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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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‘Call for Division’: Australian Muslim Council Sparks Outrage Over Push to Block Israeli President’s Visit
People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) has come under widespread scrutiny after seeking to block Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia to commemorate the victims of the Bondi Beach massacre, a move that Jewish leaders have denounced as a “call for division.”
In a press release, ANIC called on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to revoke next month’s invitation for the Israeli leader to visit Sydney, where he intends to honor the victims of the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and injured at least 40 others.
ANIC accused Herzog of being “implicated in widespread war crimes and breaches of international law” amid Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, adding he should not be “welcomed or afforded legitimacy” in Australia.
“The president is directly implicated in grave war crimes and acts of genocide against the Palestinian people, including the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of Gaza, and the expansion of illegal settlements,” the Islamic body wrote in a post on X.
“While ANIC stands in solidarity with the Jewish community and mourns the victims of the horrific Bondi terrorist attack, accountability and justice must not be compromised,” the statement read.
ANIC Statement on NSW Protest Legislation and Invitation to the President of Israel
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) is extremely disappointed and expresses serious concern over the NSW Government’s new legislation introduced following the Bondi terrorist attack,… pic.twitter.com/ZW6MhVnIDc
— Australian National Imams Council (@ImamsCouncil) December 26, 2025
With Herzog having already accepted the invitation, Albanese is now facing growing pressure and criticism from politicians and Jewish leaders to oppose ANIC’s call to block the Israeli leader’s visit, planned for early next year in a show of solidarity with the Jewish community.
David Ossip, president of the New South Wales (NSW) Jewish Board of Deputies, condemned ANIC’s latest statement.
“It’s so disappointing to hear calls for division just as Australians want this to be a time for unity,” Ossip said in a statement.
“Australia has been attacked, and its citizens have been slaughtered on the beach. Many countries, quite rightly, want to show their solidarity with us at this time. Let them,” he continued.
In its statement, ANIC also denounced the NSW government’s new laws that expand police powers and curb protests in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, describing the demonstrations under scrutiny as “an act of solidarity for Palestinians.”
“There is no evidence to suggest that peaceful protest … has any connection to the Bondi terrorist attack,” the statement read.
“ANIC is concerned that the legislation conflates lawful, peaceful protest with terrorism and acts of violence … increases social division rather than strengthening cohesion, and threatens fundamental democratic freedoms and rights,” it continued.
As the local Jewish community continues to grapple with a shocking surge in violence and targeted attacks, the Australian government has been pursuing a series of firearm reforms, including a national gun buyback and limits on the number of firearms an individual can own.
Last week, NSW passed its own legislation further restricting firearm ownership, granting local police greater powers to limit protests for up to three months, and outlawing the public display of flags and symbols associated with designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas.
In the aftermath of the Bondi beach attack, Australia’s rabbis urged Albanese to establish a federal Royal Commission into antisemitism — a formal public inquiry empowered to investigate, make recommendations, and propose legislative measures to also address the issue.
“We have sat with grieving families. We have visited the injured. We have stood with children who no longer feel safe walking to school. We have watched members of our communities withdraw from public spaces, universities, and civic life out of fear,” the Rabbinical Association of Australia wrote in a letter.
“We are demanding nothing less than the banning of [anti-Israel] marches and demonstrations, and the criminalization of the phrases ‘death to the IDF,’ ‘globalize the intifada,’ and ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ This is not an abstract concern. It is a lived reality,” the letter added, referencing three popular chants among anti-Israel activists that have been widely interpreted as a call for violence against both Jews and Israelis.
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Iran Protests Escalate as Pressure Mounts on Regime
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Iran is again in motion. Four days of strikes and protests have unfolded across the country, from Tehran to Mashhad, from Isfahan to Kermanshah, from Shiraz to Arak, since Sunday.
In Fasa, in Fars province, protesters broke through the gates of the governor’s office on Wednesday and attacked a government building, an act that carries weight in a system built on the choreography of fear. Each day has brought new reports, new cities, new confrontations. Each day has also revived the familiar, painful question: Could this finally be the moment when the Islamic Republic loses its grip?
The protests did not begin as a single ideological uprising. They emerged from economic pressure and daily suffocation. Bazaar merchants, money changers, workers, and ordinary residents reacted to a currency in freefall, to inflation that devours salaries, to a state that extracts obedience while offering little in return. Students have since joined. Chants have hardened. Anger has spread geographically and socially.
These details matter. In Iran, unrest confined to campuses can be isolated. Unrest that reaches bazaars, provincial towns, and state offices strains a different set of nerves.
Even figures within the system acknowledge this fragility. Fatemeh Maghsoudi, a spokesperson for the Economic Committee of the Iranian Parliament, said last week that the collapse of the rial owed less to any concrete economic development than to an atmosphere of fear driven by the prospect of conflict, remarking that when US President Donald Trump so much as tells Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “let’s go and have a coffee,” the exchange rate suddenly collapses. And when Netanyahu makes any statement, Maghsoudi added, prices in the market immediately rise, despite the fact that nothing substantive had changed in Iran’s economy.
Yet the regime, too, is moving. According to the Iran specialist Kasra Aarabi, sources inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) indicate that the state has raised its internal threat posture to a “yellow” level, defined as an abnormal situation within a four-tier (white, yellow, orange, and red) national security system. That architecture, built methodically since 2007, reaches into every province, city, district, and neighborhood.
Under higher threat levels, layers of security are activated: checkpoints, patrols, phone searches, internet restrictions, Basij deployments down to the street and apartment block. When a “red” level is declared, infantry units fold into domestic suppression, and the IRGC’s operational security headquarters assume sweeping authority over provincial life. This apparatus exists for one purpose. It has been used before. It has not yet fractured.
History teaches restraint in moments like this. The 1979 revolution did not triumph because crowds filled streets for a few dramatic days. It succeeded because strikes paralyzed oil production, administrative systems failed, and elite loyalty dissolved under sustained pressure. Today’s thresholds have not yet been crossed. There is no confirmed nationwide shutdown of core industries. There is no evidence of defection within the IRGC or the regular military. There is no alternative authority capable of coordinating power. These absences do not negate the tremendous courage of those protesting. They define the uncertainty of what comes next.
The international environment sharpens that uncertainty. Speaking in Florida alongside Netanyahu this week, Trump warned that Iran may be attempting to rebuild its nuclear program after US strikes in June damaged three nuclear facilities. His language was characteristically blunt. Any renewed nuclear buildup would invite rapid eradication. Missile production, too, was placed under explicit threat. The message was typically blunt. Negotiations remain open. Deadlines, Trump reminded his audience, have consequences.
The last time Trump issued a deadline to Iran, he gave Tehran 60 days to reach an agreement over its nuclear program. When that deadline expired, Israeli strikes followed the very next day, with clear US permission.
Strikingly, this convergence of internal unrest and external pressure has received only limited attention in much of the international media, treated as background noise rather than as a meaningful shift. The result is a failure to register how significant it could be for economic protest, regional spread, and explicit great-power deadlines to coincide in Iran like this.
For Tehran, this external pressure intersects dangerously with internal unrest. The regime faces a population increasingly willing to test red lines and a strategic environment in which miscalculation could invite devastating force. It is within this context that documented evidence from IRGC-linked academic institutions should be noted with great concern: the development of incapacitating chemical agents, including medetomidine and fentanyl derivatives, appear to have been adapted for crowd control munitions. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, demonstrators described effects inconsistent with standard CS gas. The implication is grim: The state has invested not only in batons and bullets, but in yet more insidious, chemical tools of repression.
And still, hope persists. It persists among Iranians chanting on rooftops and in streets. It persists among families who have buried the dead and returned anyway. It persists across the Iranian diaspora, for whom memory and longing blur into expectation. Each cycle of protest carries the belief that this time the accumulation of anger, courage, and exhaustion might finally converge. Each cycle also carries the memory of how brutally that belief has been punished before.
Prediction is a temptation best resisted. Revolutions are legible only in retrospect. While they unfold, they present as disorder, hesitation, advance, and retreat. What can be said is narrower and more honest. The protests of these four days show breadth, persistence, and a willingness to confront symbols of authority. The regime’s response shows preparedness, experience, and an arsenal refined over decades. Between these forces lies a struggle whose outcome remains unwritten.
The future of Iran will be decided neither by foreign speeches nor by analytical frameworks alone. It will be decided by whether pressure can move from streets into the systems that allow the state to function, by whether fear can be transferred from society back to those who govern it, by whether the machinery of repression can be strained beyond its capacity. Those conditions may yet emerge. They may also recede.
For now, Iran stands in that familiar, aching space between possibility and reprisal. The chants rise. The checkpoints loom. The world watches, hoping, doubting, fearing. The question remains suspended, unanswered and unavoidable: How many times can a people rise before rising becomes irreversible?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.
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Julius Berman, Orthodox rabbi whose influence spanned secular and observant Jewish institutions, dies at 90
Rabbi Julius Berman, who led the Orthodox Union and a myriad of other prominent Jewish communal organizations across the Orthodox and secular Jewish world, has died at 90.
Born in Lithuania in 1935 to Rabbi Henoch and Sarah Berman, Berman immigrated with his family to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940 where he was among the first graduating class of the Yeshiva of Hartford.
Berman received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1956 and his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in 1959. In 1960, he graduated first in his class from New York University School of Law.
Berman joined the New York City law firm Kaye Scholer in 1959, where he was a pioneer for observant Jews in the city’s legal world.
But while Berman went on to be an accomplished partner at Kaye Scholer, it was his extensive leadership at some of the largest Jewish communal organizations in the United States that defined his broader legacy.
“Though I am not equipped to psychoanalyze myself, it is very possible that my decision to go into a legal career rather than the Rabbinate had a role to play in my decision to immerse myself into Jewish communal matters,” said Berman in a 2006 interview with the Yeshiva University Commentator. “In any case, I have been heavily involved in communal work my entire adult life.”
Over the span of his career, Berman served in leadership positions at the Orthodox Union, Yeshiva University, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and over a dozen other Jewish communal organizations.
Early in his career, Berman became the president of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, or COLPA, a legal group that represents the Orthodox Jewish community.
Dennis Rapps, who was hired as COLPA’s executive director in 1970, described Berman as a personal mentor and a “sought-after participant” in Jewish communal life.
“He was a member and active participant in many of the leading Jewish organizations,” Rapps said. “I think the respect that people had for him cut across a broad swath of the Jewish community, he got along with everybody, and people respected him for his intellect and for his selflessness, and he was a real nice guy.”
Following his work with COLPA, Berman went on to serve as the president of the Orthodox Union from 1978 to 1984, later serving as the longtime chairman of the organization’s Kashrut Commission and OU press. In an obituary for Berman, the Orthodox Union described Berman as “one of the most significant lay leaders of twentieth-century Orthodoxy.”
“He was a gracious, generous person,” Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union Kosher Division, told JTA. “Whenever we had a kashrus meeting, or any other kind of meeting, everybody ultimately would defer to Julie Berman.”
Berman was also a longtime devotee of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century and longtime lecturer at Yeshiva University who ordained close to 2,000 rabbis.
“He was a devoted disciple of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and Soloveitchik had a very, very high regard for him,” said Genack. “If he had issues, if he wanted to consult someone, amongst them was always Julie Berman.”
In 1982, Berman also was elected as the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He also served as chairman of the board at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.
“God was good to him in terms of his talent, and he used it,” said Rapps. “He was really, basically one of a kind, extremely bright, I think fearless and very dedicated to doing what he thought had to be done. He was a remarkable guy.”
Berman also served as the longtime chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, where he was widely credited for expanding restitution for survivors worldwide. His time at the Claims Conference was later shadowed by controversy in 2009 after a $57 million fraud scheme orchestrated by an employee sparked criticism of the organization’s governance.
“Rabbi Julius Berman was a towering moral leader whose life’s work helped shape the global landscape of Holocaust survivor care, restitution, and Jewish communal life,” said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference in a statement. “A brilliant legal mind and widely respected Torah scholar, he was typically the smartest person in the room, while his sharp intellect was always matched by profound compassion. Julie led with unwavering integrity, grounding his leadership in the dignity of survivors, an abiding love for the Jewish people and a profound sense of responsibility to future generations. We are deeply grateful for his guidance, and he will be deeply missed by all who had the privilege to know him.”
Berman also formerly served as the president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from 1989 until its merger with its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
“I loved and always valued my discussions with Julie Berman, first as a reporter talking (often on background) to a source and later as a CEO seeking sage advice from a former board president,” said Ami Eden, the CEO and executive editor of 70 Faces Media, in a statement. “He was passionate about his beliefs and causes, super sharp and never shy about telling you if and why he disagreed.”
Berman is survived by his wife Dorothy Berman, and his children and their spouses, Zev and Judy Berman, Myra and Simcha Aminsky and Eli and Miriam Berman. His funeral will be held Thursday at Young Israel of Jamaica Estates in Hollis, New York.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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