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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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Noam Bettan Releases Song ‘Michelle’ He’ll Perform as Israel’s Rep for 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
Noam Bettan in the music video for “Michelle.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Noam Bettan revealed on Thursday the song he is set to perform when he represents Israel at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“Michelle” is a trilingual song written by Bettan, Nadav Aharoni, Tzlil Klifi, and Yuval Raphael, who represented Israel in last year’s Eurovision and finished in second place. The song features lyrics in Hebrew, English, and French, and premiered during a special broadcast on the Kan public broadcaster.
“‘Michelle’ tells the story of choosing to break free from a toxic emotional cycle. It’s a story about emotional growth and maturity, at the moment when the protagonist realizes they must let go and choose a new path for themselves,” Eurovision stated in its official description of the song.
“Michelle” is largely in Hebrew and French with only one verse in English. “Walking down Florentin/Ocean eyes/Memories/I, I’m losing my mind,” Bettan sings in English. “An angel but it is hell/Trapped in your carousel/Round and round/Under your spell.”
Bettan, who turned 28 on Thursday, was born in Israel and raised in the city of Ra’anana. His parents are French and lived in the French city of Grenoble before immigrating to Israel with their two older sons.
Bettan is fluent in French, Hebrew, and English. He won the Israeli television show and singing competition “HaKokhav HaBa” (“The Rising Star”) in January, which automatically secured him the position of representing Israel at this year’s Eurovision. Bettan will perform “Michelle” during the second half of the first Eurovision semi-final on May 12.
“I’m very proud of the song,” Bettan said in a released statement. “It’s a great privilege to bring such a creation to the Eurovision stage. The song is full of energy and emotion that touches on a wide range of feelings. I feel that ‘Michelle’ will bring us moments of shared joy and pride, and I hope this song can bring a little of that light with it.”
Watch the music video for “Michelle” below.
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‘Tool of the Enemy’: Tucker Carlson Under Fire for Latest Unhinged Rant Blaming Iran War on Chabad
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Firebrand podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of the most vocal critics of the US-Israel war against Iran, is now blaming the conflict on the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement, telling listeners of his podcast that the war’s aim is to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and rebuild the Jewish temple.
The far-right pundit, who has a history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories, alleged in his podcast released Wednesday that Israel started its “global religious war” last Saturday as an excuse to destroy the mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Al Aqsa compound, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount, in order to build the Third Jewish Temple.
The site is Judaism’s holiest and the historic location of the First and Second Temples.
“There are key players involved in this war, the one happening tonight, who believe that what we’re seeing on our television screen and on Twitter will usher in a series of events that will begin with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, Al Aqsa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad. C-H-A-B-A-D,” Carlson said, spelling out the name of the Orthodox Hasidic religious movement.
“Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
As proof, Carlson pointed to photos of Israeli soldiers with patches of an illustration of the Third Temple, claiming — but providing no evidence — that they came from Chabad.
In a social media post from two years ago, soldiers fighting against the Hamas terror group were pictured sporting the patches. The Instagram page belongs to The Temple Institute, an NGO advocating for rebuilding the Third Temple that has no connection with Chabad.
The post was accompanied with the caption: “Hamas made it clear from the start when they named their barbaric attack on Israeli citizens, men, women and children, ‘the al Aqsa flood,’ al Aqsa being the jihadist nomenclature for the Temple Mount.”
“Yes, Iranian-backed Hamas, as well as Iran’s other terror proxies are waging war against Israel, against Jerusalem, against the Holy Temple and all that the Holy Temple stands for: peace, brotherhood, prayer, and love for HaShem’s world,” the post read, using the Hebrew name for God, and ending with the biblical passage promising a “house of prayer for all nations.”
Carlson said that building the Third Temple “is totally anathema to Christianity.”
“Christians have a way of dying disproportionately in these wars, which tells you something about their real motives,” he said.
The Chabad movement, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, is not politically affiliated and is widely known for its welcoming engagement with fellow Jews, with a presence in more than 100 countries.
Chabad spokesperson Yaacov Behrman said Carlson’s claims that Chabad is behind the war amount to “a slanderous lie” and “dangerous blood libel.”
“He is also wrong about the Temple patches. They did not come from Chabad. Had he done even basic research, that would be clear,” he added in a post on X. “Reckless rhetoric like this is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Carlson’s @TuckerCarlson claim about Chabad and the Temple Mount is a slanderous lie. His implication that Chabad is behind the war in Iran is a dangerous blood libel.
Chabad’s focus is on encouraging
mitzvos—good deeds—to bring more goodness into the world and hasten the…— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) March 5, 2026
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch, the chief Chabad emissary in Kyiv and rabbi of the Ukrainian capital, said he heard Carlson’s comments while sitting in a shelter in Tel Aviv during missile sirens, after being stranded in Israel by the war.
Calling the comments “nonsense,” he said they were driven neither by “concern for human life or any values,” but by “an ugly interest.”
“While I am sitting here in a shelter because of missiles sent by extremists who prefer destruction and death over caring for their own people, there are those who choose to spread baseless antisemitic accusations,” he told The Algemeiner.
“As Chabad emissaries and as Jews, we try to help every person, in every place in the world,” he added.
The Republican Jewish Coalition denounced Carlson’s remarks as “disgusting” and posted a photo of US President Donald Trump at the Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Chabad leader, adding that “President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense.”
Tucker Carlson’s opprobrious comments against Chabad are disgusting.
President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense. https://t.co/7kjRQWjP0z pic.twitter.com/Gxjp0gHEMq
— RJC (@RJC) March 5, 2026
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Carlson’s comments on X, calling them “more abhorrent antisemitism from Tucker Carlson, invoking medieval tropes and ugly conspiracies.”
Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, Chabad’s social media director, pushed back on Carlson’s claim in a post on X, writing that belief in the Third Temple and the Messianic era is important “not just to Chabad, but to all of Judaism,” and describing it as part of the 13 Principles of Faith codified by the medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides.
“The sum total of the goodness and kindness that each of us do, Jew and non-Jew, usher in an era of world peace, when ‘Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,’ where a third Temple ‘be a house of prayer for all nations,’” Lightstone added.
Carlson’s remarks were endorsed by several commentators, including fellow podcaster Candace Owens and former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In a post on X, Owens warned followers to pay attention to where Chabad centers were located near them, describing Chabad members as “dangerous” and calling them “a radical sect of mystic occultists that follow the idea of a war messiah.”
Greene shared Carlson’s podcast episode, calling it “incredible.”
Incredible podcast by Tucker Carlson.
Telling the truth is no threat to anyone.
The greater threat is war for heretical lies. https://t.co/Vf1fZ9GjsU— Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@mtgreenee) March 5, 2026
Christian Zionist and longtime Carlson critic Laurie Cardoza-Moore slammed the remarks, saying Carlson was “ignorant of the Bible and all things Christian or Jewish.”
Cardoza-Moore, who is president of the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, said she has worked alongside Chabad rabbis worldwide “to build bridges and understanding between our communities.”
“Tucker is simply rehashing medieval antisemitic conspiracies that led to the death of millions of Jews. He does not speak for America or Christendom. He has become a tool of the enemy,” she told The Algemeiner.
In an interview with The Algemeiner last month, Israeli Christian leader Shadi Khalloul accused the former Fox News host of “destroying Christian-Jewish relations” all over the world and “endangering the persecuted Christian community in the Middle East” by falsely portraying Israel as hostile to Christianity.
Carlson has ramped up his anti-Israel content over the last year, according to a study released in December by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which tracked the prominent far-right podcaster’s disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.
In September, for example, the podcaster appeared to blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and suggest Israel was behind the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
In a recent episode in which he interviewed US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Carlson insisted that Israelis should be subject to genetic tests to determine any ties to the land of Israel.
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As ‘Death of a Salesman’ returns to Broadway, the question remains — how Jewish is Willy Loman?
Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, currently on Broadway in a new production starring Nathan Lane as Willy Loman, was inspired by an uncle of Miller’s and a suicidal colleague of his father’s, both Jewish salesmen.
On the play’s 50th anniversary, Miller told an interviewer that Willy Loman and his family were indeed intended to be Jews. But, he added, they were oblivious to this identity since in postwar America, the Lomans were “light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.”
More to the point, in 1947, Miller had lectured at the Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists about a possible new Jewish literary movement in America. After the success of Focus, his 1945 novel about antisemitism, Miller opined: “Jewish artists and writers have it as their duty to address themselves in their works to Jewish themes, Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life.”
Yet despite this belief, Miller proceeded to explain that the Holocaust had temporarily made it impossible for him to write about Jewish life without being “defensive and combative” or to treat Jewish themes “in relation to antisemitism.” A delusional failure, Loman was no role model in his professional or family life, and presenting him as a Jew might have fed already-burgeoning antisemitism among audiences.
Miller would return to Yiddishkeit in his later plays After the Fall (1964); Incident at Vichy (1965); The Price (1968); Playing for Time (1980); and Broken Glass (1994), but Salesman reflected a cagier ethnic identity.
Even so, alert audiences picked up on Yiddishisms or Brooklyn Jewish inflections, such as when Loman’s wife Linda says: “Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
The literary critic Leslie Fiedler deemed these echoes of Yiddishkeit a symptom of Miller’s being “devious” in creating “crypto-Jewish characters” who are presented instead as generic Americans, supposedly to appeal to a wider American audience.
In a 1998 essay, the playwright David Mamet alleged that by not overtly dwelling on the characters’ Judaism in Salesman, Miller had shortchanged Jewish culture; the play is the “story of a Jew told by a Jew,” he wrote, but Loman’s fate is “never avowed as a Jewish story, and so a great contribution to Jewish American history is lost.”
To which Miller politely retorted that Mamet had discerned the Jewish content in the play, “so it couldn’t have been lost. I mean, what more could anyone want?”
What some observers wanted was a literal embrace of Jewish tradition, which they received when the Yiddish stage actor Joseph Buloff, best remembered for his role as a peddler in the Broadway premiere of the musical Oklahoma! and as a Russian agent in the 1957 MGM musical film Silk Stockings. In 1951, Buloff translated and staged Salesman in Yiddish, a version which has since been revived and performed widely.
The plangent tone of the Yiddish “Toyt fun a Salesman,” made it an audience pleaser, and the literary critic Harold Bloom, a native Yiddish speaker, considered the Buloff translation the “most satisfactory performance” he ever saw of Salesman.
Less internationally celebrated was a contemporaneous staging by The Habima Theatre, the national theater of Israel. Directed by the Czech Jewish theatrical maestro Julius Gellner, it starred a powerhouse cast led by Aharon Meskin, an acclaimed Othello, Golem, and Shylock. Linda Loman was played by Hanna Rovina, who was known as the First Lady of Hebrew Theater; she had previously appeared with Meskin in the Habima production of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, and their exalted, visionary scope suited the epic, oneiric moments in Salesman.
Yet Israeli audiences seemed to prefer Miller’s All My Sons to Salesman, reportedly because Loman was a schmendrick, a small-time loser, and his pathetic demise excluded him as an appropriate hero/martyr for the new Jewish state.
Unlike the tearful Yiddish-language Loman and exalted, mythical Hebrew version, both of which glorified Jewish identity, the original Broadway cast was more ambiguous. Loman was played by Lee J. Cobb (born Leo Jacoby) a bellowing bulvan of a performer whose one-note paroxysm riveted audiences with its grim weight. In a televised interview (see the 5-minute mark), the Jewish performer Zero Mostel later complained that even a failed salesman needed humorous charm, entirely missing from the doom-laden Cobb rendition.
Of course, Mostel had suffered during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in Washington, DC, at which Cobb and the Salesman stage director Elia Kazan were friendly witnesses, naming names of former friends to placate the government witch hunt, just a few years after Salesman premiered.
By contrast, Miller himself courageously confronted the HUAC and refused to yield to threats, winning admiration even from Jewish critics who did not always laud his work. To celebrate Miller’s 87th birthday, the sometimes waspish Robert Brustein proclaimed the playwright a “true public intellectual” who created “powerful plays, but also a shining moral example unmatched in American theater.”
This praise refutes decades of obloquy, often from fellow Jewish writers, some of whom oddly resented Miller for being married for a few years to Marilyn Monroe, who converted to Judaism before their wedding. Such personal attacks, like Loman, Miller and the play itself, now belong to the ages.
Miller’s play has also won applause for productions with African-American and international casts, including a celebrated staging in Beijing, which resulted in a book and documentary film on the topic. Miller, who traveled to China for the production, explained that the play’s filial theme was as poignant in Chinese tradition as it is for Jews. Indeed, Salesman in China, a 2024 Canadian play by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy freshly revisits that historic production.
As the literary historian Leah Garrett has noted, Willy Loman and Salesman can be simultaneously Jewish and universal. Some theatergoers believe that the finest modern interpretation of the role was performed by Warren Mitchell, an English Jewish actor whose Loman at times sounded vaguely like the Jewish comedian George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum).
The most powerful, yet nuanced, Loman I ever saw onstage was incarnated by a non-Jewish actor, George C. Scott, who had previously played the role of the biblical patriarch Abraham in the 1966 epic film The Bible: In the Beginning… After a Loman tirade just before intermission, the house lights went up and the audience at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater sat in stunned silence, riveted. The impact resembled that of a 1950 Berlin production at which the audience refused to leave the theater after the show was over.
This immense force of Miller’s play is not always conveyed on stage or screen, even when accomplished actors like Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have played Loman. But the drama’s inherent force shows how the play has survived triumphantly as an American Jewish literary achievement.
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