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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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Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the longtime dean of Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, will retire at the end of the school year, the president of Ziegler’s parent institution said Wednesday, in what may signal a broader transformation of the Los Angeles Conservative seminary.
Jay Sanderson, president of American Jewish University, confirmed the news in a phone interview with the Forward.
“He has served the Jewish world admirably, honorably for more than 25 years, leading an upstanding rabbinical school and making his mark on hundreds of Jewish leaders across the country,” Sanderson said.
Artson, who is also a vice president at AJU, is not leaving the school entirely. Sanderson said he will take on a “more senior role” in the administration of AJU, which also includes graduate schools for education and business. He will also continue teaching as the newly inaugurated Mordecai Kaplan Chair.
Artson did not reply to inquiries Wednesday night.
Sanderson, who became president in May 2025, has been making noise about bigger changes ahead at Ziegler since his arrival. In a podcast interview posted Jan. 15, he said he wanted AJU — which is already nondenominational other than Ziegler — to be “less denominationally driven.”
“What I was alluding to is an idea that has been talked about in the Jewish world for 15 years, that no one, frankly, has the courage to do, which is to create a multi-denominational rabbinical school, teaching 21st century skills, and bringing people across denominations to learn together,” Sanderson told the Forward. (Trans-denominational rabbinical schools do exist, including one in Los Angeles — the Academy for Jewish Religion, California.)
AJU sold its 22-acre hilltop campus prior to Sanderson’s arrival to a neighboring Jewish day school for terms that were undisclosed at the time. Sanderson said Wednesday that while he hadn’t seen the exact documentation, he thought it was between $55 million and $60 million. He said AJU netted very little of that, however, because most of the proceeds went to pay off debt on the campus.
Ziegler has since moved to LA’s Westside, and AJU’s administration — which had planned to stay on campus until 2027 — moved out 18 months early.
Artson, a leading intellectual in the Conservative movement, helped spearhead the push to legalize gay marriage under halacha, or Jewish law. He argued that “committed, permanent, exclusive homosexual relationships between equals” could not have been biblically prohibited because they were unknown until the modern era. The responsa he published in the 1990s making that case is still taught in rabbinical schools today; the Conservative movement did not formally sanction gay marriage until 2012.
And at a time when Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship, was seen as cloistered, his arrival at AJU in 1999 — it was then known as the University of Judaism — helped shape its brand of Conservative Judaism as a movement that could be both compassionate and capable of interfacing with the public.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, head of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said hundreds of Ziegler-ordained rabbis and untold numbers of people in their communities have benefited from Artson’s “visionary leadership.”
“His impact is wide and deep and will be felt for a very long time,” Kligfeld said.
In 2024, Artson and Ziegler Vice Dean Rabbi Cheryl Peretz were investigated and cleared by the Conservative movement after they were accused by former students of enabling a toxic culture at the school. A letter from AJU responding to the complaint acknowledged it and pledged “to do better.”
Sanderson, who did not say what the plan was to replace Artson, said that Ziegler students’ response to the news of the dean’s impending departure was mixed.
“I am signaling that we’re going to be looking at things and potentially changing things going forward,” Sanderson said. “So naturally, some of the students were excited, and some of the students were anxious.”
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Columbia University Professor Who Praised Oct. 7 Massacre Still Teaching Zionism Course
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Columbia University has retained a professor who celebrated Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — where the Palestinian terrorist group sexually assaulted women and men, kidnapped the elderly, and murdered children in their beds — allowing him to teach a course on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history, published an encomium to Hamas in The Electronic Intifada which lauded the Oct. 7 atrocities as “astounding,” “awesome,” “incredible,” and the basis of future assaults on the Jewish state. Additionally, Massad went as far as to exalt the Hamas paragliders who flew into a music festival to slaughter the young people attending it as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance.”
“Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them,” Massad wrote.
Massad went on to boast that an estimated 300,000 Israelis had been displaced from their homes during the attack while mocking the Biblical story of the Exodus, a foundation stone of the Jewish faith which tells the story of the Jews’ escaping slavery in Egypt.
“Reports promptly emerged that thousands of Israelis were fleeing through the desert on foot to escape the rockets and gunfire, with many still hiding inside settlements more than 24 hours into the resistance offensive,” he continued. “No less awesome were the scenes witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs who spent the day watching the news, of Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence or gliding over it by air.”
According to Columbia University’s website, this academic semester Massad will teach a course titled “Palestinian-Israeli Politics and Society,” which “provides a historical overview of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict to familiarize undergraduates with the background of the current situation.” The class will also go over the history of “the development of Zionism through the current peace process.”
The decision to continue allowing Massad to teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes amid Columbia’s insisting that it is combatting antisemitism and ideological bias in the classroom.
In July, university president Claire Shipman said the institution will hire new coordinators to oversee complaints alleging civil rights violations; facilitate “deeper education on antisemitism” by creating new training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — a tool that advocates say is necessary for identifying what constitutes antisemitic conduct and speech.
Shipman also announced new partnerships with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other Jewish groups while delivering a major blow to the anti-Zionist movement on campus by vowing never to “recognize or meet with” the infamous organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a pro-Hamas campus group which had serially disrupted academic life with unauthorized, surprise demonstrations attended by non-students.
“I would also add that making these announcements in no way suggests we are finished with the work,” Shipman continued. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that antisemitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding will take time. It will likely require more reform. But I’m hopeful that in doing this work, as we consider and even debate it, we will start to promote healing and to chart our path forward.”
Columbia University had, until that point, yielded some of the most indelible examples of anti-Jewish hatred in higher education since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel set off explosions of anti-Zionist activity at colleges and universities across the US. Such incidents included a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
On Tuesday, Columbia again stated its intentions to combat antisemitism and foster intellectual impartiality, saying it has appointed new officials and monitors to oversee its compliance with a $200 million settlement it reached with the federal government, a resolution which returned some $400 million which US President Donald Trump canceled over allegations it had refused to correct the allegedly hostile environment.
That agreement, as told by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, called for Columbia to “bring viewpoint diversity to their Middle Eastern studies program.”
On Wednesday, Middle East expert and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) Asaf Romirowsky told The Algemeiner that Massad’s remaining on Columbia’s payroll is indicative of the university’s hesitance to enact meaningful and lasting reforms.
“Joseph Massad is a notorious tenured antisemite who has spent his career at Columbia bashing Israel and Zionism, a poster child for BDS and a scholar propagandist activist. Furthermore, he has shown his true colors time and time again defending Hamas and calling the 10/7 barbaric attack on Israel ‘awesome,’” Romirowsky said.
Noting that Columbia’s own antisemitism task force said in a December report that the institution employs few faculty who hold moderate views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he added, “By allowing Massad to continue teaching and spreading his venom, Columbia is only codifying the dearth of knowledge as it relates to the Middle East. It should take the finding of the report and act upon it by getting rid of the tenured radicals they allowed to hijack the institution.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Julie Menin wants to be a bridge in the Mamdani era
Julie Menin, the newly-elected speaker of the New York City Council, understands the significance of becoming the first Jew to lead the city’s legislative body.
“We live in a day with the first Muslim mayor of New York City and now the first Jewish speaker of the Council serving at the same time,” Menin, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said in her inaugural speech.
In a recent interview, Menin said she views it as a “historic time for the Jewish community” amid rising antisemitism and tension over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and believes it is up to her to “bridge divides, as opposed to the kind of divisiveness that we’ve seen.”
When she was officially selected as speaker – the second-most powerful government position in America’s largest city – Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, remarked, “In medical terms, the word Menin is a protein that suppresses disease. We need more Menin to stop the spread of this disease of hatred.” Potasnik, who is a veteran chaplain of the fire department and was a member of Mamdani’s transition team, called Menin a leader “who knows the way, who shows the way and who goes the way.”
Menin’s leadership and relationship with Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be tested in the coming weeks as he comes under growing scrutiny from New York’s Jewish community over his anti-Zionist worldview and revocation of executive orders tied to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
Mainstream Jewish leaders see Menin as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions. A recent Honan Strategy Group poll of 848 NYC voters found that 39% want Menin to be a check on Mamdani’s agenda, while 38% want her to fully embrace it.
The Menin-Mamdani relationship faces its first test
In her first legislative move, Menin introduced last week a five-point plan to combat antisemitism that includes a bill that would ban protests around entrances and exits of houses of worship; provide$1.25 million in funding to the Museum of Jewish Heritage; and create a hotline to report antisemitic incidents. Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposal to establish a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues. A City Hall spokesperson said the mayor would wait for the outcome of a legal review before taking a position.
Mamdani told the Forward on Wednesday he has yet to discuss the specifics of the bill and would veto it if he determines it’s illegal. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.
Menin, who has already appeared several times alongside Mamdani — including in a social media clip promoting new public restrooms — said that, given her career as an attorney and her experience serving in a senior role at the New York City Law Department, she would not have introduced legislation that lacks legal standing.
“I feel very confident that the bills that we are going to put forward absolutely meet that legal muster,” she said. Menin declined to say whether she would seek to pass it with a veto-proof majority to get it signed into law, but said that her private conversations with Mamdani on the matter have been productive.
“I feel we’re going to have very broad-based support in the council,” she said. “They do not infringe upon the peaceful right to protest, but they do ensure that both congregants and students can enter and exit their respective facilities without intimidation and harassment. And I look forward to continuing to have productive conversations with the mayor on this topic.”
Menin will also be talking with a powerful group of progressive members, all of whom backed her bid for speaker. The body’s progressive caucus now includes 24 members, two short of a Council majority. The Jewish Caucus, which Menin attended last week, has seven members.
The Council is expected to vote on the set of bills at next month’s meeting.
Menin said passing the plan on an “aggressive and fast timetable” is crucial. “It’s obviously very important to call out antisemitic incidents as soon as they happen,” she said. “But we need far more than words. This is real decisive action to combat antisemitism.”
Fighting antisemitism and hate
Menin said she has a record of confronting antisemitism in public life.
When she was first elected to the City Council in 2021 — after serving as the city’s census czar during the 2020 count — she devoted her first town hall meeting to the issue. The virtual forum, attended by hundreds of constituents, brought together antisemitism experts and law enforcement officials to discuss how to report and prevent hate crimes. The meeting followed two incidents in her Upper East Side district. One involved a social media post by a popular comedy club that likened COVID-19 vaccination mandates to the Holocaust. Menin’s condemnation prompted a defamation lawsuit against her, which was dismissed. The other was the discovery of a swastika stamped on a $100 bill withdrawn from an ATM by a local woman.
Menin stressed the need to build relationships with other faith communities and “take the temperature and the rhetoric down” by focusing on “our commonality of spirit, not the differences.”
When she served as chair of the Community Board 1 in the 2000s, Menin supported the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero, despite facing significant opposition and death threats. Menin mentioned in the interview a Muslim high school student in her district who formed a Muslim-Jewish club with a Jewish best friend after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as an example of shared values.
Menin said she will continue the tradition of leading a City Council mission to Israel during her tenure, a contentious issue in recent city elections. In 2021, the Democratic Socialists of America local chapter required candidates who sought their endorsement to pledge not to travel on a sponsored trip to Israel. Her predecessor, Adrienne Adams, was the first speaker to break that tradition, in 2022, citing budget negotiations.
Favorite dish at the Shabbat table
Menin is an active member of Central Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Midtown Manhattan.
Her mother, Agnes Jacobs, and grandmother survived the Holocaust hiding in a cellar in Hungary, and her grandfather was killed. They first lived in Sydney, Australia for 6 years and then settled in a rent-controlled apartment in New York City’s neighborhood of Yorkville, known as “Little Hungary.”
Her favorite dish on the Friday night dinner table is palaschinta, a Hungarian crepe, using the toppings her grandfather liked — apricot jam and walnuts, and layered with chocolate.
Her bagel choice: sesame with scallion cream cheese.
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