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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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‘Nobody Wants This’ is getting less and less Jewish
In its third season, Nobody Wants This gives up on Judaism.
The Netflix show, starring Adam Brody as the ultimate nice Jewish boy, Rabbi Noah Roklov, and Kristen Bell as Joanne, his shiksa — the show’s preferred term — girlfriend, has been accused, repeatedly, of doing Jews wrong. Its creator, Erin Foster, a fellow blonde who converted for her husband, has just as regularly defended her show as good for the Jews, a positive representation in a time of antisemitism, and has basically implied that anyone who didn’t like it just couldn’t take a joke.
But the complaints have been about more than jokes. Some of the issues were one-offs, like cheesy puns about a bad Jewish basketball team, the Matzo Ballers, that leaned into a stereotype of Jewish men being unathletic. Others pointed to bigger concerns, like when Noah’s mom, who is ostensibly observant, ate pork out of the trash when she thought no one was looking — was the show painting Jews as dishonest liars?
Or there was the time the show mixed up Tu B’Shvat — a holiday celebrating the birthday of trees — and Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning the destruction of the Temple. This sparked debates about whether the writers’ room had done enough to ensure basic cultural competency; the show’s Judaism seemed to rely on shallow signifiers, like a room full of menorahs, to shore up its identity. Foster may have claimed that she made the show to spread “positive Jewish stories,” but the writing has never engaged particularly deeply with Judaism.
Really, though, the biggest complaint across the first two seasons of Nobody Wants This was the Jewish women. Jewish men have often been presented as nebbishy or neurotic in the media, something Foster set out to change, but Jewish women have long gotten the short end of the stick, stereotype-wise, and the show not only doesn’t rehab that image, it worsens it. The Jewish mothers are critical and overbearing and too obsessed with their kids. The Jewish wives are simultaneously overbearing nags and prissy princesses. The non-Jewish women are somehow always cooler, more beautiful, crazy in a fun and quirky way instead of a shrewish one. Non-Jewish women might thirst after Jewish men and vice versa, but no one lusts after a Jewish woman.
Given that the entire concept of Nobody Wants This is a hot rabbi dating a shiksa, it should not surprise any readers that the issue of Jewish women is not solved in the third season. Yes, yes, the characters are all better developed; Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law (Jackie Tohn), who was once mean, is sort of endearingly cranky and wry, and they’ve started putting her in much better outfits. Noah’s mom, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), is as overbearing as ever — in fact she actually acts even crazier than ever before — but she is much nicer to Joanne. But the Jewish women are still not good enough for the Jewish men. And this season, Joanne is converting, so she can even beat Jewish women at their own game.
Putting all that aside, however, the new season of Nobody Wants This is kind of delightful. And that was, in part, thanks to making this season far less Jewish, or at least less overtly focused on it.
That’s not to say it has no Jewish elements; Noah is still a rabbi, Joanne is, as mentioned earlier, converting in a class led by Sarah Silverman, who nails the role — unsurprisingly, given that her real-life sister Susan is a rabbi. But the conversion class is as focused on work drama than what everyone is learning about Judaism. Noah and Joanne have moved in together and have a housewarming party where they hang a mezuzah on their door frame, but the episode is more about Joanne’s ex who lives next-door. The couple tries out a tech-free Shabbat, but they spend it smoking weed, not walking to synagogue or otherwise doing anything particularly Jewish.
That turns out to be the season’s strength. It isn’t trying to demonstrate specifically Jewish family dynamics, nor does it shoehorn Jewish traditions into each episode. Instead, one plot line focuses on Noah’s attempt to navigate between his mom’s vision for his life, Joanne’s and his own — a universal topic, since parents across cultures feel deeply personally engaged in their kids’ major life events. Another storyline takes on dating, reinventing and moving on after a breakup, as Esther and Sascha, Noah’s brother, try to figure out coparenting, new hairstyles and what they really want out of life. (Though it feels odd, and like a bit of a plot hole, that Esther doesn’t seem to care about dating Jewish, even though she was very hostile to Noah dating a non-Jew in season one.)
Though Nobody Wants This has occasionally managed nice little sermonizing moments on the deeper meaning of various holidays or ideas, it has stumbled when it has tried to make Jewish Representation the show’s identity. Besides, Jews are diverse, both in religious observance level and cultural background. The show was doomed from the start if it was meant to be some sort of ur-text to represent American Jewish life in the 2020s; Jews aren’t a monolith, and design for everyone is bad design. A Syrian Jew was never going to feel seen, nor was a Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi.
In its third season, the show’s Judaism is about exactly what it is: a Reform L.A. rabbi and a woman who is (finally) converting for him. There’s an episode about Joanne’s last Christmas and her attachment to the holiday; Noah tries to make her final celebration of it the most festive one ever, and it’s a deeply sweet episode despite its total dearth of Jewish content. That’s a story worth telling, and something many converts likely feel, and a rabbi celebrating Christmas is also not the average Jewish experience.
There are, still, to be fair, plenty of issues. Noah cops to drinking coffee on Yom Kippur, which I think a lot of people will be upset about — a rabbi unable to properly observe the most holy day of the year? What’s wrong with these people? But now that the show doesn’t feel as though it’s trying to represent American Jews to the rest of the world, that seems less harmful.
Besides, the best Jewish TV has always been TV about Jews who are doing other things — Seinfeld or Broad City are no less Jewish for focusing on the general misadventures of young people living in New York. Jews live life outside of Judaism. In this season, Nobody Wants This hits its stride by giving up on clunky explanations of Judaism for the wider world; we barely see Noah at the bima. Instead of Jewish holidays, we see Christmas. Nobody Wants This was always, truly, a sweet rom-com about a guy who happens to be Jewish, and his girlfriend who happens to be converting. Nobody wanted a spokesperson in the form of a Netflix show anyway.
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Herzog calls for crackdown on violent West Bank settlers as olive harvest tensions mount
(JTA) — BUDAPEST, Hungary — Israeli President Isaac Herzog is backing senior Israel Defense Forces commanders in taking decisive action against violent settler attacks in the West Bank, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
His comments came a day before Israeli forces detained New York Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander along with 90 rabbis and activists accompanying Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest.
At a press briefing in Budapest, JTA asked Herzog what action had been taken to curb settler violence following his previous calls for a stronger government response. Herzog pointed to a meeting he held earlier this month with the IDF’s West Bank division commander and other senior officers.
“I looked them in the eye and I gave them full backing to do whatever it takes to stop this terrible phenomenon,” he said.
The goal was to end the settler violence “at its roots,” Herzog said, adding that “major efforts” were underway.
Israeli police arrested 10 suspects following a series of settler attacks over the weekend, including a violent assault on Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine. Nine of those suspects were released from custody, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir ordered the deployment of an additional Border Police company to the West Bank to combat extremist violence. The unit is expected to begin operations in late November.
Herzog had personally called Levine on Saturday to apologize for the attack, which left her with four broken vertebrae and other injuries. “I was morally tormented during Shabbat when I thought about it, and I express deep sorrow and apologize for what you went through,” he told her.
The attacks have drawn condemnation from the U.S. and European governments. On Sunday, the European Union called for Israel to take “full accountability” in preventing further violence against Palestinians, journalists and diplomats.
During his visit Tuesday, Herzog met with Hungarian President András Baka and Prime Minister Péter Magyar, whose government ended its predecessor’s opposition to EU sanctions against extremist Israeli settlers.
Herzog’s visit was the first by a senior Israeli leader since Magyar defeated longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in April. At a joint appearance, Baka described relations with Israel as “cordial and stable,” while Herzog called Hungary a “friend and an ally.”
Asked later at the press briefing whether he had received a cooler reception than under Orbán, Herzog dismissed the suggestion, describing his meetings with both leaders as “fantastic.”
Pressed on Baka’s reference to the Palestinians, Herzog said the issue had been discussed “very politely” but had not dominated the talks, adding that it was “a perfectly legitimate subject to discuss.”
Herzog called the new prime minister “a brilliant person, a very impressive leader.”
The Hungarian leaders had “opened their hearts” to him, Herzog said, citing the attendance of several senior ministers at a lunch hosted by Magyar among other gestures that he said went beyond diplomatic protocol.
The visit also had personal significance for Herzog, whose father, former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, made the first state visit to Hungary by a sitting Israeli president in 1991, shortly after the restoration of diplomatic relations between the countries.
Herzog also addressed the closing gathering of Voice of the People, his initiative bringing together 150 Jews from Israel and the diaspora. He warned that combating antisemitism would be a “long-range battle” and stressed the need to engage millions of unaffiliated Jews.
“Ask the average Israeli – he has no clue about the diversity of Jewish life,” Herzog said, adding that many Jews in the Diaspora were similarly unfamiliar with Jewish life in Israel.
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El-Sayed campaign hires Jewish liaison
(JTA) —
DETROIT – Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat has hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks of the election season, part of a new push to swing undecided Jewish voters as the contentious race enters its homestretch.
Lenore Goldman is a veteran political consultant with Michigan ties whose work has included One Fair Wage, a national movement to raise the minimum wage that has prompted years of back-and-forth in the Michigan state legislature and courts.
She also consulted on Voters Not Politicians, a 2018 Michigan campaign that successfully passed a ballot measure to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission in the state. She has also consulted for Jewish groups, including the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.
Multiple figures close to the campaign confirmed her hire to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately make Goldman available for comment, but she has already been a presence at some local events staged by Jewish supporters.
News of her hire comes nearly two months after the Democratic candidate’s campaign first told JTA they were interviewing for a Jewish liaison position.
Goldman enters the campaign at a precarious moment for El-Sayed, who has struggled to win over skeptical Jewish voters in his tight race with his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.
Recent polls show a tight race, with El-Sayed holding a narrow advantage. A Marist poll released Wednesday put him ahead of Rogers, 50% to 48% among likely voters, within the survey’s margin of error.
Jews have bristled at the former county health director’s strong criticism of Israel, including when he stated earlier this week that the country is “not an ally.” They have also objected to his campaign’s prior association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, whose remarks about Jews have drawn accusations of antisemitism. El-Sayed has since distanced himself from Piker.
Some Jews have criticized El-Sayed’s initial remarks to this spring’s Temple Israel attack, which he has since apologized for. Rogers called his opponent “anti-Jew” in a JTA interview this week.
A new letter from El-Sayed to Jewish Michiganders is also being circulated as part of an effort to warm relations.
“I care deeply about the threat of antisemitism to our communities, and I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice,” El-Sayed writes in the letter, which was shared on social media.
A spokesperson for the Michigan Democratic Party, which is named as a sponsor in the letter, did not respond to JTA requests for comment by press time. The El-Sayed campaign also did not respond to a request for comment about the letter.
Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed meets with concerned Jewish voters during the state Jewish Democratic caucus’s “Summer Simcha” event, Birmingham, Mich., Aug. 30, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
In the campaign’s final days, Jewish surrogates for El-Sayed are hitting the pavement hard. A new Jewish canvassing initiative led by the progressive voter-mobilization group Seed the Vote hopes to engage voters in an effort to boost support for El-Sayed. Seed The Vote is working with the Jewish advocacy groups Bend the Arc Action and IfNotNow.
Most of the Jewish canvassers have come from out of state. One Jewish Michigander who is canvassing, Ronit Wagman, said the activists have sometimes experienced hostility from Jewish households.
“People just don’t want to put themselves on a limb and open themselves up to name-calling,” Wagman, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park and has canvassed in the nearby, largely liberal town of Huntington Woods, told JTA. “So I’m not too surprised that local Jews don’t really want to door-knock.”
In her own family, Wagman said she has been an El-Sayed supporter for a while but that her parents “took some convincing” to vote for him.
The argument that worked on them, she said, was pulling back from the candidate’s remarks about Israel and the Temple Israel attack. Instead, she asked them to consider the prospect of how Jews would fare long-term under what she described as continued Republican attacks on “constitutional democracy and civil rights.”
“Ultimately, we talked about how Jews have been able to enjoy so much safety and security in America because of the protections offered to all people by our constitution,” she said. “And when you start to erode that, nobody is safe.”
Conversations like the Wagmans’ could prove the tipping point for a Jewish population that largely considers itself liberal but has often been troubled by El-Sayed. Jewish organizers for him have also staged a series of small-room meet-and-greets with progressive politicians who are either Jewish, or who have close ties to the Jewish community. These figures have made their own pitches for the senate candidate.
One of those surrogates, Jewish Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss, spoke at a Detroit private Jewish residence on Monday to about 50 people. Goldman was also present at the event.
Biss was targeted by far-left activists during his own primary this spring, some of whom accused the candidate of being AIPAC-aligned himself. In fact, he is backed by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and he fended off millions in spending that the pro-Israel group dropped in favor of an opponent.
Yet Biss told JTA he had no qualms about supporting El-Sayed, some of whose followers have targeted Jewish Democrats in the state in similar fashion.
“I don’t think it is ever healthy to associate any leader with the ugliest thing that anyone who supports them does,” Biss told JTA. “I absolutely never saw anything like that from Abdul himself.”
He continued, “It is possible to fight for Jewish safety in America with a variety of different positions on foreign policy. I think if we don’t accept that, we make ourselves vulnerable unnecessarily.”
To the group, he also argued that some Jewish concerns regarding El-Sayed were misplaced, particularly concerns about his language around AIPAC, which spent heavily against El-Sayed in his primary.
The lobbyists also spent heavily against Biss in his own primary, and, according to Biss, are fair game for criticism because they employed pernicious tactics in hiding their ad spending and paying for ads that often obscure their pro-Israel motivations.
“To be a little bit cheeky, I would say you can’t perform an antisemitic trope and then accuse me of antisemitism when I describe the thing you just did,” Biss told the Jewish crowd.
AIPAC announced Wednesday that it would cease endorsing and soliciting donations for its preferred candidates, though its associated super PAC, United Democracy Project, would continue operations.
El-Sayed will campaign in Detroit this weekend with former President Barack Obama. He and Rogers face off in their final scheduled debate tonight.
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