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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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Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities
(JTA) — German authorities have shut down a planned pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp memorial after a fierce outcry.
The rally was slated for April 12, marking the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops. But the city of Weimar said on Monday it would ban the event on the memorial grounds and offered a square downtown as an alternate location.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald, the group behind the campaign, announced it was challenging the ban in court. The group said it aimed to “commemorate victims of genocide and fascism” and “uplift the fundamental duty to fight against all genocides, particularly the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.”
The planned event had been heavily criticized by German leaders, such as federal antisemitism czar Felix Klein. In an interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine, Klein said he viewed the rally as “disrespectful self-promotion and a perfidious attempt to relativize the murder of over 11,000 Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by comparing it to Israel’s actions in the recent Gaza war.”
The campaign was also protested in a joint statement by a coalition of 17 organizations, including several Jewish communal and academic groups. They accused the organizers of “instrumentalizing the Buchenwald memorial site as a platform for anti-Jewish agitation.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald had support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachael Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-zionist Network, said the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
“As Jewish, queer and other anti-fascists, many of us the children and grandchildren of survivors of and those persecuted and murdered in the Nazi genocide, we wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration,” Shapiro said in a statement.
The event originated as a protest against a German court’s decision that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. Kufiyas in Buchenwald also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel. They cited the treatment of Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, who was disinvited from giving a commemoration speech at Buchenwald after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said it continued to call on the memorial foundation to “openly address the genocide in Gaza” and lift restrictions on pro-Palestinian symbols and speech at the site. The group said its demands honored the “Oath of Buchenwald,” a promise spoken by survivors of the camp during a memorial ceremony on April 19, 1945.
These survivors said in six languages, “We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
(JTA) — Argentina announced on Tuesday that it had designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, a move that was quickly praised by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
The move stems from Argentina’s decades-long investigations into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 and injured more than 200, and the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center, which left 85 dead and 300 injured in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Argentine soil.
In a statement, President Javier Milei’s office described the attacks as “two of the most serious terrorist attacks in history, carried out in the 1990s by the IRGC’s operational arm in the region, the organization Hezbollah.”
With Tuesday’s decision, the Argentine government will now include the IRGC in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities Linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing, triggering financial sanctions and operational restrictions intended to curb its ability to operate in the country and safeguard Argentina’s financial system from illicit use.
The announcement by Milei, who has stood out as one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters, comes months after his office also designated the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the IRGC, as a terrorist organization in January. In recent years, Argentina has also designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terror groups.
Saar praised the move in a post on X Wednesday, writing that the designation “places Argentina, under [Milei’s] leadership, at the forefront of the free world in the fight against the Iranian regime of terror and its proxies.”
“With this decision, President Milei – one of the greatest leaders of our generation – has once again demonstrated moral clarity and an unwavering commitment to the values of freedom and the fight against its enemies,” Saar wrote.
Last month, just days into the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Argentina issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Vahidi, who was appointed as the head of the IRGC after its previous leader was killed in the first wave of U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Vahidi is currently the highest-ranking Iranian figure accused by the Argentine judiciary. An arrest warrant for him was first issued in 2006 in connection with the AMIA case.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either
There’s an FAQ on the website of the London theater where the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre of Melbourne’s production of Yentl is running through April 16. The very first item reads:
Is this a stage version of the 1983 musical film starring Barbara Streisand?
No — the London production of Yentl is a play. It is a new adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 short story,“ Yentl the Yeshiva Boy“ — just like the Streisand film was at the time.
This explanation does more than relieve box office staff of the tedious duty of informing Mrs. Lipschitz and Mrs. Rosenblatt from the sisterhood that no, they shouldn’t come expecting to sing along to “Papa, Can You Hear Me.” It argues that this theatrical “reimagining” (to use Kadimah’s own term) of Yentl is no less authentically Singerian than the musical. It also hints at how Kadimah prevailed, against considerable odds, in adapting a story whose rights Streisand still owns and fiercely guards.
As Gary Abrahams, Kadimah’s executive director and the director of the production, recently told the Jewish Telegraph, Singer’s estate gave him their approval on the condition that it be a Yiddish language, non-musical production. The London transplant, which comes on the heels of earlier stagings in Melbourne and Sydney, is enjoying a six-week run at the Marylebone Theatre, which is housed inside of an anthroposophical center. Both the limited duration of the run and the Off West End venue were critical to securing the Singer estate’s approval.
Kadimah’s production, a bilingual Yiddish-English chamber piece that has gained a certain notoriety for featuring male and female nudity, is the latest chapter in the long and unruly afterlife of Singer’s deceptively simple tale.
In “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which first appeared, in English translation, in Commentary in September 1962, a rabbi’s daughter, shut out from the Talmud learning reserved for men, cuts her hair, dons male clothing, changes her name to Anshel, finds a chavrusa, the heartbroken Avigdor, and enters a yeshiva. But Singer’s tale is considerably stranger than both that simple summary and Streisand’s popular version suggest.
Yentl is not simply a tale of female exclusion and feminist defiance. It is also a story of impersonation, erotic confusion, spiritual hunger and metaphysical trespass. Yentl does not cross one line and stop there. Once she begins living as Anshel, all the categories meant to keep life orderly — male and female, study and desire, law and transgression — begin to blur.
That instability may explain why Yentl has proved so durable. Before Streisand made it famous on screen, Singer had already adapted it for the stage in the mid-1970s together with Leah Napolin. The show opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974 and transferred to Broadway the next year, with Tovah Feldshuh in the title role.
“As a play it is altogether too anecdotal,” wrote Clive Barnes in the 1974 Times review. “The storyline wanders on and on like a river through a landscape, but the landscape happens to be worth looking at.” Napolin, who died in 2018 (and who claimed that Singer didn’t write a single word of the script) suggested that the second wave feminism of the time made the story and its themes feel relevant to contemporary audiences.
“This dark little gender-bending tale had an impact on many people who identified, as I did, with the heroine’s struggle to reinvent herself, to redefine herself,” Napolin once told an interviewer.
Half a century later, Kadimah’s Yentl leans heavily, and not always successfully, into our contemporary discourse about sex and gender. The story reemerges in a markedly — and overtly — queerer form than in previous versions.
Streisand’s film absorbed the title character so completely into her own star persona that for many people Yentl is now synonymous with Babs, not Singer. Her approach is expansive where Singer is compressed, ardent where he is dry-eyed, and schmaltzy where he is severe. Streisand gave the story glamor, emotional clarity and uplift. It also tilted the material away from Singer’s sharper ambiguities and toward the all-American theme of becoming oneself. The film, which Streisand also directed, produced and co-wrote, even ends with Yentl aboard a ship bound for America! (In Singer, Yentl simply ups and vanishes, an ending that has been interpreted as a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew).
Yet Streisand’s victory over the material came with at an expense. As Linda Besner notes in an essay on Singer and Streisand and published in the Canadian arts review Arcade, the film’s feminist reclamation of Yentl also trims away some of the story’s deepest instability. Singer’s Yentl tells Avigdor, “I’m neither one nor the other,” and the story allows a degree of erotic and ontological confusion that the film flattens into a drama of self-realization.
Kadimah’s production, adapted by Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas, starts from dissatisfaction with that inheritance. Hearst has said the team wanted to get back to the story’s darker, more transgressive roots. In an interview with The Times of London, Abrahams said he had been struck by how unlike the movie Singer’s story really was, and described the original as a work about spirituality, identity, gender, sexuality, as well as plain old sex.
Those ambitions are evident from the outset. This is not a shy Yentl. It foregrounds the body, goes hard on the story’s sexual unease and sharpens its queer implications. Amy Hack is alluringly androgynous in the title role, both attracted by and attractive to Avigdor and Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford in a very stiff performance), Avigdor’s erstwhile fiancée, who Yentl marries in bad faith. As in the film, she casts a prurient gaze at the bathing Avigdor (Ashley Margolis bares all onstage, one-upping Mandy Patinkin, whose naked tush is one of the film’s most memorable sights). Singer’s story can accommodate plenty of sexual discomfort and frustration, but Abrahams’ production lays it on too thick. Did he really need to make Avigdor a mikveh peeper?
The production also never settles on a convincing tone and register. The one-set production, with its vaguely Expressionist look, goes for too much shtetl schlock. The acting keeps sliding between modes without enough control to make the shifts meaningful: naturalistic for a few minutes, then suddenly pitched into something like Yiddish melodrama. Additionally, there isn’t any discernible logic to why certain passages are spoken in English while others are in Yiddish (with subtitles projected onto the set). The result is less daring than uncertain. No performance fully steadies the evening, although Evelyn Krape comes the closest. As the spectral “Figure,” she hovers, narrates, inhabits minor roles and hangs over the proceedings like a comic dybbuk. The device of a spectral conferencier does not entirely cohere, but Krape — hammy in a grotesque-vulgar-goofy way — almost pulls it off.
Kadimah’s production was lauded in Melbourne and Sydney but has met with a very different reception in London, which is, of course, a no-nonsense theater town. Despite the tepid and sometimes outright negative reviews (“Even with nude scenes, this is a schlep,” The Times of London’s critic wrote), the Thursday evening performance I attended was nearly full. And, the mostly grey-haired audience members, several of whom I recognized, from a nearby kosher deli where I wolfed down a pastrami sandwich before the show, were enthusiastic. A Yiddish Yentl in London now is enough of an event to draw not only the usual suspects but the theatrically adventurous — and, no doubt, some Streisand fans who should know to check their expectations at the door.
Kadimah Yiddish Theater, which recently passed its centenary, is, by some counts, Australia’s oldest theater company. This Yentl might well be the biggest hit they’ve had in their long history. Despite its shortcomings — and there any many, both in concept and execution — the production shows that the company understands the need to strive for more than nostalgia and sentimentality, à la Streisand, and to be a little impious and even impish.
Today’s most interesting Yiddish theater (and also film, to an extent) inscribes itself within tradition while treating that heritage as unstable, literate and vulgar. That is what makes the Yiddish work of another Australian director, Barrie Kosky, so refreshing and bracingly alive.
Earlier this season, Kosky directed K., a “Talmudic vaudeville” inspired by Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Berliner Ensemble. In interviews, Kosky has spoke of the polyglot, code-switching, cross-dressing Yiddish theater that formed part of Kafka’s world. His haunting and unsettling production moves between German, Hebrew and Yiddish (including a gorgeous translation of Schumann’s Dicherliebe into mamaloschen) and injects intellectual seriousness with showbiz energy.
There’s another reason I bring up Kosky, a prolific, influential, and deeply Jewish theater and opera director. In summer 2027, he will present a fresh musical version of Yentl at the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, created together with Lisa Kron (the Tony-winning writer and lyricist of Broadway’s Fun Home) and Adam Benzwi, one of the director’s regular musical collaborators in Berlin. According to Bard’s announcement, Benzwi’s score will draw on American and European Yiddish theater, music hall and Hasidic choral traditions. That sounds less like an attempt to strip Yentl back to some pristine original than like an effort to push through the whole layered history of the piece and make something gloriously heterodox.
By this point Yentl exists not as a single work. Singer gave it severity, mischief and danger. Streisand gave it melody and yearning. Kadimah has tried, admirably if unsuccessful, to restore taboo, Yiddish abrasion and folkloric unease, sometimes vividly, sometimes crudely. Kosky may prove better placed than most to let those elements collide without trying to reconcile them too neatly.
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