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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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Misguided Super Bowl Ad: Antisemitism Isn’t a Sticky Note — It’s an Institutional Failure
Anti-Israel demonstrators protest outside the main campus of Columbia University during the Columbia commencement ceremony in Manhattan, in New York City, US, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
It is an odd sign of the times that one of the clearest statements about antisemitism this year came not from a university president or a political leader, but from a $15 million Super Bowl commercial.
Robert Kraft’s advertisement was earnest, expensive, and plainly intended as a civic intervention. Kraft is not a marginal celebrity. He is one of the most prominent Jewish civic patrons in America. The fact that even he must purchase a national pulpit at Super Bowl rates is itself a measure of institutional retreat.
The ad depicts a Jewish teenager in a school hallway, targeted with a slur. Another student intervenes, covers the insult with a blue square, and offers solidarity. The message is simple: don’t ignore hate.
The impulse is understandable. Antisemitism is rising. Jewish students feel exposed. Institutions equivocate.
And yet the ad landed with a discomfort that is difficult to dismiss. As critics in The Forward, Tablet, and the Jewish Journal all noted, the problem is not the intention. The problem is what the ad reveals.
The ad reflects the only kind of antisemitism that elite America still feels fully comfortable condemning: the obvious kind.
A crude insult. A bullying moment. A hate that is personal, adolescent, and safely detached from politics, ideology, and power.
But that is not the antisemitism American Jews are confronting right now.
The defining feature of antisemitism in the post–October 7 era is not that it is whispered in hallways. It is that it is rationalized in public.
It is not merely cruelty. It is permission.
It is the normalization of harassment as “activism.” The recycling of ancient hatreds in contemporary moral language. The steady refusal of elite institutions — many educational institutions, but colleges and universities most of all — to draw enforceable lines.
The Super Bowl ad is antisemitism for a society that cannot bring itself to talk about faculty, ideologies, and institutions.
The question is no longer whether antisemitism exists. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with moral authority will name it when it is inconvenient, and confront it when it is costly.
On that question, the record is bleak.
At Columbia University last week, police arrested protesters outside campus gates — an incident that included not only students but faculty participation. That detail matters. When professors are arrested alongside students, the story is no longer youthful excess. It is adult legitimization.
The most corrosive feature of the current moment is not simply student radicalism, but the way faculty and institutional actors increasingly supply the moral vocabulary that makes intimidation feel righteous.
Universities issue statements while disruptions become routine. Administrators cite “process” while Jewish students are told, implicitly, to endure it. Students are harassed on Monday; the campus receives an email about “values” on Tuesday; nothing happens on Wednesday.
The problem is not that Americans haven’t heard of antisemitism. The problem is that institutions have stopped punishing it.
This is not a crisis of awareness. It is a crisis of authority.
Which raises the deeper irony of Kraft’s approach: a $15 million advertisement is, in some sense, a substitute for the backbone our institutions no longer display.
It is philanthropy stepping in where leadership has retreated.
Bret Stephens made a version of this argument just days before the Super Bowl, in his State of World Jewry address at the 92nd Street Y, calling the fight against antisemitism “a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort” and urging the Jewish community to redirect resources from awareness campaigns toward strengthening Jewish life itself. Stephens is right that awareness is not the bottleneck. But the answer is not merely identity-building. It is institutional enforcement. The crisis is not that Jews lack pride. It is that universities lack spine.
That may be the most revealing thing about the ad. It is an attempt to do, through symbolism, what our civic institutions are increasingly unwilling to do through enforcement.
The blue square is unobjectionable. But it also reflects a broader cultural habit: the preference for gesture over boundary, performance over consequence.
A hallway. A slur. A moment of interpersonal cruelty.
That is antisemitism as many Americans prefer to imagine it: isolated, obvious, juvenile — disconnected from the ideological infrastructures that now sustain it.
But the antisemitism American Jews increasingly confront is embedded in systems.
On many campuses, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters function less like protest clubs than like parallel moral ecosystems: separate communications channels, teach-ins, counter-programming designed not to engage speakers but to delegitimize them.
This is not spontaneous dissent. It is infrastructure.
And infrastructure is precisely what awareness campaigns do not touch.
That is why the problem persists. Confronting contemporary antisemitism requires naming not only hatred, but the respectable ideologies that now carry it.
Here we reach another familiar discomfort: the pressure to universalize.
Even Kraft’s campaign folds antisemitism into a broader effort against “all hate.” Again, the instinct is decent. But the move is familiar. Jews are permitted sympathy so long as their experience is immediately generalized.
The particularity of antisemitism is softened, and made safe for consensus consumption. But antisemitism is not merely one prejudice among others. It has a specific history, a specific structure, and a specific contemporary resurgence. Jews know, historically, that when elites insist on vagueness, trouble is already advancing.
There is also something telling in the ad’s narrative posture. The Jewish teen is passive. He does not speak. He does not resist. He is acted upon, rescued by an ally.
Solidarity matters. But Jews cannot rely on symbolic allyship in place of institutional accountability. A society that requires minority groups to depend on the kindness of bystanders rather than the firmness of institutions is not a healthy society.
And that may be the deeper point. Kraft’s ad is not offensive. It is diagnostic.
It reveals a culture that has difficulty naming antisemitism as it actually exists in 2026.
It reveals institutions that prefer statements to discipline, empathy to enforcement, and symbols to boundaries.
It reveals how far moral speech has been outsourced to philanthropy and branding because civic leaders and universities have proven unwilling to speak plainly when the costs are real.
A $15 million ad is, in this sense, an indictment — even if unintentionally — of everything that should not require an ad in the first place.
What American Jews need now is not another awareness campaign. We need institutions that enforce rules. Leaders who name what is happening. Universities that treat intimidation as intimidation and hate, not as “political expression.” Administrators who stop hiding behind process.
The blue square is fine as a gesture. But gestures are not enough.
Antisemitism will decline only when universities treat it the way they treat every other serious violation: with rules, consequences, and clarity — not symbols. A society that can only condemn antisemitism through commercials is a society that has lost the courage to confront it.
Note: According to the ADL’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024, including an 84% increase on college campuses and 860 incidents in K-12 schools.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Can We Ignore the Antisemitism in the Palestinian National Movement?
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump (not pictured) hold a bilateral meeting at Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain, July 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently offered a formulation now familiar across Western democracies: you can support the cause of a Palestinian state without being antisemitic.
Millions do that. He does that. And yet — he acknowledged — the marches claiming to support that cause are saturated with antisemitic banners and rhetoric, leaving the Jewish community in England, in his words, “frightened and intimidated.”
At the level of abstract moral philosophy, the statement is unobjectionable. Of course, one can imagine support for Palestinian Arab self-determination free of antisemitism. But politics does not take place in one’s imagination. It takes place in movements, incentives, slogans, and consequences. And it is precisely here that this formulation collapses, due to multiple failures.
The first failure is treating “support for a Palestinian state” as a free-floating moral posture rather than as a real-world political movement with a long, traceable history.
Politics is not judged by what a cause could look like under ideal conditions. It is judged by how it actually operates over time. Movements reveal their moral character not through mission statements, but through what they tolerate, excuse, and normalize when mobilized in public.
When antisemitic imagery, chants, and conspiratorial claims appear often and predictably — across countries, languages, and decades — the issue is no longer a handful of bad actors. It is structural. At that point, the question is unavoidable: is the antisemitism a bug, or is it a feature?
A movement that repeatedly fails to police its own boundaries — and instead often embraces, recycles, and mainstreams some of the most virulent Jew-hatred in modern history — cannot plausibly claim moral neutrality.
The second flaw is the elevation of professed intent over outcome. Responsibility does not attach only to what one claims to believe. It attaches to what one knowingly enables.
One could reasonably argue that between World Wars I and II, Germany had been stripped of dignity and economic viability by the Treaty of Versailles. Taken alone, that argument was not antisemitic. But once grievance politics in Germany repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories, racial mythologies, and eliminationist rhetoric, one had to look at what German nationalism actually stood for.
Good intentions did not negate predictable outcomes. They never do.
The Record Cannot Be Wished Away
The antisemitism embedded in the modern anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian movement is not new, marginal, or accidental. Its founding political leadership included figures who openly allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, broadcasting antisemitic propaganda and helping recruit Muslim units for the Waffen-SS. Its charter documents and early manifestos drew directly from European antisemitic conspiracy literature.
In later decades, its most influential organizations repeatedly framed the conflict not as a territorial dispute but as a cosmic struggle against Jews — invoking blood libels, tropes about global Jewish control, and Holocaust denial or inversion.
In recent years, these themes have not receded; they have intensified. Claims that Jews harvest organs, fabricate atrocities, control governments and media, or uniquely lack the right to national self-determination are not fringe slogans for the “Pro-Palestinian” movement. They are voiced by prominent activists, academics, and movement leaders — and then laundered through the language of “anti-Zionism” for supposed respectability.
This is not a historical footnote. It is the consistent pattern.
Which brings us to the question formulations like Starmer’s carefully avoid, but which any serious analysis must confront: If the cause is just, why does it so consistently require antisemitic language and behavior to sustain mass mobilization?
No other modern national cause routinely relies on Holocaust inversion, blood-libel-adjacent imagery, or claims of venal global Jewish control to generate energy and cohesion. No other liberation movement so frequently denies the very peoplehood of one particular nation while insisting on universal moral legitimacy for all others.
This is not accidental or incidental. It is diagnostic.
When the same antisemitic tropes surface wherever Israel is discussed — across groups or cultures that share little else — the burden of proof shifts. The problem is no longer a fringe prone to excess or “just some extremists.” It is the movement’s underlying moral architecture.
The appeal of Starmer’s statement lies in its reassurance. It allows leaders to affirm concern for Jewish safety rhetorically while continuing to validate a movement that, in practice, repeatedly produces hate, intimidation, vandalism, exclusion, and violence directed at Jews.
We have seen this pattern before. Elites once spoke warmly of revolutionary justice while dismissing the guillotine as excess. They spoke of class liberation while ignoring gulags. Each time, abstraction functioned as moral anesthesia — allowing respectable people to look away from what was happening in plain sight.
Yes — one can imagine supporting Palestinian statehood without antisemitism. But politics cannot be judged only by what one can imagine. It is judged by what one enables, excuses, and refuses to confront once patterns become unmistakable.
A politics that hides behind abstraction while ignoring outcomes and reality is not principled. It is indulgent. And history has been relentlessly unforgiving to indulgence masquerading as moral seriousness.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
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Super Bowl ad combatting antisemitism draws criticism from Jews
Artificial intelligence, Uber Eats, Steven Spielberg’s next film — and antisemitism.
Those were among the topics competing for attention during Sunday’s Super Bowl ads. The antisemitism commercial showed a white Jewish high school student being taunted with the slur “Dirty Jew,” until a taller Black classmate steps in to defend him.
The high-profile spot was funded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, formerly known as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
For Kraft, 84, the moment was meant to model allyship. Through Blue Square, he has partnered with Hillel International and the United Negro College Fund to host “unity dinners” bringing together Jewish and Black students, and he told CBS News that he hopes Palestinian students attend as well. The ad, Kraft said, was about solidarity.
This is not Kraft’s first Super Bowl ad. In 2024, he paid for an ad featuring Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter in a spot that leaned on similar themes of Black-Jewish collaboration and a shared history of Civil Rights activism. And he began running ads about antisemitism several years before that during Patriots games.
But instead of unifying viewers, the commercial quickly became one of the night’s most divisive spots. Critics — including many Jews — derided it as “dated” and “disconnected” from the way antisemitism actually shows up in 2025, especially on college campuses and online. To some, the ad seemed stuck in a moral universe where antisemitism is an interpersonal problem solved by a well-timed intervention, rather than a systemic one fueled by ideology, institutions and, increasingly, online indoctrination.
Online, the backlash was swift. Many Jewish commenters argued that the estimated $15 million Kraft spent on the campaign, which is also slated to air during the Winter Olympics, would have been better spent elsewhere.
A sharp backlash has emerged against the brand of advocacy that Kraft has undertaken, with some Jewish leaders decrying efforts to combat antisemitism as ineffective and misguided.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” the center-right New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said in a “State of World Jewry” address last week in New York. Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership.
Others simply found the ad tone-deaf and potentially even harmful.
In an open letter addressed to Kraft, Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard graduate who sued the university over alleged antisemitism, put it bluntly. “You’re a smart guy,” he wrote, “but the people you have hired either are morons or are taking advantage of the money you pay them.”
Emily Tamkin, a contributing columnist at the Forward, posted on social media: “I know in my heart that somewhere in this country of ours a Jewish kid is getting bullied with a Post-it today because of that ad.”
“This Super Bowl ad was clearly well intentioned, but it missed the mark,” posted Margot Touitou, a Tel Aviv-based content creator. “If legacy orgs want to understand what antisemitism looks like for young Jews today, they need to actually be online and tapped into internet culture. Without that, campaigns like this won’t ever land, and that hallway scene especially felt stuck in a ‘90s movie, which just isn’t how Gen Z moves or experiences this stuff.”
The team behind the ad pushed back, insisting the criticism misunderstands its intent — and its data. In a letter to the Forward, Adam Katz, president of Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, said online use of the slur “Dirty Jew” has increased 174% over the past three years, arguing that the ad reflects real trends affecting younger Jews in particular. “We test all of our ads,” Katz wrote, adding that early results have been “promising.” He said the decision to set the ad in a high school was deliberate: “That is where we have seen the most concerning trends in antisemitism data.”
The Anti-Defamation League, whose independent research found the ad resonated with audiences, echoed that defense. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the spot “powerful” and praised it as “a simple yet moving depiction of resilience in the face of discrimination.”
In response to the criticism, several groups released their own versions of the ad.
On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces posted its own stark, 11-second video to social media. “This is our Super Bowl commercial,” the IDF wrote, over footage of soldiers carrying machine guns to a soundtrack from Bad Bunny, who performed during halftime. Eylon Levy, who served as an Israeli government spokesperson in the early months of the Gaza war, shared the clip and added a pointed rejoinder: “Much more inspiring for an American Jewish kid who’s getting called a ‘dirty Jew’ than hoping a taller, cooler Black kid will save him.”
Daniel Lubetzky, a Jewish philanthropist and founder of Kind Snacks, released his own version of Kraft’s ad, reimagining the bullied Jewish teen not as a victim in need of rescue, but as a future doctor: accomplished and confident. The video went viral almost immediately, drawing praise from viewers who found it more empowering, and scorn from others who felt it simply swapped one trope for another.
Together, the competing ads — and the arguments around them — revealed a deeper divide: not just over tactics, but over what kind of story American Jews want to tell about themselves at a moment when antisemitism feels both newly visible and painfully unresolved.
JTA contributed to this report.
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