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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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The Psychology Behind the Rise in Right-Wing Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
Over the past year or so, there has been a strange and unsettling shift on parts of the political and cultural right. Figures who built their influence by pushing back against progressive excess, moral confusion, intellectual laziness, and the erosion of democratic values have begun drifting into territory that should have been left behind long ago — antisemitic tropes, conspiratorial thinking, and flirtations with ideas they themselves once would have dismissed as corrosive and dangerous.
It has been very upsetting to watch, not least because many of these voices rose to prominence by presenting themselves as more serious, more grounded, and more responsible than the alternatives they criticized.
Some have pointed to foreign money and malign external influences – with Qatar chief among them as a reliable patron of some of the most destructive forces in the modern world – as an explanation. It would be naïve to deny that such actors play a role. But that explanation, on its own, is not enough to explain this phenomenon.
Even if Qatari money helps shape narratives at the top of the pyramid – and their possible involvement absolutely deserves scrutiny – it does not explain the sheer number of willing followers who nod along to contentious statements and ridiculous conspiracies without being paid a cent by anyone.
Elite influencers may be driven by incentives tied to financial or political power, but the grassroots level is clearly motivated by something else. Money may help light the match, but it does not explain why so many people are eager to watch the fire burn – and then cheer it on.
The instinctive response is to frame all of this as ideological betrayal – and then to draw battle lines, or to declare that the political culture of Western democracies is fundamentally broken. But that reaction is the wrong approach. It shuts down thought precisely when careful thinking is needed most. Because at its core, something more human – and far more familiar – seems to be going on.
What makes this moment so counterintuitive is that this regression on the right has not emerged from defeat or marginalization. It has emerged from success.
The stunning political victory by the Republicans in November 2024 should, in theory, have been followed by a period of consolidation – a sharpening of ideas and a renewed sense of responsibility. Instead, we are witnessing a growing rift between principled conservatism and a darker, more reckless version of right-wing beliefs. That paradox suggests we are dealing less with ideology than with a psychological response to the sudden expansion of freedom and power.
We tend to assume that success produces stability and confidence. History suggests otherwise. When people or movements feel genuinely embattled, they often develop discipline, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose – an understanding of what matters and what must be set aside for the greater good.
But when the wind is at their backs, and a threat – real or imagined – appears on the horizon, the result is often anxiety: “We might lose what we have!” And anxiety is dangerous. It clouds judgment and tempts people to reach for ideas they already know are corrosive, simply because they feel familiar.
History offers some sobering examples. After years of devastating war under Napoleon, France in 1814 finally rid itself of him and he was exiled to Elba. The country had a rare opportunity to step back, recover, and build something more stable and restrained. But when Napoleon escaped from Elba a year later and returned to France, large parts of the country welcomed him back.
Soldiers sent to arrest him joined him instead. Within weeks, France had re-embraced the very man who had brought it to ruin, and 100 days later, they paid for it at Waterloo. The regression was not imposed from above. It was embraced from below – and it was an utter disaster.
Ancient Rome offers a similar lesson. The Roman Republic was built on restraint, combined with a sophisticated system of checks and balances and a healthy suspicion of the concentration of power into the hands of one man. And yet Julius Caesar’s rise was welcomed by many as a solution to a period of dysfunction.
He was appointed dictator, and what followed was not renewal but the oppressive age of emperors. Rome gained order but lost its liberty. Once again, faced with uncertainty, a civilization chose a familiar system that was bad over the harder work of repair and healing — and they called it progress.
The Torah identifies this same flaw in human nature at the very beginning of Jewish history, in Parshat Beshalach. Just days after experiencing one of the most dramatic liberations ever achieved by a slave nation – the Exodus from Egypt – the newly freed Jewish people find themselves trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s approaching army.
Despite everything they know – that God has redeemed them, that awesome miracles have carried them this far – panic sets in. They turn on Moses and cry out: “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you took us out to die in the wilderness?”
And then comes a line so jarring that it almost feels like parody (Ex. 14:12): טוֹב לָנוּ עֲבֹד אֶת־מִצְרַיִם מִמֻּתֵנוּ בַּמִּדְבָּר – “It would have been better for us to serve Egypt than to die in the wilderness.”
How is this even possible? These are people who have just witnessed the collapse of the most powerful empire on earth for their benefit – who are, in that moment, at the very top of their game. And yet, even as they bask in the glow of victory, the instant their freedom begins to feel fragile, their instinct is not to move forward into the rational unknown but to retreat into what they already know is irrational evil.
That is the crucial point. It is not a calculation that makes sense, nor is it a carefully thought-out strategy; it is a psychological reflex, and a dangerous one. Faced with what feels like an existential threat, people often reach for the familiar – even when that is the worst possible thing they could do.
Which is what makes the current flirtation with antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on certain parts of the right so disturbing. These are old instincts, long known to be destructive, that have now resurfaced because they feel familiar, as some on the right feel tinges of anxiety.
But familiarity is not necessarily wisdom; far more often, it is a dangerous trap. A recent study suggests that engagement with antisemitic conspiracy theories on the right has risen dramatically since the November 2024 election. Unless this trend is halted, it won’t end well.
The Torah’s message at the sea is uncompromising. The way forward is not to turn backward. Redemption does not come from retreating into the habits and ideas that once enslaved and degraded us. The sea will open up and offer salvation only when someone is willing to step into it – to take the risk, and to trust that moral clarity and courage still matter.
Regression may feel comforting, but it leads nowhere. The only way forward is through.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Karen Jones and the Institutionalization of Medical Dhimmitude
Illustrative: Health workers move a woman on a stretcher to an ambulance after a deadly terrorist shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The reports emerging from Sydney’s Liverpool Hospital are not merely a localized administrative failure; they represent a chilling indicator of a new, institutionalized “dhimmitude” taking root in the heart of Western society.
Rosalia Shikhverg, a survivor of the horrific Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre on Dec. 14, was admitted for treatment of shrapnel and gunshot wounds to the head. While she lay in her hospital bed, terrified and recovering from a terror attack that claimed 15 lives, staff — without her knowledge or consent — snipped her medical wristband and replaced it with a new one. Her name was gone. In its place was the alias “Karen Jones,” with her religious status completely scrubbed from official records.
The hospital’s defense, offered through state health officials, is perhaps more terrifying than the act itself. Officials claimed the name change was a “protective measure” to shield a high-profile victim from media intrusion following the heightened risks in Sydney. But Shikhverg’s own account points to a more sinister and systemic motivation: the hospital administration apparently did not trust its own staff to provide equal, safe care to a patient identified as Jewish. Shikhverg recounted how the switch left her more focused on a fear of her caregivers than her physical injuries, crying incessantly and pleading for an early discharge because she felt profoundly unsafe.
This incident represents the logical culmination of a process by which the values of the Middle East’s most regressive ideologies are imported into Western civil society. When a premier medical institution in a Western democracy feels compelled to erase a Jewish patient’s identity to ensure her safety from the very people hired to heal her, we are no longer talking about a mere “spillover” of the Gaza conflict. We are witnessing the surrender of Western professional ethics to the mob.
This is the rebirth of dhimmitude. In the classical tradition, the dhimmi was a protected non-Muslim subject granted life and property only on the condition of submission and the public erasure of their distinct identity.
In 2026, a modern hospital has effectively recreated this status. By stripping Shikhverg of her name and her religion, the hospital sent a clear message: Jewish identity is a provocation and a “safety risk” that the state can no longer manage. It suggests that the only way to protect a Jew in a modern metropolis is to ensure that they are no longer recognizable as a Jew.
This betrayal is not an isolated event. It follows the recent suspension of nurses at other nearby facilities who were caught on video bragging about their refusal to treat Israelis and expressing a desire to kill Jewish patients. The “Karen Jones” incident shows that instead of purging these radical elements from the health-care system, administrators have chosen a path of appeasement. They have decided that it is easier to erase the patient than to confront the radicalization of the workforce.
The “long march through the institutions” by radical ideologues has finally reached the bedside. We have seen this pattern on campuses, where “Jew-free zones” are established under the guise of “safe spaces,” and in the courts, where legal harassment is used to silence critics of extremism. Now, the hospital ward has become the next frontier of exclusion. If a nurse or a doctor cannot look at a patient with a Jewish name without the administration fearing for the patient’s life, then the social contract of the Western democracy has been fundamentally breached.
If the West is to survive this ideological assault, the response must be uncompromising. There must be a full, independent audit of radicalization within the public health systems of major Western cities. The administrators who authorized the erasure of Rosalia Shikhverg’s identity must be held legally and professionally accountable for civil rights violations. Furthermore, governments must recognize that non-violent subversion of Western values is just as dangerous as the violent jihad that targeted Boni Beach on Hanukkah.
Rosalia Shikhverg survived the bullets of a terrorist only to be erased by the bureaucracy of a hospital. We must ensure that “Karen Jones” is the last alias a Jew is forced to wear in a Western democracy. Peace and security cannot be built on a foundation of coerced invisibility. The survival of pluralistic society depends on the ability of every citizen to exist openly, without fear that their identity will become a death warrant in the hands of those sworn to protect them.
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Palestinian Terrorists Admit Their Own Rockets Kill Gazans, and the Media Look the Other Way
People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast from an errant Islamic Palestinian Jihad rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A document seized in Gaza and reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster exposes a reality that sharply contradicts much of the global coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: Palestinian civilians have long been killed by Palestinian rockets and terrorist leaders knew it, discussed it, and accepted it.
The document records a meeting between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials held before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the war that followed. In it, Hamas representatives confront Islamic Jihad leaders over a deadly and recurring problem: rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza, killing civilians.
“Your rockets are falling on people’s homes, and this is a recurring issue,” a Hamas official is quoted as saying.
The response from Islamic Jihad is even more damning. “We are at war,” a senior representative of the terrorist group replies. “Even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war.”
This is not a battlefield mishap acknowledged after the fact. It is an explicit, pre-war admission that Palestinian terrorist groups were aware their weapons routinely killed civilians and that they viewed those deaths as acceptable.
The document also records Islamic Jihad officials admitting that they knew their rockets were defective. According to the report, the weapons were manufactured using blueprints supplied by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, unreliable rockets were knowingly produced, launched from densely populated areas, and expected to fall short.
Image of the seized document, as presented by Kan Public Broadcaster
This matters because it directly undermines a central assumption that has dominated coverage of Gaza for years and intensified after Oct. 7: that civilian casualties are almost entirely the result of Israeli fire.
Kan’s report does not quantify how many Gazans have been killed by Palestinian rockets. But it does establish something journalists have consistently avoided confronting: terrorist groups themselves acknowledge that their own fire kills civilians and that this has been happening for years.
That reality burst briefly into view 10 days after the war began, when a PIJ rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel was immediately blamed across much of the international media. Only later did evidence emerge that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
This newly revealed document shows that the incident was not an anomaly. It was a known risk discussed internally long before Oct. 7.
So, why has this revelation barely registered outside Israel?
Journalists often justify their reliance on casualty figures and on the fog of war. But here, there is no ambiguity. This is a primary source document describing internal discussions between terrorist groups, criticizing each other for weapons failures and explicitly accepting civilian deaths as collateral.
If such a document emerged showing Israeli officials dismissing civilian deaths as “the price of war,” it would dominate headlines worldwide. When terrorist groups say it among themselves, it is met with silence.
This selective attention has consequences. Media outlets routinely report Gaza casualties without asking how many were caused by Palestinian fire. They rarely revisit earlier claims when new evidence emerges. And they almost never scrutinize the conduct of terrorist groups with the same intensity they apply to Israel.
The Kan report exposes not just the recklessness of Palestinian terrorist organizations but the media’s unwillingness to reckon with it. By ignoring evidence that complicates a simplified narrative, journalists deprive audiences of essential context and accountability.
This document does not absolve Israel of scrutiny. But it does demand that journalists stop treating Palestinian armed groups as passive actors whose actions are irrelevant to civilian harm.
Terrorists killing their own civilians is not a footnote. It is a central fact of this conflict. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists.
It is why so many in the media choose not to report it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.