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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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US ambassador demands that Belgium drop ‘ridiculous and anti semitic’ investigation of mohels
(JTA) — The U.S. ambassador to Belgium is demanding that Belgium end an investigation into mohels who may have been using unsafe practices while circumcising Jewish babies.
Bill White made the demand, an unusual intervention into another country’s domestic affairs, in a post on X on Monday directed toward Belgium’s minister of health.
“To the (very rude) Belgian Minister of Health FRANK VANENBROUCKE; You must make a legal provision to allow Jewish religious MOHELS to perform their duties here in Belgium. It’s done in all civilized counties as legal procedure,” White tweeted. “BELGIUM is a civilized country. Stop this unacceptable harassment of the Jewish community here in Antwerp and in Belgium. It’s 2026, you need to get into the 21st century and allow our brethren Jewish families in Belgium to legally execute their religious freedoms!”
White is a longtime advocate for veterans who became a Republican after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016. He was confirmed as the ambassador to Belgium last fall despite criticism that he had amplified social media posts by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right Belgian political activist had recently been sentenced to prison after being convicted of racism and Holocaust denial.
White’s post comes nearly a year after Belgian authorities raided multiple sites, including two in Antwerp’s Jewish Quarter, at the outset of an investigation into illegal circumcisions.
In Belgium, the law requires all circumcisions to be performed by licensed medical professionals. The country has a track record of limiting religious exemptions in laws: In 2024, Europe’s top court upheld a ban in most of the country against kosher slaughter, which its critics contend is inhumane to animals.
Belgian media reported that the Antwerp raids stemmed from a complaint made by a member of the Jewish community. In 2024, Moshe Friedman, a local rabbi, filed a police complaint against six mohels who practice metzitzah b’peh, a custom in which the circumciser cleans the circumcision wound with oral suction.
The custom, which can risk infecting infants with dangerous diseases, is practiced only in haredi Orthodox communities such as the substantial one in Antwerp. Several years ago, a number of babies in New York City were infected with herpes via metzitzah b’peh.
White’s X post, which he said was on behalf of Trump and a slew of administration officials, said three mohels were facing “RIDICULOUS AND ANTI SEMITIC ‘PROSECUTION,’” which he said must be dropped immediately to preserve the U.S.-Belgian relationship.
White alleged that Vanenbroucke had told him that he intended to avoid intervening in the case, calling it a “sneaky tactic.” Vanenbroucke and other Belgian officials did not immediately respond publicly to White’s post.
White said he would be traveling to Antwerp to meet with the mohels next week. “Frank you and Conner Rousseau should come with me!” White tweeted, referring to a Flemish politician with no public connection to the investigation. “It’s disgusting what’s happened to these fine men and their families because of your inaction. Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter!”
The mohel raids in Antwerp follow the arrest in 2024 in Ireland of a British rabbi suspected of performing circumcisions illegally. There, the law requiring a medical license to perform circumcisions includes an exemption for circumcisions performed for religious reasons — but the rabbi was alleged to have circumcised babies who were not Jewish. The prosecution in that case is reportedly ongoing.
The Trump administration says it aims to defend religious freedom around the world, and its ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has called attention to what he alleges is poor treatment of Christians there. Meanwhile, a Catholic member of Trump’s new domestic Religious Liberty Commission was removed last week after using a public hearing to attack Israel and press the case that opposition to Israel is not antisemitic.
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Spike Lee, Kyrie Irving wear pro-Palestinian outfits to NBA All-Star Game featuring first Israeli player
(JTA) — Deni Avdija scored five points and made four assists and one dunk in his first NBA All-Star Game — the first All-Star appearance ever for an Israeli player.
But while Avdija’s Team World squad fell short against the league’s top American players, his appearance continued to generate excitement for Israelis, who have viewed his success on the court as a matter of national pride.
Avdija’s jersey featured an Israeli flag on the back, in keeping with the uniform for Team World.
“I feel like when I come to play, I come with the entire nation, and it’s fun to show that it’s possible, even for a small country like us,” he said during a postgame press conference, in which most questions were asked and answered in Hebrew.
Lebron James, too, was asked by an Israeli reporter about Avdija’s performance and about Israel during his own postgame availability.
“I hope I inspire people over there not only to be great in sports, but to be better in general in life,” James said. “Hopefully, someday I could make it over there. Like I said, I’ve never been over there, but I’ve heard nothing but great things. I appreciate the question.”
Some cultural events featuring prominent Israelis since the start of the war in Gaza have been subject to anti-Israel demonstrations. There were no disruptions at the All-Star Game, but two prominent fans wore outfits designed to show pro-Palestinian solidarity.
The filmmaker Spike Lee wore a Palestinian flag-inspired outfit, with a keffiyeh-patterned sweater and flag badges on his bag strap.
The basketball player Kyrie Irving, meanwhile, wore a T-shirt that said “PRESS” on the front. The shirt, produced by the company Wear the Peace, says inside that it is “dedicated to our beloved journalists in Gaza showing the world the truth.” Irving had previously worn the shirt to another NBA game.
Irving, who was not playing in the All-Star Game, was traded to the Dallas Mavericks from the Brooklyn Nets in 2023 shortly after promoting an antisemitic film on his Twitter account and at first refusing to apologize for the tweet.
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As the last generation of Holocaust survivors die, is AI the future of Holocaust education?
At a Brooklyn synagogue on a recent Monday afternoon, a video of Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski played on a two-foot-tall box. Seated in a leopard-print chair, her hands folded in her lap, Warshawski blinked and nodded her head expectantly on a continuous loop.
“Did anyone else from your family survive?” a Hebrew school student asked the AI-powered avatar.
The video cut to a separate clip. Warshawski said she and her sister had survived. Her brother, mother and father did not.
Warshawski, who survived three concentration camps and ran a tailoring shop in Kansas City until 2023, had made it part of her life’s mission to tell her story wherever she could. She spoke with students, filmed the 2016 documentary Big Sonia about her life, and was even a guest speaker at a local prison.
But Warshawski knew she wouldn’t live forever. So in 2021, with the help of the interactive media company StoryFile and her granddaughter’s production company, Inflatable Film, Warshawski recorded answers to hundreds of questions about her life, from “What do you remember about the death march?,” to “Why do you like leopard print so much?” Those answers were loaded into an AI-powered avatar of Warshawski that can converse through a video screen, which debuted as an exhibit at the Museum of Kansas City last year.
The technology also caught the attention of the Blue Card, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Holocaust survivors in need. The organization adapted it into a portable format and brought the virtual Warshawski to 20 schools and community centers across the New York area over the past year, with plans to expand nationwide. A parallel effort from the USC Shoah Foundation, called “Dimensions in Testimony,” also enables students to have conversations with virtual versions of Holocaust survivors.
The initiative reflects recognition that as survivors age, a model of Holocaust education built on firsthand testimony will be increasingly difficult to sustain. No lesson plan can match the impact of hearing directly from survivors, many of whom dedicate their golden years to speaking tours retelling their traumatic stories. But 90% of the world’s roughly 200,000 living Holocaust survivors are projected to die in the next 15 years. And for aging survivors — who have already lost so much of their lives to violence and deprivation — the weight of transmitting Holocaust memories to the next generation is a burden they cannot shoulder alone.
“It’s absolutely the future of Holocaust education,” said Masha Pearl, the Blue Card’s executive director. “It actually is as close as possible to hearing a live survivor speak.”
Warshawski’s story
Warshawski grew up in Międzyrzec, Poland, and was 17 years old when she and her family were forced into a ghetto. Sonia and her mother were deported to the Majdanek death camp, where she watched Nazis march her mother to her death via gas chamber. Warshawski was then sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was forced to spread her fellow prisoners’ ashes as fertilizer, and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she was shot in the chest on liberation day.
She recovered and met her husband, John, at the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. The couple moved to Kansas City in 1948.
Using AI technology, students can ask the virtual Warshawski about all of those harrowing moments — with the added benefit that the real-life Warshawski only had to recall them once.
Many survivors “suffer from depression and PTSD, and it’s very difficult for them to recount these extremely painful experiences,” Pearl said. “This actually bypasses that in a way.”
The interactive element is also engaging for kids, Pearl said. At the Conservative synagogue Temple Sholom, after watching Big Sonia, nearly all 25 students ages 10 to 13 — half from the parochial school at the church across the street — raised their hands to ask the virtual Warshawski a question. A few students stayed after the programming had formally ended to ask more.
“It’s the same thing I heard from my uncle’s great grandpa,” said fifth-grader Noah Stein, who attends Hebrew school at Temple Sholom. “It’s amazing — I’ve never seen something like that.”
An imperfect technology
Warshawski, now 100 years old and still going strong, celebrated her birthday in November at a party with more than 1,000 people. But she doesn’t have as much energy as she used to and was unavailable to interview for this piece. So I interviewed her avatar instead.
My question — how she felt about her memory being preserved through AI — triggered an unrelated response.
“After we left [Majdanek], there were still people there, and I must tell you, one day when I was…”
“Can we pause this?” said Rechan Meshulam, special projects director at the Blue Card, who operated the technology at Temple Sholom.
Meshulam said the system had not matched my question to the correct response. She then manually selected the closest question, “Are you glad that you recorded this with StoryFile?”
“I feel this is a very important thing for the people in the world, not to forget and [to] read more about it. Read more history,” Warshawski said. “I’m very grateful that I had a chance to do it. I am thanking the Almighty for it, to give me the strength still to go on.”
The initial mismatched response illustrated the technology’s limits: Warshawski can only answer questions that StoryFile asked her during the original interview in 2021. If a question is similar enough, the AI is designed to redirect Warshawski to the appropriate answer. But this didn’t seem to work in practice. Whenever a student asked a question outside the suggested question bank, operators had to ask the student to rephrase — or pause Warshawski and jump in with their own knowledge about her story.
But according to Pearl, the limited scope of questions is a feature, not a bug. Limiting Warshawski to questions she actually answered prevents her words from being taken out of context or misconstrued, Pearl said.
“Sonia cannot tell you what the weather is today, what her thoughts are on politics — anything that’s really current,” Pearl said. “She can only speak to her experience.”
Not everyone draws the same line. Last year, a Utah-based tech startup called SchoolAI drew controversy for its AI-generated version of Anne Frank, which spits out responses that Frank never wrote herself. Henrik Schönemann, a German historian who tested the chatbot, found AI-Frank avoided holding Nazis responsible for her death and spun her story in an overly positive light.
“How anyone thinks this is even remotely appropriate is beyond me,” Schönemann posted to social media, adding that the technology “violates every premise of Holocaust-education” and amounted to “a kind of grave-robbbing.”
SchoolAI, which also offers the ability to chat with historical figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Frederick Douglass, said it was implementing additional safeguards to help characters more directly address difficult questions.
I asked SchoolAI’s Anne Frank chatbot about how Frank feels about comparisons between ICE agents and the Gestapo. She didn’t take the bait.
“That’s a difficult question. When I lived in hiding, the Gestapo and police searched for people like us because of who we were, not because we had done anything wrong. I was always afraid,” AI-Frank wrote. “I believe it’s important to treat people with humanity and fairness, no matter their situation. What matters most is how we treat one another, especially those who are vulnerable.”
Yet even with careful control over the accuracy of testimony, some educators are uncomfortable with the idea of immortalizing Holocaust survivors in an interactive form.
In a research paper titled “Creating the ‘virtual’ witness: the limits of empathy,” Corey Kai Nelson Schultz argues that digital versions of Holocaust survivors can have the effect of undermining empathy. Viewers may treat the avatars more like virtual assistants than people, he wrote, and could be tempted to gamify the experience or test the technology’s limits.
Schultz told the Forward he prefers more traditional forms of Holocaust education — seeing artifacts like survivors’ shoes or toys, or watching video testimonies — mediums he believes better capture survivors’ humanity.
But the technology’s novelty was part of the appeal for Warshawski’s granddaughter, Leah, who directed Big Sonia — and said the AI component is just one more way to ensure her grandmother’s story lives on.
Warshawski “does authentically, passionately believe that everybody needs more education, and specifically, Holocaust education. And if this is the way to do it in the future, then so be it,” Leah told the Forward. “You know, ideally, everybody would be able to read more books.”
Pearl said the survivors she works with also have a different set of worries.
“We actually didn’t hear any ethical issues or concerns,” Pearl said. “The concerns that we heard were, Who will tell my story after I’m no longer here?”
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