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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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Remembering Siskel and Ebert’s great debate: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?
Of the great debates in film history, a few dominate. How much of Citizen Kane did Orson Welles really write? Is the auteur a film’s true author? And, the one that will never be resolved, can we separate the art from the artist?
In 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoted an episode of their PBS review series Sneak Previews to the following question: Who’s funnier, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?
The camps fall out as one might expect. Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Chicago Sun Times, whose work spoke to the everyman, preferred Brooks.
“Mel Brooks satirizes old movies, he plays off of our own shared sense of movie history because we know these cliches and stereotypes as well as he does,” Ebert, who died in 2013, argued. “That’s part of the fun, we’re in on the joke.”
He laid out his evidence in the form of his favorite gags: A man punches a horse (Blazing Saddles); Gene Wilder gets smooshed in a revolving book case (Young Frankenstein); and Burt Reynolds is lathered up by Brooks, Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise (Silent Movie).
Siskel, the stuffier, Ivy-educated writer for the Chicago Tribune, championed Allen’s films, praising the filmmaker’s perennial theme of “his difficulty, every man’s difficulty, in establishing a long-lasting relationship with a woman.” (Siskel died in 1999, the year of Sweet and Lowdown, Allen’s jazz-inflected riff on La Strada.)
He made the case that Allen’s oeuvre, from Take the Money and Run through to Annie Hall, showed a personal and artistic evolution. “Watch how he grows more competent as a lover, and as a filmmaker.”
It’s a kind of odd proposition for considering comedy, and, depending on your views of Allen, may give you pause today.
Yes, Alvin Starkwell’s reliance on voiceover to express his feelings for a love interest is different from Love and Death’s Boris, who is different from Alvy Singer and his assertive request that Annie Hall kiss him now to “get it over with and then we’ll go eat.”
The scenes Siskel curates by way of argument are not the funniest moments, but taken together they signal what is most unsettling in some of the films. That is to say, they are uncomfortable, or to borrow a term from Claire Dederer, “urpy,” because Allen casts himself as a mostly hapless lover, who only aspires to possess, in the words of his later character from Manhattan, where these problematic glimmers become plot, the “coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.”
1980 was an inflection point in the careers of both Brooks and Allen. Brooks, following the rave response to Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, had more measured — if not quite tepid — notices for Silent Movie and his Hitchcock sendup, High Anxiety.
Allen’s previous two films were Interiors, his attempt at a serious picture in the mode of Ingmar Bergman, and Manhattan.
Both Ebert and Siskel saw “danger signs” ahead in these artists’ filmographies.
Siskel thought Brooks was repeating himself and straying to a more niche mode of parody.
He was right, and after High Anxiety, Brooks could be said to have officially entered his flop era with History of the World Part I. Siskel also diagnosed a generally-agreed-upon development in the work to come: Brooks giving himself starring roles, and the proportional decline in quality corresponding to his screentime.
But it’s Ebert’s view of Allen that seems most prescient, however unwittingly.
Ebert likens Brooks and Allen to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In Keaton he sees a man who remained true to himself and the persona he sought to perfect — this, one infers, is analogous to Brooks. In Chaplin, come The Great Dictator, there was a “creeping seriousness.”
I have to say, I stopped listening after “creep,” aware, as I am, that Chaplin, at age 54, married Oona O’Neill, a month after her 18th birthday.
Manhattan, and later Allen’s relationship with his now wife Soon-Yi Previn, echoes such an age gap. But Ebert’s issue with Manhattan, and he is not alone in this indulgence, isn’t with the film’s tacit approval of Isaac Davis’ relationship with a 17-year-old (played by a 16-year-old), it’s with its pretensions.
Out is Alvy Singer’s relatable, late-night campaign against a spider in his ex-girlfriend’s bathroom. In is black-and-white film stock and Isaac’s defense of Bergman as “the only genius in cinema today.”
“You can see Woody Allen there slipping away from his all-purpose comic persona that he developed in those other movies and into a character who might be a lot closer to life, but he’s also a lot less funny,” Ebert said.
Ebert’s forecast was astute. As Allen became ever more a caricature of himself, there have been both bright spots — Hannah and Her Sisters, Zelig — and diminishing returns — the run from, say, 2009 to the present, where actors including Larry David and Wallace Shawn have served as his surrogate.
Running through the discussion is a subtext of Jewish particularism. Allen’s voice is so personal, so dialed in to New York neuroses, that his departure to WASPs in Interiors sounded a symphony of false notes. In contrast is Mel Brooks, who brands his comedy not as Jewish, but “New York humor,” and whose main inspiration has always been the wider province of popular culture.
That Siskel, a Jew with a snobbish streak, should favor Allen and Ebert, a Catholic and the real film lover of the pair, Brooks, perhaps says it all.
But baked into everything is the unspoken question of legacy — who would fare better in the long-term. In a way it’s a tossup. So many of Brooks’ references were locked in place and time, even as they parodied older films. A young viewer today may need footnotes to get the joke behind the profusion of Johnsons (Howard, Olsen and Van) in Rock Ridge.
In this formulation, Allen skews (mostly) evergreen. Except when he doesn’t because of where the culture, and his reputation, is now.
For their closing arguments, Ebert and Siskel each selected a scene from their preferred filmmaker. One of them holds up today.
Ebert brought a scene from The Producers, where Leo Bloom has a meltdown over Max Bialystock’s suggestion they break the law. While this timid CPA is hyperventilating, Bialystock crosses the room to get him a glass of water — and douses him with it. Leo: “I’m hysterical and I’m wet.”
It’s timeless.
Siskel’s pick is from Annie Hall. It’s when Alvy Singer recalls his second-grade classroom.
“In 1942,” he says, “I had already discovered women,” a curious word choice for what follows. Alvy, 6, kisses a classmate (definitively a girl).
The girl cries out for the teacher, who scolds Alvy for his precocious sex drive. “6-year-old-boys don’t have girls on their minds.”
In comes the adult Alvy, cramped in a child-sized desk, to insist he had no latency period. He then gets the child actors to report on where they are a few decades later. The boys name their careers, and in one case, addictions. One girl, in glasses and a Peter Pan collar, simply says “I’m into leather.”
Is it funny? Such things are subjective, in the end. Given what we know now of Allen, the allegations of sexual abuse against him by his daughter Dylan Farrow (which he denies) and his proven and unrepentant association with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s harder to watch.
Without knowing it, Siskel chose the exact wrong clip.
As for Brooks, the baggage, and the ambition, may seem lesser, but in fact point to something unimpeachable.
“I think what Mel Brooks wants, when he walks past a theater that has one of his movies playing into it, is the sound of laughter coming from inside,” Ebert said. “That’s what I want when I go to a Brooks movie is to laugh. I can defend his career on that basis. That he wants to amuse me, that’s enough. I’m satisfied.”
To that, I say, Dayenu.
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A Jewish gun club teams up with the NRA, in pursuit of self-defense
Capitalizing on heightened anxieties and surging Jewish interest in gun ownership, the National Rifle Association this week announced a partnership with a national Jewish gun club, in a move the mega gun lobby group says will help in the fight against antisemitism.
“People are scared,” said Gayle Pearlstein, the Chicago firearms instructor who launched Lox & Loaded, the Jewish group the NRA is teaming with. “You can see it in their faces. People see history repeating itself.”
The arrangement will give Lox & Loaded access to NRA resources — and give the NRA a foothold in a burgeoning demographic as its core membership wanes. It is the first partnership of its kind between the NRA and a Jewish group.
“When people think of the NRA, they don’t necessarily think of Jewish populations, right?” Justin Davis, director of public affairs for the NRA, said. “To help bridge that gap between never having touched a firearm, getting world class training, comfortability and proficiency in firearms, I think it’s a great opportunity for the community.”
Lox & Loaded, a for-profit company founded last March, is one of several Jewish gun groups that has emerged in the U.S. since the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with many targeting first-time gun owners. Pearlstein says it has attracted more than 1,000 members and established 49 local chapters nationwide.
The rising Jewish interest in gun ownership is also prompting concerns, and not just among gun violence experts who stress risks to gun owners. Security experts working with Jewish institutions are also forced to plan for unpredictable scenarios involving concealed weapons.
A national brand
After the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, Pearlstein started offering discounted pistol lessons to the Chicago Jewish community. “I really wanted to do something to help the community,” she said, “and I didn’t want to just give tzedaka (charity) or just send money over to Israel.” Then she started giving concealed carry classes through the Chicago Jewish Alliance, a local pro-Israel group.
Eventually she joined forces with a similar group in Cleveland to form Lox & Loaded,whose members pay $118 a year for training, monthly shooting practice and other events.
Many of those members, she said, are seniors — and quite a few are longtime gun skeptics turning to firearms for self-defense after personally experiencing antisemitism.
The partnership comes amid an uptick in antisemitic violence and in the wake of multiple high-profile antisemitic terrorist attacks that were both carried out and stopped with guns. In the Temple Israel attack in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last month, a man armed with a rifle rammed a truck loaded with explosives into the synagogue before he was shot dead by a security guard.
And it points to a spillover effect from the increased focus on security — a developing interest in firearms not just in synagogues, but also in domestic life.
Historically, American Jews have among the lowest rates of gun ownership in the country. Just 10% of Jews owned guns according to a 2005 report, compared to 26% nationwide at the time; in 2018, a survey found 70% of American Jews said gun control was more important than protecting gun rights.
But newer data points to a change in tune; for example, NYPD reports show a spike in concealed carry permit applications after October 2023. Whether an increase in Jewish gun ownership actually makes American Jews safer, however, is hotly contested.
Pearlstein, who is a longtime NRA member, said the partnership came about after she introduced herself to the organization’s executives at a national trade show in January.
Davis, who was one of the people she met that day, said the NRA had been paying attention to the rise in antisemitic attacks and was eager to help.
“Meeting with folks from Lox & Loaded has been incredibly eye-opening,” Davis said, “to see the transformation that’s happening — the community of folks who are realizing that they have to take their safety into their own hands.”
That newfound Jewish enthusiasm comes at a ripe moment for the NRA, which has been beset in recent years by government efforts to break it up and declining revenue overall. Its former chief executive was found guilty of financial misconduct. And the organization filed for bankruptcy, only for a judge to block its petition.
For Pearlstein, the benefits were clear: the NRA still has the resources to throw behind additional training and club recruitment, as well as safety courses that are considered the industry standard. Pearlstein emphasized that Lox & Loaded “does not push guns in people’s faces.”
A promotional video released by the NRA about the new partnership highlights Jewish vulnerability. In the two-minute spot, news coverage of the Temple Israel attack rolls on screen — including an image of the suspect brandishing a rifle — followed by video of college protesters chanting “globalize the intifada.”
“Today, Jewish families face unprecedented threats, simply for who they are,” a voiceover intones. “Many thought they’d never need to defend themselves — until now.”
Through the scope
Pearlstein’s club is part of a “material increase” in Jewish gun groups since Oct. 7, many catering to first-time gun owners, according to Michael Masters, national director of the Secure Community Network, an organization that provides safety guidance to hundreds of Jewish institutions. Some of those groups now provide neighborhood patrols, first response and armed security outside synagogues.
But it’s unclear what safety benefits come from the prospect of increased Jewish gun ownership itself — and some say the trend introduces new safety concerns.
Lately, Masters has been fielding lots of questions from synagogues whose members want to bring their guns to services. Last year his organization released a white paper detailing best practices for concealed carry in houses of worship.
Complicating the picture is that Jewish gun groups, like gun groups in general, vary in their adherence to standardized training curriculums or certification requirements — meaning not everyone who joins them comes away equally prepared.
“Those distinctions between different groups can result in inconsistencies for the community,” Masters said, “all of which can have significant impacts on life, safety and liability.”
Gun violence researchers also point to ripple effects that accompany gun ownership.
Deborah Azrael, director of research of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, said that decades of studies have consistently shown that access to guns is associated with substantially increased risk of suicide for both a gun owner and their family.
“There isn’t really any compelling evidence of a countervailing benefit in terms of homicide reduction,” Azrael said. “And on the contrary, there’s evidence that you increase your risk of dying, and the people you love dying, if you bring a gun into the home.”
Davis, the NRA spokesperson, said that if someone wants to harm themselves, they will do it whether they have a gun or not. The bigger issue, he said, was a national mental health crisis that had gone unaddressed — and which factored into the violent threat American Jews now face.
“It’s an old adage, but when the seconds count, police are minutes away,” Davis said. “You have to be able to be your own first responders.”
Azrael said research undercut the notion that armed crime victims could reliably help themselves. When guns are used in self-defense, she said, the people who use them aren’t significantly less likely to be injured or to lose property than people who fight back in other ways, or run.
And she was suspicious of the idea that firearms training would prepare an amateur to act in a worst-case scenario. “You’re asking people to take on a role that police officers often don’t do that well,” she said.
Masters, too, was conscious of a possible disconnect between firearm ownership and capacity to respond safely in those scenarios. Lately, he said, he has begun advising law enforcement that active threat scenarios in Jewish spaces may feature armed civilians trying to help.
And he was also aware that not everyone in a synagogue felt comfortable or safe with more guns around them.
“This is perhaps a transition for many members of the community in how they feel about this issue, but it’s a reality that people have an option and are exercising it,” Masters said. “As security professionals, we have to deal with that reality.”
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How a young woman smuggled weapons into the Warsaw Ghetto
This is a revised version of the original article in Yiddish which you can read here.
On Both Sides of the Wall
Vladka Meed and Steven D. Meed
Citadel Press, 448 pages, $29.00.
“But surely by this morning we will learn something.” It was a sentiment that was going around the Warsaw Ghetto, overheard among the groups of Jews huddled on street corners. On occasion someone would muster up some hopeful words: “Jews, have no fear! You will all see. With God’s help, once more we shall survive the evil decree!” It was July 22, 1942: the first day of the Great Deportation. Any optimism was unfounded: On that day, the Germans led roughly 250,000 Jews to the death camps.
Thus begins the opening scene of On Both Sides of the Wall, Vladka Meed’s memoir of her life in Warsaw during World War II. Her story originally appeared in installments in the Forward shortly after her arrival in America, in 1946, under her real name, Feygele Peytel Miedzyrecki. A book-length edition was published by the educational committee of the Workers Circle in 1948.
In 1977, an English translation came out, with an introduction by Elie Wiesel. Now Meed’s memoir is available in an expanded edition, complete with an introduction from the historian Samuel Kassow and a foreword by the translator, Steven (Shloyme) Meed, Vladka’s son.
Vladka Meed takes the reader into the heart of the Warsaw Ghetto, with its charged atmosphere of hope, terror and despair. She summons the cacophony of those last ten, tragic months of the Ghetto; we hear the voices of Jews, Germans and their Ukrainian accomplices.
Fortunately, Vladka managed to avoid the daily aktsyes (deportation campaigns) when the mundir forces (“Jewish police,” in the ghetto vernacular) would capture Jews for deportation. Vladka soon found herself alone: “My mother, brother, and sister have all been taken from me to some unimaginable fate,” she writes. Vladka was lucky to find a job in one of the workshops that served the Germans.
Following the second selektsye (separation of fit and unfit Jewish laborers) in September 1942, the Jews that remained in the ghetto began preparing for an uprising. Vladka remembers their calls: “If we are to die, anyway, let us die with dignity!” “The enemy must pay a heavy price for our lives!”
As a young girl, Vladka was active in the Jewish Labor Bund, an affiliation that helped keep her alive during the Holocaust. She spoke Polish well without a trace of a Yiddish accent, and had “good Aryan looks.” The leadership of the ghetto’s Bundist underground suggested that she become a courier between the ghetto and the Aryan side. That’s how the young Jewish girl, Feygele Peltel, was transformed into a Polish woman by the name of Wladislawa Kowalska, or simply — Vladka.
Step by step, she integrated into “normal life” among Christian Poles. At first she had high hopes. “I had expected to encounter a strong interest among our Polish neighbors about life within the ghetto,” she writes. But she soon realized that her neighbors preferred very much not to know what was happening on the other side of the ghetto wall.
Vladka and her comrades on the Aryan side were charged with obtaining weapons for the ghetto. But their relations with members of the Polish underground army were poor, and little came of their interactions: “As we travel about the city, trying and failing to get arms…we beg them: ‘Help us to obtain weapons. We are willing to pay well for them!’”
Most of their requests fell on deaf ears. Often they’d hand over payment and receive nothing in return — or worse, their Polish contacts would betray them to the Germans. Even when the Jewish ghetto fighters managed to get their hands on a revolver, another challenge remained: smuggling it into the ghetto.
The book is a gripping read. Vladka Meed is a skillful narrator, and she gives a detailed accounting of her dangerous missions. Any day could have been her last: she never knew if she’d live to see the evening. Vladka had many more failures than successes, and in many cases she was saved by a fateful coincidence.
Kassow’s introduction describes the greater historical context of that period, while Steven Meed provides personal details about his mother’s life before the Holocaust, based on her interviews in the American press.
In his translation, Meed includes bracketed phrases that provide brief, helpful contextual notes. He has also chosen to preserve Yiddish words from the so-called “ghetto language”, like aktsye (action), mundirn (police forces), and blokade (blockade). The choice to keep such vocabulary gives the text an authentic feel, even as Meed’s strategy occasionally raises questions. Why, for example, did he ‘translate’ the word kristin (Christian woman) in the Yiddish as “shikse” (an often pejorative term for a gentile girl) in the English? In general, his translations in the book occasionally veer far from the original.
In the United States, Vladka Meed dedicated her life to Holocaust education. This newest edition of her book carries this mission forward, and constitutes a significant addition to the ever-growing library of documents and research on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Unfortunately, the history of Jewish resistance to German occupation still hasn’t been properly integrated into American Holocaust education, even in Jewish day schools. At the University of Michigan, when I discuss the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with students in my course on the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I often get this response: “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this in our Holocaust education classes? It’s so important!”
To this day we often view the history of the Holocaust with a focus on mass murder. Vladka Meed’s book, writes Kassow, “demonstrates [that] this battle to stay alive, against all odds, refuted the oft-made claim that Jews went passively to their deaths.”
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