specter of antisemitism has reemerged from the shadows, for our Government to deem a project about Jewish women disfavored because it centered on ‘Jewish cultures’ and ‘female’ voices is deeply troubling,” wrote McMahon, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. She was referring specifically to a canceled “project on Jewish women subjected to slave labor during the Holocaust.”
Appointees to DOGE, originally overseen by Elon Musk, swiftly overhauled multiple federal agencies in early 2025. That included the National Endowment for the Humanities, where DOGE personnel canceled a wide swath of grants by using the artificial-intelligence software ChatGPT to identify projects they deemed “DEI” — shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion.
A lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a consortium of scholarly groups found during court proceedings that many Jewish grants were classified as “DEI” under DOGE’s rubric. At the same time, the NEH followed up its widespread grant cancellation by awarding its largest grant ever, $10.4 million, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish group.
McMahon ruled that DOGE engaged in illegal “viewpoint discrimination.”
“Put simply, the Government terminated the grant because the grant sought to empower and amplify the voices of Jewish women who were victims of Nazi persecution,” she wrote. “The Government may have its reasons for disfavoring that perspective, but the First Amendment does not permit it to divest someone of a government benefit.”
Several other terminated Jewish grants were mentioned in the judge’s ruling, including projects to “recover and analyze ancient writings attributed to Moses but excluded from the canonical Hebrew Bible”; a short-fiction anthology by Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union; and multiple projects about Jewish women during the Holocaust. The ruling cited them alongside other cancelled grants focusing on Black Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans.
“A grant funding the study of the experience of Jewish women during the Holocaust is not wasteful because it concerns Jewish women,” McMahon wrote at one point. “Yet that is precisely how DOGE treated them – deeming grants wasteful because they related to Blacks, women, Jews, Asian Americans, and Indigenous people.”
At the same time, she noted that other grants for Jewish projects were not canceled, including one “proposing to study ‘Council of Jewish Federation records dating 1916 to 1999.’”
The ruling orders the NEH to reinstate the terminated grants.
The NEH did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the Washington Post on Friday, the White House signaled that it planned to fight McMahon’s ruling.
“The district court’s ruling is egregiously wrong,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in the statement. “It conflicts with clear Supreme Court precedent, and provides yet another example of liberal judges trying to reinstate wasteful federal spending at the expense of the American taxpayer. The Trump Administration expects to [be] vindicated as this litigation proceeds.”
The Authors Guild celebrated the ruling.
“We are gratified that justice was done,” Authors Guild president Mary Rasenberger said in a statement, “and we will be watching closely to make sure every one of these grants is restored.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states
(JTA) — As anti-LGBTQ legislation proliferated across the United States in late 2024, leaders at two Jewish nonprofits began discussing the mounting crisis for LGBTQ Americans who no longer felt safe in their home states but lacked the financial means to leave.
Now, some of those individuals are receiving interest-free loans to help finance their moves through “Move to Thrive,” an unusual joint initiative launched by the national LGBTQ Jewish advocacy group Keshet and the New York-based Hebrew Free Loan Society in March 2025.
The initiative has drawn more than 400 inquiries, according to Jaimie Krass, the president and CEO of Keshet. So far, 29 applications have been approved, representing 56 people across households in 12 states, and $274,500 in loans have been disbursed.
“It is devastating that this is even necessary, and I think we can draw strength from what has been made possible by this resource, which is that dozens of households have been able to relocate to safer states, have been able to live more fully and openly as their authentic selves,” Krass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
According to a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth crisis support nonprofit, nearly two in five LGBTQ+ people aged 13 to 24 said that they had considered moving to a different state, and 4% actually moved due to LGBTQ+-related politics or laws.
The collaboration between Keshet and the Hebrew Free Loan Society began in late 2024, when Idit Klein, then Keshet’s leader, approached Rabbi David Rosenn, the president and CEO of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, with the idea.
Rosenn initially told Klein it was not feasible, explaining that the Hebrew Free Loan Society serves individuals in the New York area and generally does not operate nationally.
But then came what Krass called a “dizzying onslaught of attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights following President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the first weeks of his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting transgender Americans, including measures recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and another that aimed to outlaw gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Lawmakers in red states picked up the pace of their legislation.
As the months went by, Rosenn said “it was clear that things were getting more aggressive in terms of the approach of legislatures in certain states,” so he went to his board to appeal for an exception.
“We concluded that if we did not do this, it would not get done, and we saw this as a matter of people’s personal safety and well-being,” Rosenn said. “People were expressing that they felt like they were at real risk, and we wanted there to be a way for them to make these moves to places where they would feel safe and welcome.”
The initial grant funds for the program came from the Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network, but Rosenn said that after more people learned about the program there had been a “spontaneous outpouring of support from people who heard that this was going on and wanted to be a part.”
So far, the program, which is open to both Jewish and non-Jewish applicants, has distributed loans of up to $10,000 to applicants leaving states including Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa. The recipients, which included single transgender women and men and over a dozen couples and families, have used the loans to move to states, such as Massachusetts, Illinois and Oregon, with a more welcoming policy environment.
James Glick, who used a Move to Thrive loan to relocate from Texas to Minnesota with his wife, told JTA that the loan had brought him “life changing relief” after he watched anti-trans policies intensify at the Dallas school where he taught.
“I remember when we got the confirmation email, like we both just sat and cried and hugged each other,” they said. “It was just so difficult to move across the country, but it would not have been possible without that help.”
Glick said he first learned about the program through a Facebook group for trangender men in Dallas, and initially doubted whether he and his wife, who are not Jewish, would qualify.
But after learning that the program was “for everyone,” they said the support from Jewish organizations felt especially meaningful at a time when many people around him were dismissing fears about anti-trans policies.
“To have a Jewish organization recognizing that something like this was happening to the trans community, when so many people around me were saying, ‘It’s not that big of a deal, you need to calm down, like you’re going to be fine, why are you freaking out?’ — it was like, oh, no, people do acknowledge and understand that,” Glick said.
While dozens have used “Move to Thrive” to help finance relocations, other LGBTQ Jews and families with trangender children had already begun moving to states with stronger legal protections long before it was launched.
For Krass, the relocations echoed Jewish experiences of moving in search of safety in the past.
“Many of our own families have relocated at different times throughout history to different locations because our safety was undermined, and right now, those same sort of alarm bells of our shared history, of our collective memory, are certainly ringing right now because of the vast number of LGBTQ+ individuals, including LGBTQ+ Jews, who are feeling forced to relocate to a different state for the sake of their own and their family’s safety,” Krass said.
The need for the program, Krass and Rosenn said, appears unlikely to disappear soon.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are currently 528 anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in states across the country, in addition to those — such as a law passed last year in Texas that defined men and women by their reproductive organs — that have already gone into effect.
“That would be a great reason to suspend this program, if nobody felt that they were at risk and they were happy and able to thrive in whatever state they’re in, but since that is not the case, I think we will absolutely try to continue to be a be a resource in this way,” Rosenn said.
He said the partnership between his organization and Keshet also served as an exciting model for collaborations he hoped to see more of in the Jewish world.
“It was also just a signal out to the world that the Jewish community sees that this is going on, cares about this issue and is moving to do something about it, that two organizations who don’t normally do things together, would figure out a way to collaborate to make this happen,” Rosenn said. “It is not just something that is to the benefit of borrowers, it’s also a message about what the Jewish community is trying to accomplish in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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