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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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Like Trump, Hitler also wanted to build monuments to himself — so did Franco, Gaddafi and Alexander the Great
As the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler laid out plans for structures that would serve as monuments to himself. His grandest scheme was predicated on his absolute certainty Germany would conquer the world: rebuilding Berlin into a Wagnerian monument to Teutonic superiority and renaming the city World Capital Germania.
Just as Hitler sought to inscribe himself onto Berlin’s skyline, Donald Trump has been pursuing his own form of self-mythologizing — having his name added to the Kennedy Center façade; proposing an arch larger than the Arc de Triomphe; floating other grandiose ideas meant to ensure the world doesn’t forget him.
All around the globe, wherever you find megalomaniacs you will find monuments to their egos. Among them are Francisco Franco’s “Valley Of The Fallen,” a colossal bust of Ferdinand E. Marcos on a hillside in the Philippines, Joseph Stalin’s Stalingrad, streets in Syria named after the Assads, a Libyan square named after Muammar Gaddafi, North Korean streets and institutional buildings named after the Kim dynasty, and a Turin stadium that bore Mussolini’s name.
It is clear that Donald Trump envisions himself as a member of this rogue’s gallery.
Alexander the Great is among the best-known world figures to immortalize himself in this way, by founding a city in Egypt and naming it Alexandria. He was followed six centuries later by Constantine the Great, who founded a new Roman capital on the Bosporus Strait and named it Constantinople. A 100-foot column topped with a gold-encrusted statue of the emperor dominated the city’s forum.
European wars in the 18th and 19th centuries sprouted multitudes of monuments to victorious leaders — glorious and otherwise. After Kaiser Wilhelm I’s armies defeated Denmark, Austria and France, the Germans raised gargantuan memorials that blended modern triumph with mythic antiquity. Many are still standing: towering figures of Germania, medieval emperors and legendary warriors.
“Herman the German,” an 82-foot-tall tribal chieftain in a winged helmet, and mounted atop an 88-foot temple-like pedestal, looms over the north German countryside with his sword raised as if daring anyone to challenge him. The figure is actually Hermann — the Germanized name of Arminius, as the Romans called the Cheruscan leader who annihilated three legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D.
At the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz, an enormous bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I astride his horse rises above the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle, announcing Germany’s arrival as a great power. Forty miles upstream, on the east bank of the Rhine, stands the Niederwalddenkmal, a 125-foot colossus celebrating Germany’s victory over France and the founding of the Reich in 1871.
On the other side of Germany, perched on a mountain in Thuringia is the Kyffhäuserdenkmal — 266 feet of terraces, arches and towers built to celebrate Kaiser Wilhelm I and the new German Empire he presided over. At its base sits a massive stone figure of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the 12th-century ruler who, according to legend, never died but sleeps inside the mountain, waiting to return when Germany needs him.
All of these monuments, bespeaking the glory of Germans and their ancestors, were repurposed by the Nazis to project a sense of historical inevitability — as if Hitler’s regime were the next chapter in a lineage stretching from Arminius to Barbarossa to Wilhelm I.
Long before Hitler became chancellor, Berlin already possessed grandiose monuments to Teutonic greatness: the Siegessäule (Victory Column) and the Brandenburg Gate, crowned by a bronze quadriga driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, envisioned even grander transformations. The centerpiece of World Capital Germania was to be a structure called the Volkshalle (People’s Hall), a domed monstrosity that would be able to hold 180,000 people. Also on the drawing board was a Triumphal Arch, so large that the Arc de Triomphe would have fit within its opening.
After France’s defeat in 1940, Hitler signed a decree asserting: “In the shortest possible time Berlin must be redeveloped and acquire the form that is its due through the greatness of our victory as the capital of a powerful new empire.”
Hitler added: “I expect that it will be completed by the year 1950.”
Obviously, Hitler didn’t last that long. Neither did work on “World Capital Germania.” And all across defeated Germany, the thousands of street signs bearing Hitler’s name came down and were replaced.
Donald Trump, perhaps glimpsing his own mortality, seems to be in a hurry to leave an indelible and grandiose imprint on the nation’s capital and beyond. Much of the country watched in disbelief as heavy equipment tore into the White House East Wing to clear ground for a super-sized new ballroom designed in the gilded idiom of America’s 47th president. His name newly affixed beside JFK’s on the façade of the Kennedy Center only amplified the sense that Trump is racing to secure the permanence he has long craved.
And he is far from finished.
His most extravagant project is one reminiscent of Hitler’s ideas for World Capital Germania — that “triumphal arch” that the White House has cast as a defining pillar of Trump’s legacy.
“The arch is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle declared.
But even as Trump pursues these monumental ambitions, he keeps running into the limits of democratic resistance. In one of the more brazen episodes, he told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he would release long-delayed federal funds for a critical rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York if Dulles International Airport and Penn Station were renamed for him. Schumer refused, and the gambit collapsed.
The only way Trump managed to get his name onto the Kennedy Center was by replacing multiple board members with loyalists and then having himself appointed board chair. His newly installed board approved adding his name to the building’s façade — a move that cannot legally alter the institution’s official name, which only Congress can change. This particular gambit backfired, prompting a long list of prominent performers to cancel appearances in protest.
Trump’s plans for a grand arch could also face some obstacles, because of laws designed to protect the capital’s commemorative landscape.
Who knows how much of Trump’s ambitions to remake Washington, D.C. in his own image will come to fruition. But even if a Trumpian analog of Germania never arises, with the way he has disrupted this country and the world, he’s already molded himself into something like a menacing monument in human form.
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Jeremy Carl is latest Trump nominee facing Senate pushback over history of antisemitic remarks
(JTA) — A key GOP senator is opposing the appointment of a Trump nominee over his past remarks about Jews, the Holocaust and Israel, potentially dooming Jeremy Carl’s bid for a top State Department post.
Carl, who is seeking the role of Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, drew scrutiny during his Thursday confirmation hearing for past writings and statements about Jews. Those included a 2024 interview on a podcast called “The Christian Ghetto” in which the first-term Trump official said, “Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history.” On the same podcast, he opined that there was “an extent to which the Holocaust kind of dominates so much of modern Jewish thinking, even today.”
Following his appearance, Utah Sen. John Curtis, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, announced he would not be supporting Carl’s nomination.
“After reviewing his record and participating in today’s hearing, I do not believe that Jeremy Carl is the right person to represent our nation’s best interests in international forums, and I find his anti-Israel views and insensitive remarks about the Jewish people unbecoming of the position for which he has been nominated,” Curtis said in a statement.
Carl, however, is continuing to push for the post on X. Since the hearing, he has used the platform to defend his performance and repost allies, including some who responded directly to Senate accusations of his antisemitism. Vice President JD Vance this week also shared a post of Carl’s, though not one directly related to his confirmation bid.
Carl also denied accusations from Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy that he is a white nationalist, though he continued to insist that “white culture” is under threat.
A Claremont Institute fellow, Carl was born Jewish but has since converted to Christianity. He served in the first Trump administration’s Interior Department and has argued that “white Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded.”
The White House also continued to defend its pick of Carl after the hearing in a statement to the New York Times late Friday.
And at least one of Carl’s defenders is Jewish: Michael Rubin, a conservative historian and longtime government advisor on Middle East affairs, called the campaign against his former Yale classmate a “lynch mob” in the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
Carl, Rubin wrote, “is a man whose record of action and allies belie any serious consideration that he is antisemitic, anti-Zionist, or racist.”
Carl’s grilling came days after Republicans booted another Trump appointee from the administration’s religious freedom commission over her remarks about Israel and Zionism during an antisemitism hearing.
If Carl’s bid fails, he would not be the first Trump nominee with a history of questionable comments about Jews to fail to clear the Senate — though other Trump officials remain in their positions despite histories of antisemitic posts.
On the “Christian Ghetto” podcast interview, Carl also gave advice to Christians “looking to convert Jews” like him. He did, however, reject certain conspiracy theories about cabals of Jewish power. “I’m very critical of, overall, the political stance and the sociology of the Jewish community, particularly in this century. It’s been very destructive overall. But I don’t think that that’s a result of a conspiracy,” he said. His other podcast appearances include Tucker Carlson in 2024.
His new role — if confirmed — would put him in a critical position of influence over U.S. policy related to the United Nations, at a moment when both Israel and the U.S. are highly critical of that governing body over its perceived anti-Israel bias.
That concerned Curtis, who said that Carl’s past comments that the U.S. “spends too much time and energy on Israel, often to the detriment of our own national interest” would damage his credibility at the UN.
“Share with me specifically, what in the US interest has been harmed by sustained American support of Israel?” Curtis asked. Carl did not directly answer the question, instead pivoting to criticizing the UN for antisemitism.
“In the UN context, I wish the UN would stop being antisemitic all the time, and so therefore we could stop — there’s a million other problems, like the Rohingya,” he said. Upon Curtis’s repeated questioning, Carl added, “I think diplomatic support of Israel in the UN context is absolutely critical.”
Curtis also noted that Carl seemed to agree with a podcast host’s remarks that Jews were “claiming special victim status because of the Holocaust” and that “the state of Israel is not a victim but instead a perpetrator,” among other remarks.
“This was your response: ‘Right, right, yeah, no, I mean, I think that’s true,’” Curtis said, of Carl’s appearance on the “Christian Ghetto” podcast.
“I do a lot of podcasts,” Carl responded, adding that he was “sure” his quotes were “accurate.”
Democratic Senators, including some Jews, were more forceful in condemning Carl’s remarks about Jews.
Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, quoting a recent American Jewish Committee study that one in three Jewish Americans have experienced antisemitism, produced placards of some of Carl’s past pronouncements on Jews, including that “the Jews love to see themselves as oppressed.”
“To my colleagues that may consider voting for Mr. Carl’s nomination, understand what the vote signals,” she said. “It tells Jewish Americans they simply don’t matter.”
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Spike Lee says his pro-Palestinian NBA All-Star Game fit wasn’t meant as a dig against Deni Avdija
(JTA) — The director Spike Lee says he was not targeting the first Israeli NBA All-Star when he wore a pro-Palestinian outfit to the All-Star Game on Sunday.
Lee’s outfit which featured a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag-themed bag strap. Some of his critics charged that he had chosen the outfit especially because Deni Avdija, the Israeli star of the Portland Trail Blazers, was taking the court.
Lee put that idea to rest in a post on Instagram late Tuesday, saying that he had not known Avdija was Israeli because the Trail Blazers are a West Coast team. (Lee is a New York Knicks superfan.)
“There has been some conjecture about what I wore to the games on Saturday and Sunday. The clothes I wore are symbols of my concern for the Palestinian children and civilians, and my utmost belief in human dignity for all humankind,” Lee wrote. “What I wore was not intended as a gesture of hostility to Jewish people or to support violence against anyone, nor was it intended as a comment on the significance of Deni being an an All-Star.”
About his lack of familiarity with Avdija, whose World Team fell short in the round-robin contest featuring 28 NBA stars, Lee added, “He can BALL. NOW I DO KNOW.”
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