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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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Is there life after Lubavitch?
Schneur Zalman Newfield knows as well as anyone what it takes to leave Orthodoxy. In his new memoir, Brooklyn Odyssey, he likens his transformation from Hasidic to secular to a butterfly’s metamorphosis. “At one stage it is clearly a caterpillar; at another it is a butterfly. But when exactly did it shift from one organism to the other?” he asks. When exactly does a Hasidic Jew become someone who prays with egalitarian minyans and protests with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice?
Newfield, a 44-year-old sociology professor at Hunter College, has been asking that very question for years. For his first book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Newfield interviewed 74 ex-Lubavitch and ex-Satmar Hasidic Jews to analyze what it means to leave Orthodoxy. Brooklyn Odyssey brings that sociological scrutiny to Newfield’s own life.
But the memoir is much more readable than the academic book that preceded it. Newfield renders vividly what it’s like to be an 11-year-old boy running amok in Crown Heights, the nerve center of the Lubavitch Hasidic universe, while rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the lionized leader of that community, was still alive. He also captures the feelings of a twentysomething ex-Hasidic virgin at Brooklyn College. After his mom reacts coldly to the news that he has shaved his beard, Newfield writes that he “felt like a Lubavitch mitzvah tank, one of those converted Winnebagos, had just rolled over my chest.”
I spoke with Newfield to see how he views the risk factors for leaving Orthodoxy, and how the Haredi world’s treatment of these people might be changing. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Lauren Hakimi: There are already so many memoirs out there about people’s journeys off the derech [out of Orthodoxy]. What did you think was missing from the OTD genre?
Schneur Zalman Newfield: None of the memoirs that are out there really captured the experience of growing up in the Lubavitch community, especially the Lubavitch boys’ environment.
Also, OTD memoirs tend to describe growing up in a very geographically constrained area. My experience is very different from that. A big part of my experience in Lubavitch was traveling around the world doing outreach work. Being exposed to the world and grappling with an awareness of other people was a big part of my process of leaving the community. There’s whole chapters in the book on my experiences visiting Russia, living in Singapore, living in China, living in Argentina.
Most of the OTD memoirs describe very stark breaks with people’s families once people left the community. In my last book, Degrees of Separation, I found that many people who grew up Lubavitch and Satmar who left the Hasidic community still maintained ties with their family. Sometimes those are very painful ties, but still, they are ties. That’s very much my own experience. A big part of my process of deciding to leave the community was complicated by the fact that I had a very loving and warm relationship with my family.
Lubavitch is as strict as other ultra-Orthodox sects, but its emphasis on kiruv [missionary work to encourage non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox] exposes Hasidim to secular Jews at young ages. How did your international travels affect your exit journey?
I was profoundly influenced by the people that I encountered. Especially in my late teens, my early 20s, once I was already reading a lot of secular books secretly on my own, I was very interested to learn more about the outside world. I think that really opened up new vistas for me that had I stayed in Crown Heights would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, for me to access.
In the very beginning of the book, there’s a photo of you and your family at your daughter’s bat mitzvah. Why was it important for you to include that?
A part of what I’m trying to convey is the fact that there is life after people leave the community. The narrative within the ultra-Orthodox community is that ‘we have such a great life, and we know the truth, and if anyone is crazy enough to leave the community, their life is doomed, and they’ll all become drug addicts.’
This is a propaganda message that the community employs in order to scare people and prevent them from even thinking of trying to leave. Many people who leave the community, yes, they face challenges, but many, if not most of the people who decide to leave the community eventually find their way in the broader society and are able to establish healthy and meaningful lives on the outside.
I wanted to highlight that about my own experience. Yes, there were real challenges, and that’s certainly part of what I talk about: the mental health issues I struggled with, the challenges related to maintaining a loving relationship with my family. At the same time, I was able to establish a healthy and meaningful life on the outside.
In Degrees of Separation, you draw a distinction between intellectual and emotional reasons for leaving Orthodoxy, but in your memoir, the intellectual and emotional seem to come together, like when your sadness over your younger brother Shimmy’s death makes you question God. I’m wondering how you view those two factors in the context of your own path.
To be clear, even in Degrees of Separation, I argue that everyone who leaves the community has both intellectual and social-emotional reasons for doing so. It’s simply a question of which of these aspects of their experience they tend to focus on. Most people tended to focus on one versus the other. This is not the full picture. The people who were talking about their intellectual disagreements with the community also experienced some kind of disenchantment or social-emotional issues related to their community. Same thing for people who talked about their social-emotional reasons for leaving.
When I thought about leaving, and then even after I left, when I thought about my experience of leaving, I did tend to describe it in intellectualist terms. In fact, early on when we were dating, my now wife asked me if Shimmy’s death played a role in my experience of leaving. I said, ‘No, I don’t think that that had anything to do with it.’
Only years later, after I was doing my academic work and thinking much more rigorously about all of these issues, did I realize that Shimmy’s death had a profound influence on my religious evolution. That, and the death of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who we were taught to believe was the messiah.
After you shave your beard, your mom sends you and your brother to a rabbi who tries to convince you to become more religious again. As someone who researches journeys out of Orthodoxy, what do you make of that intervention?
It is very common for parents, relatives, neighbors, to try to connect the person who’s thinking of leaving with some rabbi whose mission is to quote-unquote straighten the person out. In a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that there was only one intervention in my case.
Sometimes, these interventions are carried out under the guise of mental health. There’s a therapist, a psychologist, a social worker, or someone who doesn’t have any mental health training but purports to be a mental health professional. They often basically argue that for your own mental health, it would be best if you would come back to Orthodoxy.
The rabbi I was sent to had been my teacher for several years. When I had him as a teacher, I thought that he was this brilliant guy, charming and charismatic. But when it came to this interaction, where he was basically trying to convince me to remain Orthodox, he was very plebeian in terms of the arguments that he was making, and his general attitude of disdain for me, for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, and for secular knowledge in general.
Do you think that if you were going OTD today, as opposed to 20 years ago, the Orthodox net might have done a better job trying to catch you?
I think the ultra-Orthodox community has become more aware of the fact that large numbers of their members are leaving and that they need to do a better job of trying to respond to it.
Each individual religious community responds in a somewhat different way. So it’s hard to make generalizations, but it definitely seems that the ultra-Orthodox community is trying to respond to this issue in a more sensitive and thoughtful and humane way than they were doing, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago.
Me and other scholars have also noted a rise of quote-unquote ‘modern’ ultra-Orthodox people.
I sometimes stay in Crown Heights for Shabbos with my family and go to shul with one of my brothers in law. I go to this one particular shul, and there’s a bunch of people who have trim beards, or something’s going on with their beards, not quite the way nature intended. They’re going to shul every Shabbos, they send their children to Lubavitch schools. In a lot of significant ways, they’re enmeshed in the community, and they’re recognized as being full-fledged members of the community, yet they’re living a kind of Lubavitch lite.
So yes, I think if I was leaving today, or if I was living in the community today, it’s hard to say exactly how things would end up. But I didn’t grow up in the community today. I grew up in the community 30 years ago, and my story is my story.
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Homeland Security hires social media manager whose posts raised alarm for promoting ‘white-nationalist rhetoric’
(JTA) — The Department of Homeland Security has hired a new digital communications director whose social media content for the Labor Department reportedly raised alarm bells inside the department and beyond for promoting white supremacist rhetoric.
Peyton Rollins began his new role at Homeland Security this month, The New York Times was the first to report this week. Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security spokeswoman, did not confirm the move to the newspaper, but Rollins’ LinkedIn profile shows that he began working at the department this month.
Rollins, 21, has been identified as the staffer responsible for posts at the Labor Department that have been decried as making veiled antisemitic and racist allusions. He also claimed credit for a large banner of President Donald Trump’s face that was hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters, which its critics said echoed fascist stylings.
During Rollins’ time at the Labor Department, its social media pages have featured a range of slogans including “the globalist status quo is OVER,” “PATRIOTISM, NOT GLOBALISM” and “Patriotism will Prevail. America First. Always,” which featured an image of an American flag with 11 stars, the number that appeared on some Confederate flags.
One post on X in November, which featured the phrase “Americanism Will Prevail,” spurred hundreds of negative comments because it appeared to use the same typeface used on the original cover of “Mein Kampf.”
Staffers at the department were alarmed, according to the New York Times. “We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” a former employee, Helen Luryi, told the newspaper. “All of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”
In his new role, Rollins will oversee the Homeland Security social media accounts, including its X account which has been accused of tweeting antisemitic dog whistles.
Rollins joins a growing list of hires under the Trump administration who have faced allegations of promoting extremist rhetoric.
In March, DHS hired speechwriter Eric Lendrum, who has previously promoted the “Great Replacement” theory and likened conservatives in the United States to Jews in Nazi Germany. In May, the Pentagon also appointed Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly echoed antisemitic rhetoric online, as its press secretary.
Last year, the appointments of Darren Beattie as the acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in February and Paul Ingrassia in May to a senior legal role drew criticism for the pair’s relationships with white supremacists.
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The Israeli government wants you to stop calling Oct. 7 a ‘massacre.’ Yes, really.
The Oct. 7 attack was a massacre. But Israeli authorities would prefer you not call it that.
The Prime Minister’s Office demanded that a bill establishing a national memorial for the incursion remove the term “massacre” from its title, with Minister Mickey Zohar explaining that since Israel is “strong,” no one can “massacre the people of Israel.”
In other words: To accurately describe what happened when Hamas struck Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 —killing almost 1,200 and kidnapping 251 hostages — is unpatriotic, signals weakness, and is, somehow, leftist.
This is not really a matter of semantics. It’s an attempt to control language in order to distort reality. And it’s tied to the Netanyahu government’s vast project of evading accountability for the many military and political failures that contributed to the horrors of Oct. 7.
Their method is time-tested. Early versions of it appear in classical sources, in which rulers often rename actions to soften their meaning.
King Saul masks disobedience as a religious act. King David cloaks the fact that he planned the death of his romantic rival Uriah in the language of war.
Ancient Greeks observed that political conflicts alter not only reality but also the meaning of words. Thucydides described how during civil strife, recklessness was called courage, moderation was branded as weakness, and caution was treated as betrayal, illuminating how language could be inverted to serve passion and polarization.
In ancient Rome, the phenomenon assumed a more formal character. The emperor Aurelian gave himself the title restitutor orbis, meaning “restorer of the world”; he framed a series of brutal conflicts he embarked on to reunite the Roman empire as an act of correction, rather than conquest. It was a formulation that wrapped violence in a mantle of legitimacy and proper governance.
As political systems evolved, so did linguistic sophistication. During the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror was overseen by a body called the Committee of Public Safety. The Nazi regime called its deportations of Jews to concentration camps “resettlement” and described some executions as “special treatment.” Stalin did not cause famine; there were “grain procurement difficulties.” Mao Zedong did not preside over catastrophe; he launched a “Great Leap Forward.”
George Orwell identified this mechanism with unmatched clarity in his novel 1984. His fictional government’s “Ministry of Truth” serves the function of degrading language until truth becomes inexpressible, with the slogan “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
The contradictions are deliberate. Their purpose is to train citizens to accept inversion and surrender their independent grasp of reality.
Orwell’s deeper insight was that the corruption of language precedes the corruption of politics. When words lose precision, accountability dissolves. Reality becomes malleable, and loyal followers will believe whatever they are told. If aggression is always “defense,” repression always “order,” and censorship always “responsibility,” there is little limit to what rulers can do.
The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut put it even more sharply — beautifully, even — in 1973’s Breakfast of Champions: “In nonsense is strength.”
This phenomenon is not confined to totalitarian regimes. Democracies, too, are tempted to soften language when confronting failure. Even — and perhaps especially — in Israel.
Thus, the killing of civilians becomes “harm to uninvolved civilians,” phrasing that distances attention from human reality. Torture becomes “moderate physical pressure.” Extrajudicial killings become “targeted prevention.”
Set aside the question of whether these measures are ever justified: It’s essential to note that the language itself undergoes distortion for political ends.
The Netanyahu government has a specific goal behind this approach. Avoiding the word “massacre” in describing Oct. 7 fits into its broader strategy of evading responsibility for the disaster itself.
Netanyahu has refused to accept any blame since the first hours after the attack, including by arguing that no investigation into his actions could take place during wartime, while prolonging the war as much as possible. At the same time, his allies attacked the Supreme Court to justify avoiding a state commission of inquiry with real authority.
To refuse to call Oct. 7 a massacre is to suggest it was somehow less brutal or devastating than it was. So let us dispel the nonsense.
A massacre involves the deliberate killing of a large number of defenseless people. It does not imply permanent strategic defeat. It does not preclude a military response afterward. It does not suggest inherent weakness. It describes a specific act: the intentional slaughter of civilians under circumstances in which they cannot defend themselves.
On Oct. 7, 2023, armed Hamas militants invaded Israel and committed a massacre, almost unopposed by Israeli security forces, in a crushing national collapse. Families were shot in their homes. People were hunted down, executed, or burned. Hostages were taken. Most of the victims were civilians. It was hours before the public heard anything from the shell-shocked Netanyahu.
Call it what it was. Truth combined with moral clarity, over time, are a nation’s deepest source of strength. Resistance to accurate language serves to dull the recognition that something profoundly shocking occurred — something that demands deep reckoning and change, not a continuation of the morally bereft and misleading status quo.
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