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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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He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
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‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
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When Harry met ‘Hava Nagila.’ Belafonte’s lifelong love affair with Jewish culture
When Harry Belafonte let loose the word ”Day-O” in Webster Hall in 1955, it echoed a storied past.
He was in the ballroom recording “The Banana Boat Song,” a working man’s cry for reprieve, taken from the Caribbean’s banana loaders, who worked nights to escape the scorching heat, for his album Calypso.
Decades earlier, in the same, acoustically-blessed venue founded by a Jewish immigrant named Charles Goldstein, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America formed in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Emma Goldman, who encouraged a young Communist named Paul Robeson, later to become Belafonte’s mentor in politics and performance, gave speeches about anarchism and women’s rights there.
Belafonte’s song was a kind of call-and-response with history, and a Jewish one at that. He was no stranger to Jewish culture and would come to evangelize it. When he was a struggling actor, operating a burger joint in the Village at the height of the folk era, a local cantor wandered in and taught him a tune he’d make world famous: “Hava Nagila.”
“Harry’s affinity toward Jewish culture and for Jews was a huge part of his life,” said Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the author of Daylight Come, a new biography on Belafonte.
Jelly-Schapiro first interviewed the late singer, actor and activist when he was a grad student writing his dissertation on the influence of Caribbean culture. He didn’t have a book in mind, but over the years he’d catch up with Belafonte at events around the globe. Jelly-Schapiro even scored invites to his birthday parties. An earlier book proposal was scuppered by news of Belafonte’s memoirs, but in the years since his death in 2022, Jelly-Schapiro wanted to tell the larger story of how he reshaped American culture, in the pre-Civil Rights era and in the dead center of the movement.
Daylight Come is a fascinating look at Belafonte’s extracurriculars. Outside of his tenure as a matinee idol, and the first solo act to crack 1 million LPs sold, Belafonte’s best friend was Martin Luther King, Jr., for whom his West End Avenue apartment served as a kind of New York headquarters for the Civil Rights leader. He had the ear of John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. He mobilized movie stars for the 1963 March on Washington and bankrolled much of the campaign to desegregate the South. Among his other contributions was an early break he gave to a young Jewish Minnesotan looking to make it in the music industry (Bob Dylan’s first professional recording was as a harmonica player on the title track of Belafonte’s 1962 album Midnight Special).
I spoke with Jelly-Schapiro about Belafonte’s enduring connection to Yiddishkeit and the exceedingly strange film where he plays a Jewish angel on work probation. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The way you put it in the book is that Harold Bellanfanti, Harry’s dad, “said his father was a Dutch Jew from Martinique.” That makes me think it hasn’t been verified.
There’s no way to confirm it empirically, but that’s certainly the family story. Many family trees in the Caribbean are very mixed and hard to track because they involve mixtures of enslaved people from Africa and traders and others from the edges of Europe. He had this very mixed sort of family, but probably even more important is his growing up in New York around lots of Jews.
His mother worked as a domestic and a tailor. This Jewish tailor was kind to her and would give her these cheap suits that she dyed blue. But he also said in an interview once “I came to know the Irishman by knowing the culture of the Irish. I came to know the Jew by knowing the culture of the Jew.” He was quite literally around synagogues. He heard cantors sing. He was really taken as a young man with the stories of Sholem Aleichem and traditions of Yiddish storytelling and drama. That was a big part of his formation, and he talked about it.
He served in the Navy during World War II. Like many people of this generation, of all backgrounds, he was really shaped by this understanding of the Shoah and of the fight against Hitler.
I didn’t realize that he sang “Hava Nagila” in Berlin in 1958, so soon after the war; obviously the significance couldn’t have been lost on him there.
And “Hinei Ma Tov.” He made them a part of his repertoire. Germany is a fascinating moment. Here’s this Black Caribbean entertainer landing in Germany and singing “Hava Nagila” and really impressing on German folks who loved him — they absolutely adored Harry. He was a huge star in Germany, an even bigger star there than he was here — really conveying the sense of Jewishness as a culture and not just an identity. It’s an incredible fact that he was the conveyor of Jewish humanity and culture.
He took a break from making movies, but then right after MLK and Bobby Kennedy were shot, he comes back with this movie The Angel Levine, based on a Bernard Malamud story and co-starring Zero Mostel. Why do you think the material spoke to him at that moment?
In the late 1950s, he’d essentially turned his back on Hollywood. He had really scaled the heights of fame, and he appeared in some very big movies, but made this one called Island in the Sun in particular, which is a big blockbuster. But he hated the edit because basically they sort of neutered the interracial love affair that was at the center of it. They just had him drink out of the same coconut with Joan Fontaine. He was really soured on Hollywood. Did not want to take on roles or projects that, to his mind, were just designed to make whites comfortable, or that didn’t fit his politics. He was also hugely involved in the Civil Rights movement — I mean, he was making records, and he was still incredibly busy, but he was not making movies.
In this very dark, interesting time after the assassination of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, he was a little bit adrift personally and politically, but he decided to re-enter — make another movie, but on his own terms. The impetus for it was that he was really interested in the relationship between Blacks and Jews. He was interested in these old ideas about the human family and who gets to count as human, and mutual recognition of humanity of humans recognizing humans. But then you have this angel, so it adds this odd other element that’s really kind of interesting and strange. To me it’s an amazing thing that they just made that movie and it had national distribution because it’s so New York and so ethnic, for lack of a better term. This is way before Seinfeld made New York Jewishness hit the heartland. It was an experiment in trying to make movies that followed his politics, also in the sense of who was involved in the production.
He had all these interns of color; he wanted to integrate the entertainment industry and the film business. He also hired Bill Gunn, a very quirky Black screenwriter who’s kind of a genius. And Zero Mostel, who was blacklisted and then gave this memorable testimony in the House. An amazing character and a fellow denizen of the Upper West Side, he was a friend and a political ally of Harry’s. It’s a flawed and strange film, but it’s also a deeply touching one because it really gives it some of the complexities of the kind of deeply intimate and intertwined relationship between Blacks and Jews in New York, and also memorably features the Commandment Keepers up in Harlem, which is a synagogue of Black Jews of whose existence many people are ignorant outside New York or outside Harlem.
Belafonte was critical of the U.S. not participating in the 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa. This was the summit where a number of delegates declared Zionism as racism and singled out Israel for rebuke. He was asked about it on the Today Show the morning of 9/11, before the first tower was hit. I know that Harry had a relationship with Israel. He obviously was very supportive of the boycott of South Africa. People are pushing to boycott Israel. What do you think he’d think of Israel now?
His identification with Israel and with the cause of protecting Jewry and Jewish people was hugely important to him, and so he absolutely identified with Israel through much of his life in that way. I think certainly his politics were deeply anti-imperial, deeply anti-colonial, deeply skeptical of American foreign policy, and I think it, as evinced by that interview he gave on the morning of 9/11, he was developing a serious critique of American foreign policy and support for certain aspects of Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Like many American lefties of his generation, as his life went on, I think his critiques of Israel grew. By the time the current catastrophes unfolded in that part of the world, he was leaving public life. He didn’t speak concretely on them.
But he had very close relationships with the activists and the lefties and the causes that he really identified with in the last couple decades of his life — people involved with the prison abolition movement, certainly Black Lives Matter, but people like Angela Davis, Cornel West, these people who have obviously become extremely critical of Israel, and he was very close to many of these people in political formations. I think that was a journey for him.
The American Jewish Historical Society has an exhibit up now and it’s 75 objects about Jews in U.S. history, and one of them is a picture of Harry and Julie Robinson, his Jewish wife, at a march in the section on Civil Rights. The text says he was part Jewish.
He would joke he was the most popular Jew in America. It was not lost on him that many of the most important allies and backers of the Civil Rights movement were Jewish, and he was extremely close with Stan Levison, who was really kind of King’s chief strategist. His involvement, both in show business but also really vitally in the Civil Rights movement, involved a deep identification with a tradition of Jewish political engagement with progressive causes, and certainly his wife Julie, who was sort of a red diaper baby raised by Jewish Marxists, was part of that as well.
In the same way we talk about how he popularized a folk tune like “Day-O,” he introduced a lot of the country and the world to “Hava Nagila.” I don’t think someone who looks like an Old World cantor could have made quite the same impression with it
He gave a platform to Jewishness also being a deep well of folk culture. And he did the same for the Caribbean.
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