Where are all the Jewish gangsters?
I am talking about confident, courageous, burly groups of Jews who can put these "pro-Palestinian" mobsters in their place.
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I keep seeing and hearing about these “pro-Palestinian” mobsters roaming Western streets and campuses, intimidating and bullying people, making all types of scenes and demonstrations — targeting Jewish-linked people and places more often than not.
And I keep wondering:
Where are all the Jewish gangsters?
I am talking about confident, courageous, burly groups of Jews who can put these mobsters in their place.
Max Nordau, a Zionist leader and physician who was born in 1849 in Hungary, perceived the characteristics of 19th-century European Jews to be problematic in dealing with antisemitism (which at the time was a million times worse than its present-day forms).
According to Nordau, 19th-century European Jews were often the rabbinic or Jewish Enlightenment types — the Jews of letters, intellectuals — who were said to be busy all their life engaging with esoteric subjects. Nordau believed their bodies grew weak, which is why he saw the promotion of athletic Jews (what he called “Muscular Judaism”) to be a profound prescription against antisemitism.
“Muscular Judaism” refers to the cultivation of mental and physical properties, such as strength, agility, and discipline, which Nordau believed were all necessary for the Jewish People’s national revival.
Advocating for a transformation to “deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed” Jews that would vanquish negative perceptions of them, Nordau argued that mental and physical strength would be an imposing response to “Jewish distress” in antisemitism-infested Europe.
Over time, Jews who went on to adopt “Muscular Judaism” experienced an increase in self-confidence, a critical ingredient in the Jewish fight against antisemitism. In 1909, for instance, two Austrian Zionists and prominent Jewish businessmen founded the first Jewish sports club and named it Hakoach (הכח), meaning “the strength” or “the power” in Hebrew.
At the time, Jews in Vienna numbered 180,000 — about 10-percent of the city’s population — and many of them were intoxicated with the aforementioned doctrine of “Muscular Judaism.” David Herbst, the sports club’s president from 1928 to 1938, echoed this sentiment, saying:
“In the days of our forefathers, we Jews have completely forgotten the old and true words in the education of our children: Mens sana in corpore sano! We only thought that the new generation should be educated. We neglected what today the whole world recognizes as the only proper educational principle: to make our bodies strong.”
During its first year, the Jewish sports club’s members competed in fencing, field hockey, track and field, wrestling, swimming, and football — eventually expanding its roster to other athletics and attracting Jewish athletes from across Europe.
Their football team was one of the first to market itself globally through frequent travel, attracting thousands of Jewish fans in London and New York, as well as in South America, Africa, and other cities throughout the United States. They also garnered the attention of prominent Jewish figures, such as the famous author Franz Kafka.
After touring Germany in the early 1920s, a prominent newspaper commented that the club “had helped to do away with the fairy tale about the physical inferiority of Jews.” However, the football team regularly faced antisemitism during its travels, so they created an unconventional form of security: The sports club’s wrestlers accompanied them, acting as their personal bodyguards.
Over in New York, judge Nathan D. Perlman was also a big believer in physicality, so in 1938 he called up notorious Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky to ask him for a favor: to direct Jewish gangsters to violently break up meetings of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization for Americans of German origin.
“I want you to do anything but kill them,” Perlman told Lansky, prompting the organized crime boss to tell his associates that they could “marinate” but not “ice” those who showed up at Bund meetings, rallies, and marches, where speakers spewed Jew-hatred.1
Lansky gave his comrades the license to use more than their fists, though. Baseball bats, clubs, and other street fighting paraphernalia were fair game. Guns were out of bounds, as were the ice picks, the preferred weapon of killer Abraham “Kid Twist” Reles.
These tales are documented in “Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America,” authored by the phenomenal writer, Michael Benson.
In the book, Benson tells the fascinating story of how Perlman secretly directed an “army” led by Jewish gangsters across the United States in a successful campaign to squelch two key American Nazi organizations, the Bund and the Silver Legion (better known as the Silver Shirts) — while giving these organizations the extrajudicial punitive treatment.
Approximately 100 antisemitic groups operated throughout the U.S. during the Great Depression. During an era before hate laws were in effect, these Jew-hating organizations were thoroughly protected by the freedom of speech granted by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. As a result, they operated openly with impunity. Does this sound familiar? To me it sure does.
Back then, the German American Bund promoted antisemitism alongside its pro-Nazi and pro-isolationist agenda, and was closely aligned with antisemitic demagogue and radio personality Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front.
“They said that the Jews were all Communists and they had all the money, which came as quite a shock to a lot of American Jews,” said Benson.2
While the Bund was really looking to Germany and propagandizing for the Nazi regime, it claimed to be a pro-American organization.
American Jews and community leaders were concerned and frightened. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration tried to act against pro-Nazi groups whenever and wherever possible, but there was nothing they could legally do to shut them down.
Fed up with the situation, Nathan Perlman took matters into his own hands. As a former congressman and justice of the Court of Special Sessions of the City of New York, his role in intimidating law-abiding Americans would have to be kept on the down-low. So he requested the aid of men who wanted antisemites hurt, and had no compunction about acting outside of the law.
“The book takes place in that twilight zone between what is legal and what is just,” said Benson. “The villains within the book are all within the law, and the heroes are all outside the law.”
According to the author, an attendee of a Bund meeting “slid down the wall like vanilla ice cream rolling down a cone” after being pummeled by a Jewish thug. In another case, Jewish gangsters ambushed Bund members as they left an event, leading to “intense action … looking like the flesh-eating frenzy of piranhas in otherwise still waters.”
After testing a “pilot” in New York, Perlman reached out to Al Capone’s associate Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik in Chicago and asked him to do in the Windy City what Lansky was doing in the Big Apple. Key to the Chicago operation were Jewish boxers, including champion Barney Ross, as well as blond, blue-eyed Jewish journalist Herb Brin who went to Bund meetings undercover and collected valuable intelligence.
In New Jersey, Perlman relied on mob boss and bootlegger extraordinaire Abner “Longie” Zwillman. In turn, Zwillman looked to his pal, ex-boxer and gym owner Nat Arno, for help in recruiting Jewish tough guys. The ever-generous Zwillman covered all costs incurred by these “Minutemen” — named after the New Englanders who took up arms against the British.
In Middle America, the problem was not the Bund so much as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion. Many of the card-carrying 15,000 Silver Shirts and their supporters lived in Minnesota. Davie “The Jew” Berman, who ran the gambling scene in Minneapolis, was Perlman’s man. Berman even collaborated with rival Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld on this mission.
“Berman told Perlman it would be his honor,” wrote Benson, “to slap those Silver Shirt assholes around.”
By 1939, Jewish gangsters had pounded enough Nazis to ensure that a significant number of them quit attending meetings, or at least went underground. The gangsters’ actions had also emboldened ordinary Jews to protest and take action.
The gangsters were able to get away with cracking skulls and causing all kinds of physical harm because the police (who were in the their pockets) turned the other way. With no fatalities involved, the bloody fights never made newspaper front pages, and the perpetrators were never named.
Judge Perlman’s role in all of it was not revealed at the time. Perlman, who died in 1952, went on to serve as a senior official at the American Jewish Congress and to assist U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, President Truman’s appointee to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor of Nazi war criminals.
“It wasn’t the numbers [of American Nazis] that really upset Judge Perlman as much as it was the brazen way they behaved,” said Benson. “It never occurred to them that they would encounter resistance. They assumed Jews were soft and would be afraid to fight back.”
It is time we reassert ourselves again.
Benson, Michael. “Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in WW2 Era America.” Citadel. 2022.
“Bam! Kapow! When 1930s Jewish mobsters beat up Nazis in the streets of America.” The Times of Israel.
No joke, but instead of subsidizing pro Hamas academics with no-strings university donations, Jewish philanthropy should be going to security for Hillel and free Krav Maga training for Jewish students. Pro Hamas leftists only get more vicious when they get away with physical threats and assaults on Jewish students. They need to be confronted directly and physically. The main reason diaspora Jews are targets is because they fold in the face of bullying. The majority reason Israeli Jews stomp on Palestinian terrorists is because they choose not to accept physical threats.
We subsidize security at local Hillels and Chabads. Happy to speak offline with anyone interested in making Jews more secure. As Perlman said, often these scumbags are on the right side of the law while the people in the right are not always....