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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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When it comes to Israel/Palestine, everyone is sure that everyone else is a bigot
Welcome to the Great Hardening, in which Zionists and Anti-Zionists have each decided that the other side is made up of Nazis.
Literally.
For many on the Hard Left, all Zionists are Genociders. Doesn’t matter if you’re in Standing Together or Smol Emuni — Zionism is settler colonialism and entails genocide. And on both the Hard Right and what I have come to call the Hard Center, Anti-Zionists are Antisemites. Doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, or even a rabbi — all anti-Zionism, and even strong criticism of Israel, is antisemitism and thus bigotry.
As is typical of this decade of purity politics, each side embodies their rigidity by excluding the impure from the camp, as Leviticus 13:46 commands. On the Hard Left, some of my own progressive communities now explicitly ban “Zionists” (as they understand the term) from participation — at one event, a community meeting was halted because one person identified themselves as Israeli. Israeli DJs, including some who are vocally critical of Netanyahu and others who have “renounced their Israeliness,” have been banned at venues in London, Belgium and New York. Radical inclusion does not include “genociders.”
The Hard Center is equally uncompromising, defining its political opponents (often including liberal Zionists) as bigots who must be defeated, deplatformed and delegitimized. Anti-Zionist Jews aren’t even Jews, they say, and the term “genocide” is a blood libel. I have seen this firsthand as well; since daring to consider whether the term might apply to Gaza, I have not been invited as a scholar in residence or keynote speaker by a single mainstream Jewish organization. Meanwhile, leading institutions of the New York Jewish community now platform centrist or right-wing speakers exclusively, including at religious events happening next week.
On the Left, Right and Center, I have seen artists, academics, writers and musicians de-platformed for not condemning Israel, not condemning Hamas, mentioning Oct. 7, not mentioning Oct. 7, or issuing one’s condemnations without invoking the appropriate shibboleths. And, like the Levitical tzaraat, wrong views are contagious. If you fail to condemn someone who fails to condemn Israel, or Hamas, or antisemitism, or the occupation, then you are condemned.
As Shaul Magid has recently written, the limits of pluralism seem to have been redefined — and tightened. American Jews can accommodate disagreement on theology, halachic observance, intermarriage, LGBTQ inclusion and American politics — but not Israel. Magid himself was recently informed by a synagogue that “no one who is not a Zionist is permitted to speak from the pulpit.” (He identifies as a post-Zionist.) Meanwhile, students who privately protested the choice of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to speak at the JTS graduation had their jobs and livelihoods threatened as a result.
I know that there are many of us who feel caught between the Hard Left and Hard Center (and aren’t engaged with the Hard Right). Present company included, we are exhausted by all the shouting and shadow-banning. Is there nothing we can do about this? Is it just the new normal?
I want to make a case for a softening of the Hard Places — but I admit to some pessimism, because doing so may require a rethinking of what political arguments are really about. And the prescription I offer is thus, well, a little “soft.”
By which I mean: It addresses the real sources of all this hardening, which are emotional, and even spiritual. I mean a softening of the hard walls — built out of certainty, rage, and trauma — that demarcate the boundaries of pure and impure.
I don’t mean resolving our disagreements or pretending they don’t matter. They do matter. I also don’t mean centrism; writing this article, I took one of those online political quizzes and on a scale of 100, with 100 being the most conservative, I scored 15 on economic issues and 10 on social issues. That’s not the center.
What I mean is that our responses to these disagreements are not a matter of political ideology, but of more primal, instinctual drives. Consider: When someone says something you find strongly objectionable, how do you feel, physically? Often the response is physical disgust — like our Israelite ancestors, we want to put the defilement outside the camp. This is not an accident: Neuroscientists tell us that moral disgust activates the same parts of the brain as physical disgust. Which makes sense evolutionarily — it’s safest to keep the contaminant far away — but which affects how we tolerate dissent and disagreement in our midst. Often, we are repulsed by it.
Or consider this: Take a moment to reflect on how you feel — psychologically, tribally, morally, physically — about (take your pick) Israel or Palestine. Speaking for myself, I grew up loving Israel. Even before I visited it (in 1987, on a USY teen trip), I understood that it was the only place where I could feel fully at home. My group was in the majority. I could eat in all the restaurants. And I hated anyone who hated it. I had no space, intellectually or emotionally, for their narrative of 1948. And I still, to this day, have a love for the land and culture of Israel, where I lived for three years.
Is it not obvious that, when we love a person or place or country, we might be biased toward it?
Or maybe you’re on the other side of the emotional-political spectrum. Maybe you are in communities or close relationships with Muslims, Arabs, or others who have family directly impacted by Israel’s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, or Iran. Maybe you have seen videos or movies of atrocities in those places — of innocent children dead or maimed, of entire cities flattened by a supposedly defensive war. So of course you have emotional as well as political responses; you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.
No wonder the Left and Center are putting up walls. They are in pain. And, as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people.
This is why nationalists never want to see the suffering on the other side. The cognitive and emotional dissonance is unbearable. The people you love have done horrible things. The enemy is not entirely evil; in fact there are many innocent people who have suffered. Their blood, too, cries out from the ground.
Now can you reread the preceding paragraph from the other ‘side’? Maybe the real sides aren’t Israel and Palestine, but Coexistence and Violence.
If these last few paragraphs sound a little ‘soft’, that is the point. Paraphrasing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., hardness cannot drive out hardness. Only softness can do that: coming to see our own pain, sharing vulnerability and uncertainty, and understanding that questions of Palestine and Israel are as emotional as they are political, for all sides of the debate, including the center and right.
I am not naïve here, which is why I am pessimistic. I know, obviously, that the Hard Left, Hard Right, and Hard Center are composed precisely the people least interested in processing our grief or leading with vulnerability. But that doesn’t mean their trauma isn’t there. They’re just enacting it unconsciously rather than consciously.
They may seem like the strong ones, but they are not strong enough to face their own pain.
But doing this kind of inner work is not impossible; I have seen it work in my own life. And then seeing multiple narratives, cultivating intellectual humility, and recognizing that, in fact, there are coherent worldviews on all sides — all that becomes the easy part. When it comes to Israel/Palestine, I have Socialist and Jewish Voice for Peace friends whom I regularly consult for their takes, and I have Security Hawk and Soft Center (by which I mean: sad that coexistence seems impossible, but not hardened or nationalist) friends with whom I do the same. It works because we have been friends for a long time, and when we have argued intensely in the past, there’s been time to let the anger cool. We are invested in one another as people, not as bearers of positions. And when I see myself getting triggered, I step back from the brink.
Maybe we need a change of Jewish metaphor, away from Leviticus and its lepers, and toward the Talmudic sages and their modeling of constructive disagreement. Sincere debate, they said, is l’shem shamayim — for the sake of heaven. And when the disagreement cannot be resolved, elu v’elu divrei Elohim Chayim; both views are the words of the living God. The sage Rabbi Meir even continued to learn from Elisha Ben Avuyah after he committed apostasy.
These rabbis were not softies; they resisted imperialism, created a new form of religious life, and probably saved the Jewish people. Many of them were martyred. And yet they were ‘soft’ in the best ways: They were emotionally, spiritually and intellectually permeable, and, though still limited by their culture in many ways (sexism, for example), they were able to live in community even while strongly disagreeing with one another.
Can we?
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Elected PA Jewish judge leaves Democratic party, citing ‘disturbingly common’ antisemitism
(JTA) — An elected Supreme Court justice in Pennsylvania announced Monday night that he has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent, citing concerns about antisemitism.
In a statement, David Wecht, who is Jewish and served as Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair from 1998 to 2001, said he believed antisemitism has moved from the fringe of the Democratic Party to the mainstream.
“Nazi tattoos, jihadist chants, intimidation and attacks at synagogues, and other hateful anti-Jewish invective and actions are minimized, ignored, and even coddled,” he wrote. “Acquiescence to Jew-hatred is now disturbingly common among activists, leaders and even many elected officials in the Democratic Party.”
Wecht wrote that he had long understood that antisemitism “always festered on the fringe” of the right, a fact that hit home in 2018 when a far-right shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh where he and his wife were married in 1998.
“In the years that have followed, that same hatred has grown on the left,” he said in his statement. “It is the duty of all good people to fight this virus, and to do so before it is too late.”
Wecht previously made national headlines for his 2020 ruling against an effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania.
Through a spokesperson, Wecht declined to be interviewed about his exit from the Democratic Party.
Wecht’s comments come as Democrats wrestle with a range of internal tensions over antisemitism. The ascent of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who recently covered up a Nazi Totenkopf skull-and-crossbones tattoo, to become Maine’s Democratic candidate for Senate, and the increasing coziness between some progressive politicians and Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has said he favors Hamas over Israel, have particularly alarmed some members of the Jewish community.
Wecht is the son of renowned forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, who was involved in investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Wecht’s mother, translator Sigrid Ronsdal, spent the first six years of her life living under Nazi occupation in Norway.
“I know David and his legendary father, Cyril,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has clashed with his party over Israel, tweeted following Wecht’s announcement. “As I’ve affirmed, I’m not changing my party—but I fully understand David’s personal choice. The Democratic Party must confront its own rising antisemitism problem.”
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At Abraham Foxman’s funeral, an elegy for the last generation with direct ties to the Holocaust
(JTA) — As mourners gathered Tuesday for the funeral of Abraham Foxman, they were saying goodbye not only to one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the last half-century, but to one of the dwindling number whose moral authority was forged in the Holocaust itself.
Foxman, who died Sunday at 86, spent decades as one of the world’s most recognizable Jewish advocates, serving for nearly 30 years as the ADL’s top professional and another two decades before that in its leadership ranks. Presidents sought his counsel. Antisemites sought his absolution. Popes welcomed him. Prime ministers argued with him.
Many of the speakers at Park Avenue Synagogue credited his accomplishments to his outsized personality, his sense of humor and his intuitive leadership skills. And yet his past hung heavy over the funeral, which also served as an elegy for the last generation of survivors and how, like Foxman, they shaped Jewish communal life in the years after World War II and the founding of Israel. Born in Poland, Foxman survived the war in the care of his Catholic nanny.
“His life story of rising from the ashes is our story,” said Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, in a video tribute. “It is the story of our people born in the world at war. The Holocaust shaped Abe’s character and defined his mission to combat antisemitism and hypocrisy, to call up racism and bias, to speak up for the Jewish people and a Jewish democratic state of Israel.”
Others recalled that beyond fighting antisemitism, Foxman’s past inspired him to build a communal juggernaut that championed pluralism, democracy and civil rights.
“He knew exactly what the absence of those things looked like,” said Stacy Burdett, a former ADL colleague, referring to the Holocaust. “Abe lived in our world as a moral witness, not just to what human beings can survive, but to what they’re obligated to defend.”
Packing the sanctuary were Jewish communal leaders, former ADL colleagues and bold-face Jewish activists such as the lawyer Alan Dershowitz and the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (Not able to attend was Jonathan Greenblatt, Foxman’s successor at ADL, whose mother died in Florida on Saturday.)
When they weren’t recalling Foxman’s early trauma and subsequent accomplishments, eulogists painted a portrait of a Jewish communal warrior as a consummate hugger.
Thomas Friedman sent a video tribute, recalling how they met when the future New York Times columnist was a camper and Foxman was a counselor at Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisconsin. (That’s also where Foxman met his wife, Golda, who survives him, as do his two children and four grandchildren.) Friedman said that no matter how often or angrily they disagreed over something Friedman had written, usually about Israel, Foxman would sign off with affection.
“It’s true, if Abe really disagreed with you, you always knew because his text would end ‘love you, hugs,’” said Burdett. “The more strongly he disagreed, the more hugs and the more emojis.”
Former White House domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, in a video tribute, recalled shouting matches with Foxman during the Biden administration that left aides outside her office terrified.
“And when Abe and I emerged laughing and hugging,” she said, “we both had to reassure my team that all was fine, that we loved each other and not to worry.”
Rice credited Foxman with helping shape the Biden administration’s national strategy to combat antisemitism, and thanked him for defending her when others attacked her personally for administration positions on Iran and Israel.
But even as his children and grandchildren recalled Foxman as a family man, the shadow of the Holocaust fell across the synagogue’s ornate, Moorish-style sanctuary.
“You were a hidden child,” his daughter Michelle said, “and at the same time, you sought to hide the trauma from your children.”
She said she learned much of her father’s Holocaust story not from conversations at home but from his speeches, interviews and articles.
Foxman, who became ADL’s national director emeritus when he stepped down in 2015, was certainly among the last survivors to lead a major Jewish organization.
Fewer and fewer of those witnesses remain; according to the Claims Conference, as of January 2026, an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors are still alive. Nearly all are “child survivors” who were born after 1928.
In discussing how Foxman’s childhood shaped his activism, Sarah Bloomfield, director of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, recalled his traumatic childhood. His Polish Jewish parents fled to present-day Vilnius after the Nazi invasion of Poland; when Vilnius too came under Nazi control, his parents left him in the care of his nanny, who baptized him as a Catholic.
“This is what he said: ‘I’m only here because one Polish woman made a choice to save a Jewish child,’” Bloomfield recalled Foxman telling her. “She risked her life to protect the life of another human being, a Jewish child in Hitler’s Europe. Her name was Bronislawa Kurpi.”
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue, said Foxman was less interested in the “logistics” behind his survival (he and his parents were only reunited after several bitter lawsuits) than in the “singular moral act” of his rescuer. “In a world consumed by fire,” Cosgrove said, “one human being chose courage, one person chose decency, one person chose light.”
His grandson Gideon recalled asking Foxman how his history shaped his life’s work.
“He said that he felt obligated to make something of himself so that all the other Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust didn’t die in vain,” Gideon said.
And up until the end, said Burdett, Foxman was still feeling that obligation, shaped by a cataclysm that for many is becoming a distant memory, when recalled at all.
She recited his remarks last year during Yom Hashoah ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol.
“As a [Holocaust] survivor, my antenna quivers when I see books being banned, when I see people being abducted in the streets, when I see government trying to dictate what universities should teach and whom they should teach,” Foxman said at the time. “As a survivor who came to this country as an immigrant, I’m troubled when I hear immigrants and immigration being demonized.”
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