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This is a guest essay by Eric Dezenhall, an author of 12 books and the founder of one of America’s leading crisis management firms.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
American Jews have spent considerable energy explaining why people should stop hating them. We need to spend considerably more time deciding what happens when people refuse.
That is the question beneath Eric Dezenhall’s provocative essay. A writer who has explored the dealings of presidents and gangsters, Eric finds himself fielding increasingly urgent inquiries about how Jewish mobsters confronted American Nazis. The interest reveals a hunger for something too often missing from contemporary Jewish leadership: the confidence to impose consequences on those who threaten us.
There is something profoundly wrong when Meyer Lansky inspires more confidence in Jewish protection than institutions established to provide it.
Readers will recognize the larger issue. Jewish security requires organized power: the ability to defend our communities, mobilize allies, challenge discrimination, and make intimidation costly. Sympathy becomes useful when it produces action. Acceptance remains precarious when it depends on our willingness to apologize for Israel or keep our Jewish identity unobtrusive.
The people filling Jewish-owned restaurants when activists try to isolate them understand this. So do those building effective security organizations and demanding that public officials enforce equal protection. They are making Jewish solidarity a practical force.
Eric’s essay raises an uncomfortable question about the institutions we have built and the habits we have acquired: Have we become better at asking for reassurance than organizing our own defense?
That question deserves an answer before the next emergency.
— Bob Goldberg
I’ve been getting inquiries from multiple corners about how Jewish racketeers handled the rise of a rabid U.S. Nazi movement in the lead-up to the Second World War. What’s prompting this interest is raging antisemitism in the wake of the October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Friends and acquaintances are terrified. I have told them, quite seriously, that I believe the best-case scenario is that American Jewish life reverts to the early 20th century when Jews had to establish their own hospitals, schools, and other institutions, and when the “gentlemen’s agreement” to fake tolerance ruled the day.
Some of the most intense correspondence came in the wake of billionaire Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl advertisement featuring a cowering Jewish nebbish being bullied in school, only to be protected by a bigger, tougher, cooler biracial student. This is a very different response from how the shtarkers (tough guys) confronted antisemitism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. What did Jewish gangsters actually do about the German American Bund (domestic Nazis)?
In the 1930s, as Adolf Hitler’s power grew, Nazi acolytes got a toehold in America. Prominent religious, judicial, and political leaders, including Rabbi Stephen Wise and Judge Nathan Perlman, summoned Meyer Lansky, the most powerful Jewish mobster of the age, whose private records I discovered through family members in my research.
Wise and Perlman knew that American Jews were preoccupied with two things in addition to their safety: the desperation to be liked and accepted, and the need to feel good about themselves. They wanted the answer to the question “What kind of people are we?” to be “learned, kind, and gentle.” Gangsters weren’t quite as concerned about these things.
The goal of outreach to gangsters was to make life inhospitable for the German American Bund and their “Führer,” Fritz Kuhn, who whipped up crowds by tagging the president as the Jewish “Frank D. Rosenfeld.” Popular Americans such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and Catholic broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin showed sympathy for the Nazis.
The Bund was based in the Yorkville section of Manhattan — that’s right, Nazis in the American city with the largest Jewish population — and had filled Madison Square Garden in a massive rally in 1939. There was sporadic violence, but nothing like what was happening in Germany, which was what men like Wise and Perlman were looking to prevent. Enter Lansky & Company, who were tasked with disrupting Nazi gatherings with one caveat: No killing. Lansky agreed.
For these mobsters, pogroms were personal experiences and mortal threats. Lansky fled Poland in 1911, where, as a boy, he witnessed townspeople beating a rabbi to death and mutilating his body after a local girl went missing. There was other violence, which prompted the then-Suchowljansky family to come to America and shorten their name.
Irish and Italian mobs tormented Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s. They had expected a race of yeshiva students and pious homemakers. They found them, yes, but also some of the hardest criminals ever to set foot on American shores.
When antisemites said, “We’re going to kill you,” men like Dopey Benny Fein, Gyp the Blood Horowitz, Tick Tock Tannenbaum, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Newark’s Longy Zwillman, and Lansky’s closest friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel didn’t consult the Talmud to interpret its meaning.
Mickey Cohen of Los Angeles and Davie Berman of Minneapolis infiltrated Bund rallies. On April 20, 1938, Lansky’s men broke up a pro-Hitler jubilee in Manhattan. Lansky said, “The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. The speaker started ranting. There were only 15 of us, but we went into action … We wanted to show them that the Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”
If somebody said to Lansky the present mantra, “You can be critical of Israel without being an antisemite,” his response would have been, “You wait.”
Walter Winchell, journalist and President Franklin Roosevelt’s top propagandist, was Lansky’s neighbor in the Majestic House apartments on Central Park West and tipped him off to Bund rallies. Lansky sent crews after the Nazis, whereupon Winchell would report on the action: “Walter Winchell phoned to thank me for busting up that meeting, and I told him he had nothing to thank me for because I was doing what had to be done anyway.”
The U.S. Navy reached out to Lansky, too. Nazi U-Boats had been prowling east coast sinking ships. In 1942, eight Nazi saboteurs came ashore on Long Island and in Florida with plans to blow up aircraft factories, munitions and chemical plants, bridges near industrial centers, and Jewish-owned department stores. They were all captured, some with the help of spies that Lansky had furnished to the Navy.
While mobsters ran roughshod over Bundists, domestic sentiment turned after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s rampage through Eastern Europe. U.S. entry into the war silenced American Nazis.
American Jews, perhaps unconsciously, want to know that badass landsman were once out there to confront the an incoming pogrom. They are trying to understand what’s possible without suggesting that they are calling for gangland violence. I certainly am not.
Jews historically scorn our criminals as a “schande” (disgrace) — think David Berkowitz, Bernie Madoff, and Jeffrey Epstein — but the names Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel are recalled now with a reassuring grin. Lansky lamented that it was the ungrateful Jewish press that first tagged him as a gangster.
Over the years, I’ve spoken with hundreds who claim a personal connection to Lansky or someone in his orbit. Amazingly, many share the same false memory with me: “‘Uncle Meyer’ used to bounce me on his knee when I was a child.” Unless Lansky ran a daycare center we don’t know about, these stories aren’t true. He has become a personal meme, a Jewish St. Nicholas, protector of children, to people who may have had the most tenuous brush with him or have convinced themselves they did.
Nobody wants the job of protecting American Jews to fall to brutes, but if the government won’t, who stands ready to pounce on the disciples of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens?
In Philadelphia last weekend, antisemitic activists targeted Jewish-owned businesses. Imagine the reaction if black or gay businesses were specifically targeted. The courts would be bursting with civil rights actions (not to mention media coverage). We’ll see. Meanwhile, at a recent gathering of fellow authors, Israelis were openly called Nazis — and the Jews at the table competed over who could denounce Benjamin Netanyahu the loudest.
The “Kosher Nostra” has been gone for generations, their offspring absorbed into prestigious universities, professions, and suburban lawns with time-controlled sprinklers. Mortal danger is abstract and academic to present American Jews, whereas it was very real and imminent to Lansky and his peers.
The most visible threats today are a new generation of American politicians and the Israel-hating cadre of campus activists, amply funded by the Qataris and the Caliphate in Iran. The Islamists are many things, but they’re not morons. The power of “progressives” lies in having laundered their intentions with the fabric softener of “opposition to Israeli policy.” Many Jews wrongly traffic in the canard that “education” will solve the problem when, in fact, education is the problem.
Antisemitism will get worse because it’s the only culturally sanctioned hatred, and folks want to hate. Some #MeToo feminists who once chanted “Believe All Women” don’t even believe Israeli women were raped to death on October 7th despite ample proof.
Meanwhile, friends of multiple faiths have urged me to write a book “exposing AIPAC” because the group spends millions on lobbying and elections. When I sent them a report from a watchdog group about Islamists spending up to a trillion dollars in recent years to influence American public opinion, I got no response. AIPAC’s middling millions are noxious. The Islamists’ billions are simply “combating Islamophobia.”
Many anxious friends have purchased firearms for their homes, and several now legally carry them. However, what will they do if things get worse? Emigrate to Israel? Perhaps, but it didn’t work for Lansky; Israel expelled him in 1972 because of his gangland pedigree, making its first exception to the Law of Return allowing Jews to settle there.
Will there be legal private security forces? If so, where would they be stationed? Scarsdale and Brentwood? What about the working class and poor Jews? In the absence of a definitive answer, American Jews are managing their anxiety by asking about what a generation for whom pogroms were very real did when the unimaginable — Nazis in America — happened.
Machiavelli said that it is better to be feared than loved. 2000 years of history prove beyond any doubt that the world will never love Jews, and the events of the past three years have driven home the point. Maybe it’s time to try the alternative.
As Dara Horn says, they love us when we're staring soulfully from behind babed wire; as an armed nation capable of defending herself, not so much. It's possible for any older Jewish person in America now to look back on sixty or seventy years of feeling accepted and to realize, incident by incident and person by person, that the feeling was a mirage.