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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. 

—
The post The historian who uncovered the ADL’s secret plot against the far-right John Birch Society appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Shabbos Kestenbaum: The New Encampments

The “People’s University” encampment, established by Students for Justice in Palestine, on the campus of Smith College in April 2024. Photo: Screenshot

The encampments have returned. At Smith and Occidental Colleges, the ugliest form of campus bigotry since the 2024 Tentifada is back.

The 2023-2024 academic year saw an unprecedented wave of antisemitic incidents on American college campuses. Infamously, anti-Israel “encampments” — also known as the Tentifada — took over at least 80 campuses during this period. These pro-Hamas zones were designed to make Jewish students feel unsafe. Sadly, they’re here once again.

At Occidental College in Los Angeles, students set up the “Rafah to Jenin Liberated Zone.” Organizers recently called it the longest-lasting encampment since 2024. The radicals were handing out “No Zionists” pins and red inverted triangle stickers, a symbol Hamas uses to mark targets.

In 2024, Occidental settled a Title VI complaint filed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Brandeis Center, agreeing to implement sweeping reforms to address antisemitism. The agreement explicitly states that “no Zionist” litmus tests may constitute discrimination against Jewish or Israeli students.

At Smith College in Massachusetts, radicals occupied Chapin Lawn and renamed it “the People’s University.” They demanded divestment from Israel and called for a critical race theory curriculum. The president and chairwoman of the Board of Trustees agreed to sit down with the ringleaders. Despite this concession, the coordinators pledged to continue disrupting campus.

The Smith College jihad pajama party disbanded only after the college’s administration agreed to enter into sustained negotiations with the anti-Israel rule-breakers. The radicals openly stated that they will continue to disrupt campus life to demand divestment and threatened that “if the institution won’t give it to us, we will make it.”

Allowing these terror-supporting encampments to fester is a losing strategy for college administrators. It causes real damage, both physical and institutional, at the schools that fail to immediately disband them. Many colleges are now under investigation for failing to protect their students during the spring 2024 semester.

One of the most destructive tentifadas occurred at Columbia University. Pro-Hamas radicals seized the Butler library in May 2024, disrupted final exams, and targeted Jewish students. They besieged Hamilton Hall, smashed open the doors with hammers, injured security personnel, and barricaded themselves inside. Jewish faculty lost access to campus. Jewish students alleged structural antisemitism in a lawsuit. Ultimately, Columbia canceled in-person classes and commencement ceremonies for the remainder of the school year.

Across the United States, campus agitators vandalized property with swastikas and terrorist propaganda and defaced war memorials and statues of American heroes. They smashed and occupied buildings and poured cement into sewage systems. Jewish students faced violent threats and were blocked from getting to class. In some cases, physical violence resulted in the hospitalization of Jewish students. Due to the severity of the campus disruptions, many classes and graduation ceremonies were canceled across the country.

The Tentifada caused an estimated $3 million in property damage at the City College of New York, millions in damage at Cal Poly Humboldt, and $29 million across the University of California system, including new security measures, law enforcement, and the destruction of campus spaces. These incidents are just a small portion of the damage that was done by pro-Hamas radicals on American campuses during the 2023-2024 academic year.

The Tentifada was a dark chapter for American universities. Pro-Hamas campus radicals are now trying to start a new chapter of destruction and disorder. Administrators must not let them. The response should be immediate: disband the encampments, impose disciplinary proceedings, expel participants, and refer criminal conduct for prosecution. American universities exist to educate students, not to host pro-Hamas block parties.

Shabbos Kestenbaum is a political commentator at PragerU and a former lead plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit against Harvard University.

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The Special Importance of Memory in Judaism

The entrance gate of a Jewish cemetery in Gauting, Starnberg, Upper Bavaria, Bavaria, Germany, on Nov. 8, 2020, is a wrought iron gate adorned with a Star of David. It stands between two stone pillars, leading into a tree-lined cemetery with gravestones and a pathway visible in the background. Photo by Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect

A few weeks ago, I conducted the funeral of Ron Plotkin, former owner of Monster.com and once a leading philanthropist in Los Angeles. In recent years, his life changed drastically — from prominence and influence to obscurity and hardship.

I knew Ron at his height and stayed in touch as others drifted away. By the time he died, there were no resources left — not even enough for a burial. We arranged for him to be laid to rest through charitable means at the Jewish cemetery in Commerce, California.

Sadly, we struggled to find 10 men to attend Ron’s funeral so Kaddish could be recited. A group from my synagogue agreed to come, but there were only nine of us. We stood in the blazing sun, waiting for a minyan.

Suddenly, a 10th man appeared: Shalom Raichik — originally from Los Angeles, now living in Baltimore — was at the cemetery just at that moment and agreed to join us.

After I recited Kaddish for Ron, Shalom asked if we could gather at another nearby grave to say Kaddish again, along with a memorial prayer.

“Who is it?” I asked. Shalom’s answer sent a chill through all of us. It is a story I cannot put out of my mind — a story about reclaiming someone who had disappeared from history.

We often think of death as a single, final event. But Jewish tradition introduces a powerful idea: a person can die twice. The first death is physical. The second is when they are forgotten — when no one remembers their name, or visits their grave, or even knows they existed.

The man we said Kaddish for that day is marked as “Ploni ben Avraham” — the Jewish equivalent of John Doe. We don’t know his name.

His story is tragic yet extraordinary: He survived the Holocaust, came to America alone, had no money and no family, and lived quietly in New York in obscurity.

At some point, he sought the help of Dr. Maurice Frey, a dentist and fellow refugee who had escaped Europe during the war. Dr. Frey was known for caring for penniless Holocaust survivors and treated this man without charge.

The patient, wanting to keep his dignity, insisted on giving something in return and arranged to donate his body to medical science, requesting his skull be given to Dr. Frey for educational use.

Years later, long after the encounter had been forgotten, a small package arrived containing the man’s skull. Dr. Frey tried to transfer it to the NYU School of Dentistry, but when they declined to take it, he kept it.

After his death, Dr. Frey’s widow moved to California, bringing the skull with her. There, she sought its disposal according to Jewish law and was directed to Chabad, who helped arrange a proper burial in 2021. Though only a skull remained, they honored the survivor and fulfilled the obligation to respect even the smallest remnant of a Jewish life.

Still, something was missing: There was no name, no marker, and no memory. Visitors to the cemetery unknowingly walked over his grave. A man who had survived the worst horrors was, even in death, being trampled, not by malice but by ignorance.

Finally, a small group decided to act, and this past January, they placed a modest stone, simply acknowledging that Ploni ben Avraham had existed and was not forgotten. And a few weeks ago, someone finally said Kaddish for him at his grave.

At Ron Plotkin’s funeral, having just buried a man once surrounded by success and admirers, but who died nearly alone, and then walking over to the grave of Ploni ben Avraham, I was struck by how fragile life and legacy can be.

Ron had a name and achievements, and was once celebrated, but at the end, there were barely 10 people at his funeral. Ploni ben Avraham had no name or notable achievements, and no family to remember him — yet, by chance, both were remembered on the same day. Their second death was averted.

At the end of Sefer Vayikra, in Parshat Bechukotai, the Torah presents consequences for the Jewish people’s fidelity or disregard for their responsibilities. It seems like a strict formula of reward and punishment: Follow God’s laws and you’ll receive blessings; abandon them, and hardship will follow.

And yet, within this passage, there is a quieter message. After the warnings and descriptions of suffering, the Torah offers a redemptive promise (Lev. 26:42): “I will remember My covenant,” says God.

That is the turning point. Even if everything falls apart — even if the people are scattered and shattered — God says: I will remember, I will always remember.

God teaches us that memory is the foundation of meaning. In Jewish thought, remembering is not merely recalling; it is restoring. When God says, “I will remember,” it is an active commitment: No matter how far we fall, we are never erased.

That is why we say Kaddish — not for the dead, but because memory sustains identity. It ensures a person’s life continues to echo in this world. We mark graves, tell stories, and cling to names — because the greatest tragedy is being forgotten.

That is why we tell stories about the dead, and that is why we refuse to let people disappear after they’re gone. Because the ultimate curse is not suffering, or even death. It is oblivion. And the ultimate redemption is not just survival. It is being remembered.

When we remember someone, we return them to the narrative. We restore their place in the story of our people. Ploni ben Avraham had no land, no family, and no possessions. He didn’t even leave a name. But we still remember him, and that is his redemption.

That day in the cemetery, I was reminded that in the end, what matters is not how loudly a person’s life is celebrated at its peak, but whether it is remembered after they are gone. And sometimes, in the most unexpected ways, we are invited to be part of that remembering.

The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.

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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — but Exposed Hezbollah Instead

Men carry Hezbollah flags while riding on two wheelers, at the entrance of Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel but also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.

Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.

That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.

When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.

So, when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.

The “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” investigation attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.

The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.

In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.

Mohammed claims that, had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing. It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country. Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.

According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.

Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.

Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.

Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.

Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.

The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.

The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?

The answer may lie even closer to home.

Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.

Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.

This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.

By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.

Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.

The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.

Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.

Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.

There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.

The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.

Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.

The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.

When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created.

And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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