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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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Israeli couple killed by Iranian cluster bomb as Israel continues assassinating Iranian officials
(JTA) — A couple in their 70s were killed overnight Tuesday by an Iranian missile, apparently as they tried to reach a bomb shelter, amid an especially intense barrage of missiles aimed at the Tel Aviv area.
Yaron and Ilana Moshe were killed near their home in Ramat Gan, an upscale suburb of Tel Aviv; a walker found near their bodies suggested that they were on their way to shelter but could not move quickly, officials said. Damage from the cluster munitions, which shed smaller bombs as they land, was also reported at other sites including a main train station in Tel Aviv.
The barrage, Iran said, was retaliation for the killing the day before of Ali Larijani, the country’s security minister and a close ally of its assassinated supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Shortly afterwards, Israel announced that it had assassinated another top official, intelligence minister Esmaeil Khatib. The Israeli military said in a statement, “Khatib played a significant role during the recent protests throughout Iran, including the arrest & killing of protestors and led terrorist activities against Israelis & Americans around the world.”
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, warned that “significant surprises” would be ahead as Israel continued to pummel targets in Iran.
A Wall Street Journal story published Wednesday details how Israel says it is choosing its targets, describing an extensive list of sites and people who are in its crosshairs. Israel knew security officers would gather in sports complexes after their offices were destroyed, then bombed the complexes once they were full, for example, according to the story, which says Iranians say order is beginning to fray on the streets but the regime appears far from falling. Israel said earlier this week that it had three more weeks of targets to work through.
Israel has also stepped up its campaign in and around Beirut, where it is targeting forces affiliated with Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy that operates out of Lebanon and has been bombing Israel since earlier this month.
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I love the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. This year, it left me heartbroken
I’ve heard Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” hundreds of times. But one recent Friday afternoon, returning from the grocery store with food for Shabbat dinner, was the first time I truly listened to the words.
“There’s battle lines being drawn,” Springfield sang. “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong / Young people speaking their minds / Are getting so much resistance from behind.”
Six decades later, those lines felt less like a period artifact than a live transmission.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working in and around Atlanta’s Jewish community, including six years on staff at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, leading community engagement and guest programming. So when the Israeli Consulate General to the Southeastern United States pulled its sponsorship of AJFF mid-festival last month — publicly rebuking the organization over its engagement with a Muslim Morehouse College student who had made social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza — I felt it the way you feel a fracture in your own family.
What followed was even more painful to witness. This juror, by multiple accounts, was thoughtful, respectful, and described his role with the festival as an honor. The naming and public shaming he has been subject to in the past few weeks, as Jewish organizations issued statements of condemnation, have likely undone any understanding and bridge-building that had taken place over the course of his engagement with AJFF.
And AJFF, one of the largest Jewish film festivals in the world, found itself at the center of a communal firestorm — not for screening a controversial film, but for engaging with a young man of a different faith and perspective as part of a three-person jury evaluating human rights documentaries.
Reflecting on this now that this year’s festival has concluded, I’m troubled by what this incident shows about just how far the “battle lines” Springfield mentioned have extended — and how dangerous they are. Sometime between the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 and today, something troubling took hold in parts of our community: the conflation of Jewish identity with unquestioning political loyalty to the current Israeli government.
The Talmud records that the rabbis preserved minority opinions precisely because truth is not always with the majority, and because a dissenting voice might one day be vindicated by circumstance. We are a people who have, for millennia, argued with God. Are we now going to stop arguing respectfully with each other?
And what does it mean for Atlanta — a city that styles itself the cradle of the civil rights movement — when its Jewish community responds to disagreement in this close-minded manner?
AJFF was built to advance a different set of goals. The festival’s mission has always rested on the belief that film is uniquely powerful as a vehicle for human connection — that sitting in the dark together, watching stories unfold, can open us to perspectives we might otherwise never encounter.
AJFF does not screen films as endorsements, nor does it require audiences to agree with what they see. Many screenings are followed by panel discussions designed to surface complexity, not resolve it. The festival’s explicit commitment to “foster intergroup understanding among Atlanta’s diverse cultural, ethnic and religious populations” is not a political statement — it is a pedagogical one.
Art doesn’t ask us to capitulate to another point of view. It asks us to be present with it long enough to recognize our shared humanity. As Robert Redford, honored during Sunday’s Academy Award in memoriam tribute, once said: “The glory of art is that it can not only survive change, it can lead it.”
Inviting a young Muslim student to evaluate films about human rights is not a provocation. It is that mission — AJFF’s mission — made real.
Organizations and individuals who are willing to engage in thoughtful, open-hearted dialogue with those whose experiences differ from their own — who resist the pull toward insularity and choose engagement instead — are doing some of the most important work in American civic life. That willingness, that courage, has the capacity to create lasting change for the better.
These are not radical ideas. They are deeply Jewish ones.
Hamas’s terror on October 7, 2023, was a cataclysmic rupture — a massacre that has legitimately shaken every Jewish person I know, including those who hold the most progressive views on Israeli policy. The grief and fear are real. The trauma is real. And antisemitism — actual antisemitism, not mere criticism of a government — is real and rising, and must be confronted without equivocation.
Just last week, a gunman rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in suburban Detroit in what the FBI called a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. It is a reminder, as if we needed one, that the threats facing Jews in America are not hypothetical — they are physical, present, and demand our clear-eyed vigilance.
But vigilance and exclusion are not the same. Nor does the latter reflect the truth of the American Jewish community.
A recent poll from the Jewish Federations of North America found that while 88% of respondents affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state, only 37% identify as Zionists. These numbers do not reflect a collapse of Jewish values. They reflect a community grappling honestly and painfully with a situation that resists easy answers — which is exactly what Jewish communities are supposed to do.
That’s also what Judaism is about, at least the version I was raised in.
That Judaism tells us to welcome the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves. It instructs us that the most important commandment is to love your neighbor. It has, in my experience, made the Atlanta Jewish community one of the most generous, creative and genuinely pluralistic in the country.
The cancellation of individuals and organizations, the public shaming, the erosion of communal institutions that took decades to build — these are not expressions of Jewish strength. They are symptoms of fear. And fear, historically, has never served us well.
I do not have all the answers. My own views on Israel and Gaza have evolved, and I expect they will continue to. What I hold with confidence is this: if we retreat into camps of “Good Jew” and “Bad Jew,” defined not by ethical conduct or spiritual practice but by the volume of one’s political allegiance, we will lose something irreplaceable.
“Young people speaking their minds,” to quote Springfield, are already showing signs of disengagement from Jewish institutional life. They will not be won back by litmus tests and boycotts. They will be won back, if at all, by communities that demonstrate the capacity to hold complexity without cruelty.
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German antisemitism commissioner quits far‑left party over anti-Israel resolution
(JTA) — BERLIN – The antisemitism commissioner for the German state of Brandenburg has resigned from his far-left party over a resolution passed Sunday condemning Israel.
After 11 years in Die Linke (The Left), Andreas Büttner has quit its ranks over the position taken by members in Lower Saxony, in former West Germany. But it’s also personal: Büttner said he’s had enough of what he has described as harassment from within his party.
“It’s no longer possible. And I can’t go on … without betraying my own convictions,” Büttner wrote in a statement to party leaders. The letter was shared with the dpa, the German press association.
Die Linke is the successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling communist party of former East Germany, and has a platform that is critical of capitalism and of NATO. Die Linke notched a better-than-expected finish in last year’s national elections, drawing 9% of the vote despite internal tensions over Israel and Germany’s handling of antisemitism.
According to news reports about Büttner’s resignation, Brandenburg’s party leaders expressed “great regret and respect,” and promised to continue fighting antisemitism with him.
“This is not a question of party affiliation,” wrote Stefan Wollenberg, the party’s managing director in Brandenburg.
The trigger for Büttner’s move was a resolution condemning current forms of Zionism, put forward by the party’s youth delegation in Lower Saxony. They insisted that the resolution — passed at their convention in Hanover last weekend — was not against Zionism per se, only against “existing political manifestations of Zionism.”
But Büttner, who has long stood up for Israel in defiance to his party, and has openly criticized antisemitism from all corners, said the message was unmistakable.
Resolutions that condemn Israel as a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state” are “no longer acceptable to me,” he wrote in his resignation. He criticized the Lower Saxony party for coming perilously close to questioning Israel’s right to exist.
The fight against antisemitism should transcend party lines, he added. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to experience within my own party for years,” he wrote, as cited in the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Büttner, a former police officer who was elected in 2024 to his position as Brandenburg’s first commissioner for combating antisemitism, has had his differences with his party for some time over its views on Israel. Departing from his party’s official stance, Büttner supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, known as IHRA, which labels some criticism of Israel as eliminationist and thus antisemitic.
In 2025, members of his party tried and failed to have him expelled over his solidarity with Israel.
Büttner also has been targeted by unknown perpetrators, who in 2024 vandalized his car with swastikas and other Nazi symbols, and in January set fire to a building on his property, leaving a Hamas symbol as their calling card.
The new resolution, which condemns Hamas as well as Israel, characterizes terrorism as a result of “occupation, disenfranchisement, and a lack of prospects.”
It rejects “the Zionism that actually exists today” and recognizes “ethnonationalism and political Zionism as a major obstacle to a peaceful future for all people in the region.”
It says that both Israel and Hamas “harbor fantasies of annihilation” against one another.
The resolution refers to “two years of genocide” in Gaza, calls for an “end to apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories” and criticizes the alleged instrumentalization of antisemitism “to delegitimize criticism of actually existing political Zionism.” It presents a list of demands on Israel, but none on the Palestinian leadership or Hamas.
Die Linke has a long history of anti-Israel activism: In 2010, prominent party members took part in the ill-fated Gaza Freedom Flotilla, aboard the Mavi Marmara, which the Israeli military intercepted in an operation that killed 10 activists. The German politicians were among those arrested and deported home.
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