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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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At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure
A July 1954 funeral in Fairbanks, Alaska, drew unexpected attention from Jewish newspapers across the country. The woman being buried, Lena Ferguson, was laid to rest in what the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner described simply as the “Jewish plot” inside the city’s Clay Street Cemetery — a small, largely forgotten burial ground that many outside Alaska did not even know existed.
Reports in papers from Florida to Chicago described the “discovery” of what was believed to be the only known Jewish cemetery in the Last Frontier. Some emphasized the unusual circumstances of a Jewish burial in the remote Alaskan interior. Others noted that Ferguson had been married to a non-Jew.
Long before Alaska had a purpose-built synagogue, the Jewish plot at Clay Street had already begun preserving the names of Jews who lived and died in the territory.
The six graves within the plot preserve fragments of a largely forgotten Jewish world built around mining camps, frontier trade, military outposts and isolated immigrant lives. Together, they show how Jewish life appeared in one of the most remote corners of the United States, often before the institutions that sustained it elsewhere.
Ferguson’s funeral itself reflected that improvisational frontier Judaism. According to accounts published at the time, her Jewish identity only became widely known after her brother, Joseph Wishengrad of Catskill, New York, contacted a Fairbanks funeral chapel and requested that she be buried according to Jewish law.
Alaska’s only rabbi, military chaplain Jacob Rubenstein, happened to be away visiting Jewish servicemen stationed at remote military installations. In his absence, Jack Frankel — a former Biloxi, Mississippi, resident working for the United Service Organizations-Jewish Welfare Board — helped officiate the service alongside Robert Bloom, a former Klondike Gold Rush miner who later opened a hardware and general merchandise store in Fairbanks.
Jewish newspapers reported that the cemetery plot had not been used for more than 25 years because many Jews who died in Alaska were sent “to the states” for burial instead.
Before Ferguson, the most recent burial there had been Gussie Beckman in 1939. Born in New York in 1882, Beckman operated the Palace Baths and the Palace Liquor Store on Fourth Avenue in Fairbanks. Her obituary noted that “nothing is known in this city of any surviving relatives.”
Her funeral demonstrated how tenuous Jewish communal life in Alaska could be: a Christian minister, Rev. Rudolph G. Fitz, conducted the service, while Leonard Newman, a University of Alaska mining engineering student from New York City, read the burial prayers. Her pallbearers included future state senator John B. Hall, Deputy Marshal Pat O’Connor and other Fairbanks civic figures.
Other graves preserve similar fragments of frontier life.
Thomas Robin, a Romanian-born immigrant who arrived in Alaska in 1893, was buried in 1923 under the auspices of the Pioneers of Alaska, a fraternal organization founded by early settlers in the territory. His obituary identified him as a member of the Iditarod Igloo chapter.
Julia Warren, buried in 1929, lived near the Mason Creek gold mine and died in an automobile accident alongside three others. Her husband worked as a miner.
Anna Marks, who died in 1915, received a public funeral in Moose Hall, reflecting how civic lodges and fraternal organizations often doubled as gathering places in frontier towns where formal Jewish institutions scarcely existed.
Little survives about David Hurvitz, who died in 1920, beyond a brief bankruptcy notice published years earlier.
And that absence itself forms part of the story. The record preserves only fragments: names, occupations, scattered newspaper clippings and weathered gravestones. Yet together they reveal that Jewish life in Alaska did not begin with synagogues or other organized institutions. It began with individuals — merchants, miners, and immigrants — carrying pieces of Jewish identity into an isolated region where religious infrastructure barely existed.
Alaska’s first purpose-built synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage, would not be dedicated until 1965, more than a decade after Lena Ferguson’s burial and nearly 360 miles south of Fairbanks.
Clay Street Cemetery eventually closed to new burials as Fairbanks shifted to Birch Hill Cemetery after 1938. In 1982, the historic cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, Jewish life in Alaska is more visible than it once was. Congregation Or HaTzafon was founded in Fairbanks in 1980, and Chabad established a center there in 2024. The closest active Jewish cemetery is now in Anchorage.
The six graves at Clay Street remain among the earliest surviving records of Jewish life at the edge of America.
The post At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise?
(JTA) — When Maureen Galindo finished first in a crowded Democratic primary for a newly redrawn South Texas congressional district in March, the result surprised even seasoned observers of San Antonio politics.
With voters set to decide the Democratic nomination Tuesday, as Galindo faces off with sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, local officials and political observers are grappling with how a little-known candidate with a history of inflammatory remarks about Israel and Jews has come within striking distance of a seat in Congress.
The local housing activist went into the race with little political profile, having received less than 3% of the vote in a San Antonio City Council race last year. Local officials familiar with the contest chalked up Galindo’s success to a litany of factors, including low voter awareness of the candidates and a newly drawn Republican-leaning district that attracted few high-profile Democratic contenders.
What they did not credit for her success was her antisemitic rhetoric. While the race heading into Tuesday night’s runoff has been defined by scrutiny and criticism of Galindo’s views toward Zionists, local political analysts and activists told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that her controversial positions were not widely known ahead of her March win and, if anything, are hurting her chances against Garcia.
Israel is a growing flashpoint in a number of Democratic primaries across the country, and several candidates have drawn allegations of antisemitism as they employ harsh criticism of Zionism. Galindo’s rhetoric has been even more extreme – including vows to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists” – but San Antonio political observers caution against lumping her early success in with the recent wins of progressive candidates in urban districts.
Jon Taylor, a political science professor at University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA that Galindo’s antisemitic rhetoric had been largely unknown at the time of the primary.
“What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Taylor said. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”
Now that her antisemitic tirades have received so much attention, Taylor predicted they would turn off voters in the socially conservative district, where elections are usually driven by pocketbook issues.
“To be honest, talking about Israel, talking about some sort of Zionist conspiracy, is not what voters are looking for,” Taylor said.
Galindo has previously told local outlets that it was her “perception that Zionist billionaires run the world” and posted on social media that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS,” After Texas Senate candidate James Talarico revealed to JTA that he would not back or campaign with Galindo, she told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”
Galindo, who has raised almost no direct funding for her campaign, has benefitted from an opaque, newly formed Political Action Committee, which Democrats are charging is Republican-backed.
For some Jewish Democrats, the purported GOP-backed funding is evidence that Galindo’s anti-Israel rhetoric is a political liability rather than a strength.
“Republican dark money groups are spending big to elevate anti-Israel Democratic candidates who are out of touch with voters — because they’d rather face a weaker opponent in races that will decide the House majority in November. It’s cynical and it’s disturbing,” the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, Brian Romick, said in a statement to JTA.
Taylor noted that the GOP would only be promoting Galindo because the party wants Democrats “to nominate the worst candidate possible,” backing up the notion that her views are not appealing to voters.
The newly launched Lead Left PAC, which has not disclosed its donors, has spent more than $900,000 on ads and mailers promoting Galindo. Campaign finance watchdogs accuse the group of structuring its activity in a way that allowed it to bypass donor disclosures before voters cast their ballots.
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the PAC of having “strategically gamed federal reporting deadlines” in order to not disclose the sources of its funds ahead of the primaries.
The alleged GOP interference in the Texas race also spurred a row between the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Democratic Majority for Israel, which, after it called on Democrats to condemn Galindo, asked the RJC if it would “condemn the Republican Super PACs promoting her?”
The RJC, Texas GOP and Winred – a Republican donation platform that reportedly was at one point linked in the metadata for the website of Lead Left PAC – did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
A local Democratic Party official familiar with the race told JTA in an emailed statement that it was likely voters did not know much about Galindo ahead of the race, but that with “more knowledge and media attention, voters are now much better equipped about their choices.”
The race has unfolded against the backdrop of a major Republican redistricting overhaul. Congressional District 35, where Galindo is competing, was impacted so heavily that the incumbent Rep. Greg Casar is now running for a different seat, while roughly 43% of residents of Bexar Country, which the district partially covers, were placed in a new district, according to the San Antonio Report.
On Wednesday, a host of Texas Democratic Party leaders released a joint statement decrying Galindo’s rhetoric, writing that her comments “do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”
Casar, who chairs the U.S. House Progressive Caucus and currently represents much of the district, made the unusual move last week of endorsing Garcia, Galindo’s moderate runoff opponent, telling the San Antonio Express-News that Galindo’s “very inappropriate remarks” sealed the deal.
“I’m a progressive Democrat. Johnny has been endorsed by the more conservative Blue Dogs. But we can all agree that he’s the candidate who can win this race,” Casar told the outlet.
Rabbi Mara Nathan, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in San Antonio, told JTA that she did not think Galindo had drummed up support heading into her campaign from voters over her antisemitic rhetoric, adding that “if that had been the case, we would have heard about it much earlier on.”
She explained, “An alarm would have been sounded pretty early, and not necessarily from Jewish people, but from other people in the San Antonio community who are our friends and allies.”
Looking to Tuesday’s primary, Taylor said he believed the public spotlight on Galindo’s remarks had changed the race by making voters more aware of her record.
“With this animus now out there and highly visible, people are really alerted to the danger of this woman and what her rhetoric could mean,” Taylor said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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