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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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Cornell Graduate Student Union Blasts Israel, Backs BDS While Committing to ‘Palestinian Liberation Struggle’
Cornell University students walk on campus, November 2023. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
A graduate workers’ union at Cornell University has approved a resolution to adopt a statement titled “International Solidarity With the Palestinian Liberation Struggle” which espouses invective against Israel and calls for participation in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state.
“Cornell is implicated in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians through research, recruitment, and financial ties with the weapons industry, and endowment investments,” says the resolution, passed by Cornell Graduate Students United, a division of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). “Cornell’s complicity perpetuates its history from profiting from dispossession.”
Pronouncing its synthesis of classical Marxist themes and anti-Zionist propaganda, the statement continued: “The labor movement faces a once in a generation opportunity to build international worker solidarity after globalization has fractured the working class across lines of race, gender, legal status, and national borders. The Palestinian Trade Unions have urged us, as workers of the world, to end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes.”
Cornell UE, which announced the membership vote last week, added that it will follow up the resolution with a series of policies and actions intended to enforce it, including using union time, resources, and space to advocate anti-Zionism, pressure the university to “disclose” its investment holdings, and enforce BDS within the union by ensuring its members “refuse funding sources that are tied to the US and Israel militaries and weapons manufacturers and … find alternatives.”
Experts told the US Congress in September that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the UE.
In particular, Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he argued quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who said he has experienced a climate of hatred that is impervious to correction because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Shabbat dinners for young adults were the new thing. Now OneTable is laying off staff.
When OneTable, a nonprofit that helps organize and fund Shabbat dinners for thousands of young adults each year, introduced its new chief executive in May, things seemed to be on the upswing. Amid a national rise in Jewish engagement, OneTable board chair Julie Franklin said the organization’s community was “thriving and bigger than ever before.”
Internally, though, the organization was facing a decline in funding, and on Tuesday it laid off 14 employees — about a quarter of its staff.
CEO Sarah Abramson informed staff of the impending layoffs in a companywide Zoom call Tuesday afternoon, according to a OneTable employee who was later informed that they were among those whose jobs were cut. The Forward granted the employee anonymity to discuss the situation.
The organization confirmed the layoffs in a statement.
“Our organization is undertaking a planned, strategic shift in staffing to ensure we effectively continue to empower young adults to craft their own personalized Shabbat practices filled with meaning, reflection, and community,” the statement said.
The cuts — which did not appear to include any executives, the employee said — come as OneTable, whose budget still exceeds $10 million, makes broader changes to its approach.
Oct. 7 changed Shabbat dinners
The organization typically gives hosts, who must be Jewish and are generally aged 21-39, a stipend of $10 per registered guest at their dinners. Guests looking for a Shabbat dinner can sign up to be matched with a host on the OneTable platform.
After Oct. 7, the employee said, the organization saw a new pattern emerge: Unique guests were down, with some hosts inviting the same few guests over and over. In recent months, OneTable began “graduating” — that is, discharging — some of those hosts in an effort to reduce costs and focus on the mission of bringing Shabbat to more people, the employee said.
In the statement about the layoffs, the company said that their participants have doubled to 80,000 annually since Oct. 7, and that the layoffs will allow them to “explore new engagement approaches including pilots launching in 2026.”
The organization also partners with local organizations to receive funding and to collaborate on larger dinner events. But several OneTable field managers were laid off, perhaps signaling a change to that model.
The future of a newer program for older adults, known as “50ish+,” is unclear.
An audited financial report from 2024, made public by OneTable on its website, reported just under $11 million in assets — down from just under $12 million the year prior, with net contributions and grants receivable also down from roughly $8.5 million to $7.4 million.
The previous CEO, Aliza Kline, co-founded the organization and served 10 years in the role before stepping down in 2024.
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Africa Becomes Center of Global Terrorism Amid ISIS Revivals, Al Qaeda Alliances
Islamic State – Central Africa Province released documentary entitled “Jihad and Dawah” covering group’s campaigns in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and battles against Congolese and Ugandan armies. Photo: Screenshot
Both independent analysts and the United States government have identified rising Islamist terrorist threats across Sub-Saharan Africa as a growing concern, now positioning the region at the center of attention regarding global jihadist terrorism.
Gen. Dagvin Anderson, commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), has started a series of visits to African partners, starting with Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Puntland.
“The whole reason I came here is because we have shared threats,” Anderson said. “I’m not new to this region; I understand what the issues are, and we’re here to help empower our African partners to address these threats in a united way.”
Just last week, AFRICOM coordinated with the government of Somalia to strike Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Shabaab targets.
“As we face the growing security threats, including the rise of terrorist activities in East Africa, the Sahel, and West Africa’s coastal regions, the collective efforts are more important than ever,” Anderson said. “Together we can build a more prosperous and secure future for the United States, for Africa, and most importantly, for our children.”
Anderson’s trip came after the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released a report last month showing that, last year, 86 percent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in just 10 countries, with seven of them in Africa and five in the continent’s Sahel region.
The report explained how the Sahel — a belt that runs across the African continent and is also called the Sahelian acacia savanna — dominates the map of terrorism deaths today.
“Where once the global terror threat was concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, today it is centered in the Sahel, specifically in the tri-border region between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger,” the report’s four authors wrote before noting that, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, the region comprised more than half of all terrorism-related deaths last year.
“The data shows that while countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria have been largely steady when it comes to significant impact by terrorism over recent years, Sahelian countries (Burkina Faso, chief among them) have experienced a steep increase,” the analysts assessed. “In 2023 and 2024, Burkina Faso was most impacted by terrorism globally.”
Regarding the specific groups responsible for these slayings in the Sahel, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies primarily blamed an al-Qaeda-affiliate, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), which it identified as being responsible for 83 percent of deaths in the region.
In August, a report from the Observer Research Foundation argued that “the African continent remains the principal theater of global jihadist activity.”
Colin Clarke and co-author Anoushka Varma, both of the Soufan Group, described the threat of JNIM. The group “has entrenched its position as the deadliest terrorist group in the Sahel, escalating attacks across Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, while making inroads into Benin, Ghana, and Togo — countries that had largely avoided jihadist violence until now,” they wrote. “In the first half of 2025, JNIM claimed to have carried out at least 280 attacks in Burkina Faso — double the number recorded during the same period in 2024 — and was responsible for approximately 8,800 fatalities across the Sahel that year.”
Another region of the continent drawing the concern of counter-terrorism analysts is the Horn of Africa (HOA), where the West Point researchers identified the “critical case” of the “the triangular confluence that has developed between the Houthis, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and al-Shabaab.”
Despite the Houthis being backed by Shi’ite Iran and operating primarily out of Yemen, the West Point report noted that “there is even evidence that the Houthis have collaborated with Islamic State Somalia [a Sunni group], coordinating on intelligence and procurement of drones and technical training.”
Clarke and Varma also explained the unique threats operating in the HOA in their analysis, explaining that “both the Islamic State–Somalia Province (IS-Somalia) and al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, al-Shabaab, remain key drivers of regional instability.”
In April 2025, they wrote, al-Shabaab “launched a renewed offensive in Middle Shabelle, regaining territorial control not seen since the Somali federal government’s counteroffensive in 2022.” The analysts also identified that “IS-Somalia has attracted foreign fighters from Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and even among the Somali diaspora in the West.”
In addition to the increased violence in the HOA and Sahel African regions, two other alarming trends in terrorism that West Point’s researchers named are the wide involvement of Iran with organized crime gangs and the decreasing ages of first-time terrorist suspects.
The report stated that over the last five years, Iran has conducted 157 foreign operations, with 22 involving criminal groups and 55 involving terrorist groups. These range from “Hell’s Angels gang members in Canada to the Kinahan Cartel in Ireland.”
Likewise, the age range of terrorism offenders has transformed.
The authors stated that many analysts have identified “a new wave of extremism among children” and that “across Europe as a whole, nearly two-thirds of Islamic State-linked arrests in 2024 involved teenagers. This included the infamous August 2024 plot by three males aged 17 to 19 targeting a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria.”
In 2024, the United Kingdom reported that 20 percent of its terrorism suspects were legally classified as minors.