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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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Analysis: NYC synagogue protest protection vote gives Mamdani cover
The New York City Council’s passage of protest restrictions outside synagogues and schools is being closely watched by states and cities grappling with the targeting of Jewish institutions — but the two key bills both leave what happens next an open question.
Those uncertainties let Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish Council speaker who drove the package, Julie Menin, both declare victory and appeal to their respective sides of the anti-Israel protest divide.
Menin had originally sought to establish a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues as part of a broader agenda to combat antisemitism — only to revamp it after Mamdani’s police commissioner and civil liberties groups objected. That amended bill now directs the NYPD to craft a plan within 45 days for managing protests around houses of worship. It passed by a 44-5 vote, a veto-proof margin.
But Mamdani could choose to veto the other key measure, which would similarly direct the NYPD to devise a protest response plan to protect access to schools — including institutions of higher education like Columbia University, where Gaza war protests roiled the campus. That bill passed 30-19.
This outcome offers Mamdani a political off-ramp. A strident critic of Israel who rose to power aligned with pro-Palestinian activism, Mamdani faces a different governing reality. The veto-proof synagogue bill allows Mamdani to avoid a direct confrontation with the Jewish community, already concerned about his recent responses to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests.
Meanwhile, his power to veto the schools measure gives him room to declare solidarity with the protest movement that helped bring him to power.
Mamdani also has a third option: take no action. Under city law, the bill would automatically take effect after 30 days without his signature or a veto.
The mayor has not indicated he would refuse to sign the bills. However, he cited “serious concerns” expressed by his allies about limiting New Yorkers’ constitutional rights.
Since taking office, Mamdani has walked a tightrope, resisting pressure to take clear positions that could alienate either progressive allies or Jews worried about rising antisemitism.
Menin’s major win
The vote also spotlighted Menin’s role as a counterweight to Mamdani on Jewish issues. The synagogue bill was her first piece of legislation, and her first major win since becoming the first Jewish speaker in city history, at a time when anti-Jewish incidents continue to make up a majority of reported hate crimes in the city. In remarks after the vote, Menin called it a “victory” and a personal milestone.
“We passed a historic package of bills that protects every single faith and allows every single person in New York City to go to their house of worship without fear of intimidation and harassment,” Menin said at the start of an Interfaith Passover seder she co-hosted with the Jewish Community Relations Council. “This is a very personal bill to me. This matters so much.” The event was held at Tsion Cafe, an Ethiopian Jewish restaurant in Harlem that closed earlier this year, citing security concerns after harassment and vandalism following Oct. 7.
Menin is expected to celebrate the bill’s passage with Jewish leaders Friday morning at Park East Synagogue, which was the site of a November protest that included antisemitic slogans and helped spur this action.
Jewish communal and pro-Israel organizations praised Menin for her leadership in statements after the bill’s passage.
Divisions within the Jewish Caucus
The divide around the schools measure, introduced by Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, co-chair of the Jewish Caucus, could prove less politically fraught for Mamdani. The bill drew opposition from 19 members, including two Jewish colleagues.
Dinowitz told the Forward that if Mamdani vetoes the measure, it would undermine police transparency and accountability, “and make students less safe.” He added that he would continue pushing the issue regardless of the mayor’s decision. “I look forward to the conversation the mayor may want to have about how we protect our students’ safe access to schools,” Dinowitz said.
His co-chair, Councilmember Lynn Schulman, said at the Seder event that she is prepared to whip the votes needed to override a veto. “We only need four votes,” she said.
Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who is Jewish, said in the council chambers that he opposed the measure over concerns it could restrict protests on college campuses. Dinowitz pushed back, saying the bill applies only to educational facilities on public property and does not target campus demonstrations.
A watered-down approach
The synagogue bill’s passage comes as similar protection proposals are surfacing elsewhere. Last week, a California state lawmaker proposed a 100-foot buffer around synagogues, and New York is weighing a 25-foot zone statewide.
The bills were revised multiple times from their original proposal following pushback from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, some progressive Jewish groups and free speech advocates, under threat of legal challenges. What began as a plan to establish buffer zones of up to 100 feet outside synagogues and other houses of worship was scaled back to giving the police department broad authority to design and implement enforcement guidelines. The final version does not explicitly ban protests or set a fixed distance requirement.
Menin said that in her early conversations with the mayor, Mamdani did not “indicate particular concerns.” Mamdani said in January that he ordered his law department and police leadership to review the proposal’s legality. Menin said those officials “had input on the bill,” and that input is reflected in the current language of the bill.
Outside City Hall, a group of Mamdani allies gathered during the vote to protest the measures.
Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Forward that even the modified version of the bill gives the NYPD “free rein” in how the rules are enforced and risks signaling that protest activity is problematic.
“What it’s going to do is make it hard to protest in New York City,” Lieberman said. That runs counter to efforts to reduce over-policing, she added.
Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, called on Mamdani to veto both pieces of legislation.
“We’re extremely disappointed that the City Council voted to pass Intros 001 and 175, bills that serve to generate headlines and convey concern, but not to materially make our city safer for all New Yorkers, including Jews,” Sasson said in a statement. “At best, the legislation changes little. At worst, it restricts New Yorkers’ free speech rights and empowers the NYPD to engage in discriminatory policing of protest outside houses of worship and educational facilities.”
Lieberman said the NYCLU will hold off on further action until the NYPD releases its implementation plan.
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Israel’s best-case scenario in Iran may also be its worst
If the war in Iran ends with every objective achieved — and it won’t — Israel may still come to regret its victory. The warnings of an ancient Athenian writer, an early right-wing Zionist and an Orthodox Jewish professor of biochemistry illustrate why.
Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has dismantled nearly every adversary that once threatened it. Hamas can no longer effectively launch rockets. Hezbollah is degraded. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime gave Israel an opportunity to destroy Syria’s weapons stockpiles. And now Iran: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, other key leaders have been assassinated, and the country’s ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities appear to be in tatters.
None of this is likely permanent. Hamas is regrouping, Hezbollah is launching rockets, Syria may yet radicalize, and Iranian regime change is a fantasy. But even if Israel really does defeat its foes, history teaches a painful lesson: it is victory, rather than defeat, that can set the stage for a country’s collapse.
An ancient analog for modern Israel
When the historian Thucydides documented the rise and decline of Athens some 2,500 years ago, he told a story that feels eerily applicable to Israel in 2026: that of a vibrant state poisoned by its own power.
Athens’ emergence as a military hegemon also marked the onset of its corruption and decline. Initial victories over strong enemies set the stage for later follies, arrogance, and cruelty. Flush with confidence, the Athenians embarked on the Sicilian Expedition and overextended catastrophically. Before that, even, they articulated a credo that almost perfectly encapsulates Israel’s current approach to the Palestinians: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
This isn’t to say that any country should forego military power. But even right-wing architects of Zionism recognized that such power must eventually become a conduit to sustainable peace.
‘The iron wall’
In 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological founder of the Zionist right, wrote a famous essay arguing that Palestinians would never voluntarily agree to convert what was then mandatory Palestine “from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.”
Therefore, he wrote, a Jewish state “can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall.”
But while that part of Jabotinsky’s philosophy clearly aligns with that employed by today’s Israeli right, there are two crucial differences between the two.
The first is that Jabotinsky affirmed that it is “utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine” and that “there will always be two nations in Palestine” — a far cry from Israeli messianists’ current dreams of wholesale ethnic cleansing.
The second is that Jabotinsky saw the “iron wall” he envisioned as the first step to eventual agreement in which both sides “agree to mutual concessions.” Power was a precondition for safety, but eventually diplomacy would reap the fruits of long-term peace.
Yet in recent years, Israel has largely eschewed the second part of Jabotinsky’s vision in favor of a “strong do what they can” attitude towards the Palestinians — and the rest of the world.
A ‘secret-police state’
Which brings us to Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a brilliant and influential Orthodox Jewish philosopher and biochemist who foresaw the danger that a “might makes right” ideology would incur for Israel.
Leibowitz dared to challenge the euphoria of victory following the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab armies and drastically increased its territory. Writing the following year, he warned that “a state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners” — the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank — “would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions.”
Leibowitz was not naive: he firmly recognized the need to “continue to fortify ourselves in our Jewish state and defend it.” But he understood that the military victory of permanent occupation would erode Israeli democracy from within. Nearly 60 years later, Leibowitz is, sadly, vindicated: Settlers are on the rampage, public media and the judiciary are under attack, and some experts have suggested Israel can no longer be considered a true liberal democracy.
A deal in the works
Leibowitz warned that, under the wrong conditions, victory can corrode democracy. The question: Can the gains earned through military success ever justify that risk?
Some might argue that a potential Iran deal in the works would validate Israel’s strategy, because it shows that successful negotiation sometimes depends on military action. That is partially true. Israel has effectively negotiated with countries like Egypt after conflict. Long-term peace with Arab states has emerged precisely from the diplomacy that occurred after victory.
But we should be extraordinarily skeptical that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the man to manage that process. Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who returned the Sinai to Egypt to secure peace, had to muster extreme political courage to go against settler elements within his Likud party. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has folded over and over again to the radical demands of his ultra-right wing coalition.
The man who at this very moment is allowing Hamas to regroup in Gaza because he is avoiding a postwar plan should not be trusted to manage any kind of victory with Iran.
The paradox of victory
What’s even more worrying is that the more successful the campaign in Iran is, the more the Israeli right will likely weaponize victory as proof that force is the only strategy that works for Israel, and that all external critics can be safely ignored.
They will be wrong. And we know that, because that’s exactly the same argument that the right offered during and after the Second Intifada: unilateral security, achieved through Israeli might.
The Oct. 7 attack showed the folly of that promise.
Israeli military strength has perhaps never been greater, and its regional foes have never been less powerful. And yet the country’s international standing is at historic lows, and its people are being harassed, injured and killed by Iranian ballistic missile launches that persist despite the country’s best defensive efforts.
No, Israel should not lay down its arms. No, peace with the ayatollahs was never possible. And yes, sometimes force is the only option.
But long-term security, like the kind we’ve seen Israel successfully build with some Arab states like Egypt, comes from resisting the temptations of radicalization that military success brings.
Israel’s current government lacks the wisdom to take advantage of those successes. It will, in fact, warp a win into a reason to double down on isolationist thinking that will push the country further away from liberal democracy.
In other words: victory in Iran — a best-case scenario for Israeli security in the short run — may turn out to be the worst-case scenario for Israeli democracy long-term.
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Hundreds of Diaspora leaders call for action against ‘Jewish-extremist terror in the West Bank’
(JTA) — Over 1,000 Diaspora Jews are petitioning Israeli President Isaac Herzog to intervene against settler violence in the West Bank, saying that the settlers are threatening Israeli security.
“Mr. President, the terror, death and destruction inflicted by Jewish-Israeli extremists against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank is an abomination,” says an open letter published Thursday. “It is not only morally shameful but a strategic threat to the future of Israel. It damages world Jewry and the relationship of future generations with Israel.”
The letter continues, “Sadly, based on events and on the statements of the most extreme coalition partners it can be concluded that the violence now engulfing the West Bank is not only condoned by the government but is in fact policy.”
The letter was organized by the The London Initiative, a liberal Zionist network founded earlier last year to “strengthen Israeli democracy, advance a fairer shared future for all citizens of Israel, revive hope in the prospects of achieving secure peace, and improve relations between all Israelis and world Jewry.”
It comes as violence against Palestinians in the West Bank — often unpunished by Israeli authorities — has reached new heights, with settlers allegedly killing seven Palestinians in the last month, including one on Thursday, and driving others from their homes.
The situation has grown so extreme that the Israeli army this week took the unprecedented step of diverting soldiers from Lebanon, where Israel is battling Hezbollah, to the West Bank. Both the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces and the Central Command chief have warned in recent days that conditions in the West Bank are contributing to a dire manpower shortage in the army.
The issue has also ignited concern from the United States, and from Israel’s U.S. ambassador, Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, who told Ynet that he believed the situation was deterring some in Washington from supporting Israel. He called on the rabbis of the West Bank to constrain their disciples.
“I’m so angry about the issue of Jewish riots in Judea and Samaria,” Leiter said. “It’s a handful of a few hundred people who are staining an entire enterprise — and everyone is silent.”
The new letter signed by Diaspora Jews calls on Herzog to advocate for change with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right ministers who have not interceded to stop the violence. The signatories include prominent philanthropists including Charles Bronfman; liberal rabbis from multiple countries; and former British and Canadian ambassadors to Israel.
“Mr. President, Pesach is upon us. As we have for millennia, Jews everywhere will reflect on the promise of freedom and responsibilities of power,” the letter says. “We call on you to use your position to implore the government to put an end to the abomination of Jewish-extremist terror and the era of impunity for its perpetrators.”
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