The breadth of the antisemitism Jews encountered in the US then was, and remains, shocking. In late September 1935, the same month that the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship, men and women opening their Sunday Los Angeles Times found an insert urging them “to prepare the way for an ultimate solution of the ‘Jewish Problem.’ ” In Manhattan, Rabbi Louis Newman’s Congregation Rodeph Sholom was on West 83rd Street, directly across Central Park from Yorkville, a German immigrant neighborhood and a stronghold of the German American Bund. One morning in March 1937 walking up to the synagogue, he saw almost a dozen large orange swastikas stenciled on its front wall. This was at least the third time the synagogue had been defaced in recent years. In June 1939 in Baltimore, forty boys from a junior high where half the population was German and 30 percent Jewish, inked swastikas on their arms, went after a classmate with a knife, and carved H for Hebrew into his neck.
The future Village Voice columnist and music critic Nat Hentoff grew up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a neighborhood home to mostly working-class Jews. He was about fourteen in the late 1930s when, rushing home one winter’s day, he slipped on the ice, looked up, and saw, looming over him, eight “Irishers,” from one of the adjacent Irish Catholic neighborhoods: “Hurt yourself, kid? . . . You Jewish, kid?” He knew enough to stay on his bum: “What do you mean Jewish? I’m Greek. I don’t live here. I just finished work.” When one snarled “Hebe,” another demanded: “Say something in Greek.” So Hentoff, a student at the elite Boston Latin School, began reciting the Odyssey, and miraculously the thugs sauntered off. But the next time he ran into Irish bullies out “Jew hunting,” he was not so lucky. This time he ended up bloodied and missing a tooth.
Hentoff never identified his assailants as members of the Christian Front, but they may have been. By 1938 Father Coughlin had become convinced that more than words were needed to stop Judeo-Bolshevism. His call in Social Justice that May for a crusade against communism and Jews attracted tens of thousands of young men to the Christian Front. With strongholds in Boston and New York, and chapters in other cities across the country, Christian Fronters went after Jews. A few weeks after Germany invaded Poland, Joe Leveque, a New York Christian Fronter, said: “Christians, especially Catholics, should exterminate the Jews just like Hitler did in Germany and is now doing in Poland.” America must “see Jewish blood stream all over the streets.”
The Christian Front mounted “buy Christian only” campaigns to stop customers from shopping at Jewish stores. Its members, calling themselves “Father Coughlin’s brownshirts,” after Hitler’s Brown Shirts who beat up Jews and political opponents, began arming themselves. Although the Boston Christian Front had officially disbanded in January 1942, as the government cracked down on individuals and organizations whose enthusiasm for the Nazis made them suspect now that the US was at war with Germany, it had just moved underground.
No one knows the full extent of this antisemitic “terrorism” in the 1930s and 1940s. Frankly, it is not possible to calculate it because so many assaults were never reported, sometimes because police, who were members of the Christian Front and like-minded organizations, were either involved or stood idly by; other times because Jewish leaders feared exposing the perpetrators would make matters worse.
Not only did assaults on Jews not end with America’s entry into the war, by 1943, in Boston, they were “an almost daily occurrence.” Not until that fall was the breadth of the violence in Roxbury and the adjacent Jewish neighborhoods of Dorchester and Mattapan brought to light by an enterprising journalist. Earlier that year on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, eight boys leaving Dorchester’s Hecht House, a Jewish community center, were set upon by Irish thugs. Sneering “Wasn’t Hitler ‘the greatest person in the world,’ ” one of the hoods smashed his fist into a boy’s face. Then each of his four buddies, repeating the question, took a swing at the same boy.
Thugs hit Dorchester’s sixty-nine-year-old Samuel Rudofsky from behind with a blackjack, leaving him bedridden at least for a time. They smashed synagogue windows, yelling “Let’s kill the Jews!” On Blue Hill Avenue, Dorchester’s main thoroughfare, they shattered storefronts owned by Jews and slashed their awnings, swearing: “There’ll be no more Jews on Jew Hill Avenue when this war is over.” A hundred Jewish Roxbury teens appealed to Boston’s mayor for help. They were afraid to walk the streets at night—and even during the day.
In New York and other cities, gangs, brushed off as rowdy hoodlums, beat up Jews, slashed at them with switchblades, and tore clothes off of Jewish girls. Smashing windows of shops owned by Jews, they stole what they wanted and damaged the rest. Antisemites vandalized synagogues, dumped prayer books in toilets, and threw stones at Jews on their way to services. They desecrated cemeteries, overturning gravestones and painting swastikas.
When Zelda Popkin’s teenage son Sandy had wisecracked, “You can’t tell your Jew without a pogrom,” he was not referring to what was happening in Europe. Attacks in America may not have escalated to the scale of full-blown pogroms, but cumulatively these incidents were so widespread that they explain Jews’ desperation about what was happening not only to Jews overseas but to themselves and their children at home.
Sandy and his buddies took up that quip about Jews and pogroms from the antisemitic broadsheet Christian Defender, published by the journalist Arthur Derounian, an undercover agent working for Leon Birkhead’s Friends of Democracy. The Christian Defender was his gateway into the pro-Nazi groups. Birkhead was a maverick Kansas City Unitarian minister, who, visiting Germany in 1931, heard that “Hitler was a transitory pest.” Four years later in Nuremberg, at the office of Julius Streicher, publisher of the antisemitic hate-sheet Der Stürmer, he met someone eager to show off a stack of correspondence the Nazis were carrying on with Americans. Birkhead founded the Friends of Democracy to expose them.
By 1939 he had left Kansas City to open a New York office, and the Popkins were raising funds to keep it going. Taking aim at the US’s leading antisemites, his weapons were a typewriter and printing press, with Zelda Popkin taking credit for writing some of his dispatches. Birkhead campaigned against Father Coughlin, called the America First Committee “a Nazi transmission belt,” and as late as 1940, continued denouncing Henry Ford for publishing The International Jew. The Friends of Democracy awarded its Ignoble Prize, given to the American who had done the least for democracy, to Congressman John E. Rankin. In addition to working with the Popkins, Birkhead roped in Hobson.
Birkhead admitted that spying was essential to his work, and Derounian, his chief spy, had an office in the same Park Avenue building as the Popkins. In 1943, under the penname John Roy Carlson, Derounian published Under Cover, a best-selling exposé of America’s fascist pro-Nazi groups bent on attacking American Jews the way Hitler was attacking their brethren in Europe. Their “terror” divisions and “death” legions trained for smashing up Jewish stores and “beating the brains out of Jews that put up a fight.” Sandy Popkin and his friends helped Derounian. Heading off to Yorkville, they showed up at German American Bund rallies and brought back names of those who attended.
Just as the full extent of anti-Jewish violence and vandalism in America in these years remains unknown, so too does the magnitude of responses from Jews and allies, like Birkhead. In part, that is because counteroffensives came not only from established organizations but also from like-minded individuals, sometimes erupting spontaneously.
Arnold Fastenberg grew up in the East Bronx, became a lawyer, and changed his name to Arnold Forster. In 1937, hanging out in Manhattan’s Washington Heights—a neighborhood with many German Jewish immigrants—with some friends whom he had gone to law school with, he heard a group of a dozen men marching down the street, chanting: “One, two, down with the Jew. Three, four, hit ’em in the jaw.” Without saying a word, the lawyers stepped off the sidewalk into the thugs’ path, and a brawl ensued.
That was, Forster remembered, how their Junior Guild started. With dozens of antisemitic street meetings happening all over New York every week, the Junior Guild came up with a plan to strike back. Three members, one a lawyer, would stake out a meeting. When they judged that the harangues about “kike” Communists controlling FDR and occasional rants about the blood libel crossed the line to incitement to riot, they approached a policeman and demanded an arrest. Then, trailing the detainee to Night Court, the attorney made their case against the defendant. The Junior Guild got convictions, but they were not able to stop antisemites from spewing their hate.
Monitoring the Junior Guild’s success, the Anti-Defamation League brought it under its umbrella and hired Forster to open its legal department. At the end of 1943 he reported on a spate of antisemitism hitting New York akin to that in Boston. Forster revealed that not only had virtually every synagogue in Washington Heights been desecrated, but also, in the past two months, almost a third of the children in one of their Hebrew schools had been attacked. The Anti-Defamation League had affidavits from twenty-six children saying that they had been beaten and robbed.
By then, Nazi agents had been infiltrating America since the 1920s. In the early 1930s, the American Jewish Congress’s Jacob X. Cohen was so shaken by foreign agents and their native sympathizers spreading fascism and antisemitism that he began surreptitiously attending meetings where Nazis ranted for hours against Jews. He even joined the National Socialist Party under an assumed name and soundproofed a room at the Free Synagogue for meetings with government agents.
Cohen corralled a few men and women who did not look stereotypically Jewish to help him spy on American Nazis. Among them was the library clerk Florence Mendheim. Raised in a German Jewish immigrant family, she infiltrated, under the alias Gertrude Müller, Yorkville’s Friends of the New Germany and brought its propaganda, including copies of The International Jew, to Cohen along with her notes on meetings and the names of the people who attended. One evening, cozying up to the speaker Earl Carter, she casually remarked that his was not a very German name. Erich K. Wildegaus was all too eager to share his real identity with the attractive thirty-four-year-old. After the Friends of New Germany dissolved and reformed as the German American Bund in 1936, it hired Mendheim as a secretary. But at some point, she quit. Perhaps the work had become too dangerous, or perhaps her cover had been blown.
In Los Angeles, Leon Lewis was also running a spy ring. In the mid-1920s, when he was the Anti-Defamation League’s national secretary in Chicago, he saw German-born Americans, recruited by the Nazi Party, spreading hate. Relocating to Los Angeles with his family, he saw the same thing happening there. Then Hitler came to power, and Lewis, convinced that boycotts, rallies, and denunciations would never stop Nazis in America, launched what may have been the era’s largest domestic spy operation run by a Jew.
A World War I veteran, Lewis had close ties to the American Legion and Disabled American Veterans. He knew former military men who hated the Nazis but whose German ancestry gave them, and even their wives and daughters, the perfect cover for spending time at LA’s Aryan Bookshop and Deutsches Haus. Infiltrating dozens of the city’s pro-Nazi and fascist groups, these daring agents uncovered shocking plots to sabotage the nation’s military installations and seize National Guard armories as well as schemes to murder Jews by driving through Boyle Heights, where many Jews lived, shooting up homes and sending in exterminators to fumigate them with cyanide. The spies discovered a plot to kidnap Jewish movie stars and studio heads, along with Gentiles deemed too friendly to Jews like Charlie Chaplin and spymaster Leon Lewis. The conspirators planned to string them up, expecting the mass lynching to spark a nationwide pogrom. They crowed: “The sooner we get these Jew sons of bitches and their Gentile fronts on ropes the better.” The head of the Pacific Coast’s naval intelligence was so impressed with Lewis’s operation that he wanted the spymaster to come work for him, but Lewis declined. His spy network remained independent, sharing information with the Navy, the FBI, and the War and State Departments.
Other American Jews threw punches to fight the Nazi menace at home. New Jersey crime boss Abner “Longie” Zwillman decided to give Newark’s homegrown Nazis a taste of their own medicine. Protests and boycotts were not his cup of tea. Intimidation, fists, and clubs were. After learning, in September 1933, that the Friends of New Germany were planning a meeting at the local Schwabenhalle, Zwillman gathered a bunch of prizefighters and gangsters, called them the Minutemen after the American Revolution’s special fighting forces, and put ex-boxer Nat Arno in charge. As three hundred Friends of New Germany gathered, the Minutemen grabbed iron pipes they had already hidden in an alley nearby. Once the meeting began, Arno tossed stench bombs into the back of the hall. As some of the Friends fled out the front door, gang member Hymie “The Weasel” Kugel screamed: “Look what they did to me!” As soon as the police guarding the entrance took off to help him, the Minutemen rushed in and began beating the Friends of New Germany with their iron pipes. By the time the police returned, the Minutemen had all gotten away. Zwillman’s Minutemen continued going after Newark’s Nazi sympathizers until the Pearl Harbor attack. Once America was at war with Germany, supporting the enemy was sedition and the sympathizers retreated.
Jewish gangsters were not the only ones risking life and limb. On February 20, 1939, seventeen hundred New York policemen were guarding Madison Square Garden. Inside, the Bund’s own uniformed American stormtroopers patrolled the aisles as twenty-two thousand German American Bundists celebrated the birthday of George Washington, the man they oddly revered as America’s first fascist. Outside, thousands were protesting. Inside, Isadore Greenbaum, a twenty-six-year-old Brooklyn plumber’s helper in a blue suit, had listened to three hours of hate. By the time Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn took the stage and began demanding that the Bund “break the grip of the palsied hand of Jewish Communism” on America and restore a “White-Gentile ruled United States,” Greenbaum had “lost [his] head.” He made his way toward the podium, pushed through the brown shirts to scale it, and yelling “down with Hitler,” knocked over Kuhn’s microphone before a dozen Bundists tackled him and began beating him up. Some of the police managed to grab him, saving his life. They arrested Greenbaum for disorderly conduct and hauled him off to court. Greenbaum, one eye blackened and his nose broken, told the judge that when he went to the meeting, he had no plan to disrupt it. The judge asked: Didn’t he realize that “innocent people might have been killed?” Greenbaum shot back: “Do you realize that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” The court fined him $25. Later, in the war, Isadore Greenbaum served as a chief petty officer in the Navy.
‘Excerpted from Antisemitism, an American Tradition. Copyright © 2025 by Pamela Nadell. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.’
