Search for Meaning with Steven J. Ross

What really happened to hatred in America after World War II?

Most of us were taught that defeating Hitler marked a turning point — that America emerged from the war more tolerant, more unified, more committed to its democratic ideals. Historian Steven J. Ross is here to tell us that story is a myth. And he has the documents to prove it.

In this episode, Rabbi Yoshi sits down with one of America's most compelling Jewish historians to discuss Ross's new book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy — a USA Today bestseller that uncovers a hidden chapter of postwar American history. When the war ended, antisemitism and racism didn't recede. They surged. Organized hate groups more than doubled between 1940 and 1946, and a network of domestic terrorists set about — in their own words — finishing the job Hitler had begun.

But that's only half the story. The other half is about the people who fought back: the citizen-spies recruited by the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Nazi League, who infiltrated these groups at great personal risk and brought their dangerous work to light. Their names have been largely forgotten. Ross gives them back to us.

Rabbi Yoshi and Steve talk about the history, what it illuminates about this moment in American Jewish life, and — in true Search for Meaning fashion — where a man who has spent his career in some of the darkest chapters of human experience still finds hope and meaning.

About Steven J. Ross

Steven J. Ross is Dean's Professor of History at the University of Southern California and the Myron and Marian Casden Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. The first person in his family to go to college, he holds degrees from Columbia, Oxford, and Princeton.

His books include Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Los Angeles Times bestseller; Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, winner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award; and Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

His latest book is The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy (Bloomsbury, 2026).

More at his USC Dornsife faculty page: https://dornsife.usc.edu/profile/steve-ross/

Learn about the book at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/secret-war-against-hate-9781635578003/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And the minute you hate other Americans, you're not really an American. You can dislike people who don't think like you. You can call for policies, but you can't call for hate, for intimidation, or death because somebody just doesn't agree with you.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Welcome to Search for Meaning. I'm Yoshi Zwivak. Thank you so much for joining me. History has a funny way of reassuring us at times. We like to believe that once we've defeated evil, we've learned its lessons forever. But history isn't nearly so tidy, and sometimes the stories that we think we know are really only half the story. And that brings us to my guest today, Professor Steve Ross. He's a distinguished professor of history at USC and one of our country's leading historians of the American Jewish experience. And his remarkable new book, which I won't say enjoyed reading because it was so difficult at times, but boy did I learn a lot, and boy was it engaging, is called The Secret War Against Hate, American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy. And I think it's a really important read, and I encourage you to get yourself a copy. He talks about a largely forgotten chapter of American history, one in which ordinary people quietly risked everything to confront antisemitism and white supremacy here at home. So I think you're really going to enjoy the conversation. Steve, thank you so much for making time for me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me today, Rabbi. Well, first I wanted to just talk a little bit about your own background and your own past. As I read the book, I got to hear a little bit, especially in the beginning, the introduction, you talked a little bit about your own family and that experience, what it was like to be the child of Holocaust survivors and your own journey. But I'd love to hear more about your own Jewish journey. Tell us a little bit about growing up as a Jewish boy and what that was like.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Well, I grew up in Queens. I was born in Jamaica, and we lived there until I was five. We moved to Whitestone, where my father had a bakery, lived there two years, and then they did what many immigrants did. They scraped together their money and they bought a very small 1,200 square foot home in an area called Beechhurst. But as far as I and my sister were concerned, it was luxurious because we each had our own bedroom for the first time. And uh, you know, I grew up, you know, for me, I grew up in a household that struck me, this is the way I grew up. What did I know different? All my parents' friends save one were survivors. Uh most of the kids I played with were the children of survivors. And so it was pretty much a working class area that I grew up in with the traditional New York ethnics on my block, Jews, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Armenians, Israelis. That was just my block, let alone the neighborhood.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

When did you first start to learn about your parents' story? I'm always interested with that next generation, and it's different in my experience from everyone I've spoken to about when their parents first shared this with them, but when did you start to learn the story of your own parents and their experience in the Holocaust?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Uh never. All I learned were anecdotes. They never sat down and uh they did it for the Showa Foundation. They did it many years probably a decade ago, my children interviewed my mother for several hours. But my father never spoke about it, and I mean never in his whole life, not a single word. And my mother, from the time, I certainly remember from the time I was about seven, seven or eight when we moved to Beechhurst, my mother would tell me just about every single morning that she had the nightmare again. And the nightmare took one of uh three forms. It was always the Gestapo breaking into the house, and they either seized her. Uh, variation two was they seized my sister and I. And variation three, they seized my sister, my mother, and I. Where my father was, I had no idea. But uh she was um always talking about her nightmares. But it was again, it was worse for a child growing up because you never had the whole story. And as a child, you figure if you never have the whole story, the story must be so awful they can't tell it. And so um it wouldn't be until many years later my mother would tell me drips and drabs. But really, the first time I ever got the complete story was uh when my mother died, is when I watched their their, they made this in around late 80s, and I just couldn't bring myself to watching them. I watched my mother's, and then I watched my father's. And my mother's pretty much followed the little pieces that she had told over the years, but now for the first time it came out as a story with a beginning, a middle, and the end. My father's tape had my mouth drop open because I realized my mother had made up a whole story about my father, telling me the beginning and the very end, and um basically she wouldn't call it lying. She would say, Why should I tell you the whole truth when it's gonna be upsetting? So as far as she was concerned, he went from the Warsaw Ghetto to Dachau, where he learned to become a baker, and that was it. The truth was he uh went from uh uh the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. He was on a force march to the Eastern Front, and then when the Russians came, he was part of the people who are on the infamous death march to Dachau. 8,000 Jewish laborers started and only 3,000 wound up at Dachau. So my family's history was shrouded in mystery.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

When I read in the book about the Treblinka piece, I wanted you to share a little bit more about it. So thank you for doing that, because you very rarely hear stories of people surviving Treblinka. And uh and I I understand that sometimes it was just those who were there at the end of the war, basically, when they decided to evacuate the camp and send send the survivors to their death one way or the other. So it was interesting, and thank you for sharing that with me. But I'm thinking about this part of the story that I didn't know. Um, and uh it connects to a question I wanted to ask you because your books have focused, some of them that I'm familiar with at least, are focusing on forgotten stories, things that, wow, I didn't know that was part of the American story, like in the secret war against hate. And I'm grew up in this country and I've spent my life, you know, learning about Jewish history, but there were components that I was like, I didn't know that. I didn't realize that. We're gonna get into some of those things. Um, your your book that talked about um Hollywood and uh some of those stories. I I didn't know those stories. And I'm now discovering that there was a very important personal story that you didn't know the details of. Do you think those are all connected? I'm not trying to be uh, you know, amateur psychologist here with you, professor, but as you reflect on telling those stories that are kind of the hidden stories, how much of that do you think connects to your own hidden story?

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Well, I think let's start with the professional, which is easier, then we'll go to the personal. Uh I'm part of a generation uh having gone to college. I graduated from Columbia in 71. I was at Oxford for two years, and then I went to Princeton in 73. And I was part of a generation of the doing what's called the new social history. That is, we did what we call history from the bottom up, that the history of ordinary Americans had not been written, that when I was in high school, you know, American history was political history. We studied presidents, we started generals, famous men. But what about ordinary people who built quite literally built this country? We had very little. And so I started writing about 19th century working class history. And basically everything I've written has been unknown history, trying to bring ordinary people to light and bring the history of the unknown people who, as I say, quite literally built this country to light. So it started with 19th century working class history. I then moved into uh silent film, talking about how it helped. It was a medium that started out appealing to immigrants and working class people, and eventually it became middle class and then cross-class. And I tell that story of how early cinema was suffused with films about working class life and class conflict, stuff we never knew about. Um, and then the interesting was it became personal and it started with Hitler in Los Angeles to talk about Nazis and fascists in America. And I'd always wondered as a kid, why didn't Americans do more to stop this? Why wasn't there more protest? And so in the course of writing Hitler in Los Angeles and the secret war against hate, I was also understanding my own background, my family's background, and the background of Jewish life. And what I would say the most important thing I discovered is I had been asking the wrong question as a kid. You know, I thought, why didn't Jews do more? And uh the answer is they did. That the real question is, why didn't American authorities do more to protect Americans? And they didn't. And that's what my books are. In many ways, the energy behind them is to understand how, in the face of American authorities, local sheriffs, police, FBI, they didn't give a damn about right wing in America. They only cared about communists. So it was up to Americans themselves to protect each other from harm. And that's the story I tell in both books. They're both spy stories where the spy operation is run by Jews, but the spies are almost all Christian. And what's really um heartening about that story is even though every one of those spies knew the people they were working for were Jewish organizations or Jews, they never felt they were working for Jews. They were working for America because they felt in America it's not okay for one group to call for death to another. You don't have to love your neighbor, but you can't call for death and harm to your neighbor. And they stood up for Jews and blacks, even though they weren't Jewish or black, because that's what you do in this country.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

It is beautiful and it is heartening, and it's so important to remember, especially right now, when so many Jews feel all alone and feel like, well, where are our allies? But remembering that there are allies, they really are, and right now there are allies, and there have been in the past as well. And so I want to go back now to the end of World War II, part of the story that you tell in the secret war against hate. Many people felt like Nazism has been vanquished, fascism has been vanquished, and so many Jewish Americans who had served in the Army, so many black Americans who had served in the Army, albeit usually in segregated units, come back to the United States to discover that there's still plenty of hatred, plenty of anti-Semitism, plenty of racism, and plenty of fascism still, you know, just under the surface in America. And so take us back to that moment. Why is it so often we've gotten that wrong? You know, we tell a different story. We think, okay, Hitler's been vanquished, and now the golden age of American Jewelry is happening, and let's just celebrate that. But the reality is that wasn't the case. So take us back a little bit and help us understand how it really was unfolding.

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Well, the story isn't you can't begin at the end of World War II. You have to go to the 1920s when fascism started raising its head in America. Uh eugenics became very popular. In fact, Hitler would say later on that he got his whole idea about inferior peoples from the American eugenicists, that we inspired him in many ways. But by the 1920s, you began getting uh the rise of right wing groups, particularly right wing and business, and then fascist groups. Uh and if we look at the right wing in business, that was the era when in Los Angeles, for example, Jews had founded a number of clubs in the city, uh, like the Jonathan Club. They were part of that, and then they were kicked out in the 20s as anti-Semitism began to spread. And you had the rise of pro-German groups, first the Friends of New Germany, then the German-American Bund, and you had their uh American equivalents, the day after Hitler. Hitler became Reich Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the day after he assumed office in America, uh, a former screenwriter started the Silvershirts, Mr. William Dudley Pelley, the Silvershirts, which were the same as the Nazis, only it was an American leadership. And what they shared in common was a hatred of Jews and communists. And as far as they were concerned, and this would go through in many cases to today, every Jew was a communist and every communist was a Jew. And during the 30s, they joined up with the America First movement trying to keep America neutral. But unlike some American firsters, like John F. Kennedy and young John F. Kennedy, young Gerald Ford, who joined America First, which was an ant was an isolationist group, anti-involvement in European affairs. This is post-World War I. This is post-World War II. This is 1930s, yes. And they just wanted America out of war, period. Because they believe war didn't solve anything. But there was the right wing element, which was the majority in America first, which wanted to keep us out of the war until Hitler could conquest Europe, conquer Europe, and then Hitler would turn his eyes to America, and that's what they wanted. And these groups swore that if we got into World War II, it was because Jews got us into war. And if they got us into war, we would get them. We being the fascists in America would get them after the war. So part of one of the things I write about in The Secret War Against Hate is what we saw in January 2021 was not something new, not something unexpected, nor was it Donald Trump's instigation. This has been going on since the 1930s and 40s, and particularly after World War II. The reason we don't know the story is because many Americans believed the Tom Brokow book, The Greatest Generation in the Good War. That these men went off to fight, they met people of different backgrounds that they never would have met before. And when they came back, they came back with a new appreciation of diversity, appreciation of what we call the salad bowl, that everyone could contribute to what was America. And while I may not want you to marry my sister, you deserve to live a life free of harm and uh death threats. And that just wasn't the case. That um what I discovered was there's a story Tom Brokaut didn't tell. In other words, he was right about half Americans. He was right about the people he who did in fact go to fight Hitler and Mussolini. But what I discovered is there was a huge portion of Americans who didn't go to fight Hitler and Mussolini, didn't go to fight for democracy against fascism and Nazism. They went to war simply because Japan bombed us. And these are people who I called the betrayed generation. And these are people who came from the Confederate States in the Southwest, all the way over through California, through Southern California. And they argued that uh, for example, many of them were members of the Ku Klux Klan. And as soon as Pearl Harbor happened, the Ku Klux Klan announced it would have no cross burnings until the war was over because they wanted all Americans to pull together. And they went off, and here's the absolutely crucial thing to remember if you're listening to this or reading the book later. These people went off as patriots. And the people who stormed the Capitol in 2021 are their ancestors, literally, in some cases quite literally, and others metaphorically. If you think they're the bad guys, then you don't understand their world because, from their point of view, we are liberals in America, are the bad guys. What they argued is we went to war as patriots. And when before we left, Jews and blacks knew their place. Everything was harmonious, things worked well. But when we left, what they called the Jew Deal Congress and President Rosenfeld had passed all these laws that made it easier for blacks and Jews to compete for jobs and housing. And we've been betrayed. And after the war, these Jews and blacks didn't know their place anymore. Particularly blacks came back, black soldiers, and wanted to live in white areas and wanted nice housing. They didn't want to live in slums anymore. How dare they? And so race wars started yet again. And anti-Semitism, which many people thought would decline, in fact, rose after the war, which is something the leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League all realized and all wrote about right before the BE Day, that they said anti-Semitism was going to get worse, not better. And these people have continued arguing that they've been betrayed by their nation, by liberals and Jews and blacks, and that one day they would make America great again and they would make America white again.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Wow. Well, you mentioned some of the heroes of the book, some of the heroes of the story, the organizations, and I'd love you to tell us a little bit more about each of them, if you if you can, and maybe a little bit about some of the leaders who you mentioned in the book and write about, because I found their stories really inspiring. And especially in this moment where of the groups that you mentioned, the one that has been most controversial in recent years is the Anti-Defamation League. And my whole life, um, I'd had family members who were contributors and volunteers, and I, you know, had been involved with the ADL and I have throughout my professional life. And then to see over the last few years, some of the rhetoric around the ADL, I just think it's so important for people to remember the role that the ADL played going back to the early part of the 20th century and that it continues to play in trying to fight hate. And I've had opportunities to sit with ADL leaders and learn about the number of different hate groups that they are tracking and the ways that they do that. It's methodical, but it's not new. It's been going on for decades and decades and decades. So tell us a little bit about some of the heroes of the book and really the heroes of our history.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Right. Well, the three groups I write about in this book are the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and a group that no longer exists called the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League. Um and what we have to understand is the ADL has been a different ADL after October 7th. So we don't want to uh what has gone on there is very different and it's come under uh attack by both Jews, non-Jews. So I don't want to deal with contemporary ADL. But up until then, all three groups, um starting in the nineteen thirties, realized that yes, I d in an ideal world when you had threats against Jews or blacks or any American, you would go to the police, you would go to the sheriff, you go to the FBI. And they did in the nineteen thirties. And the police, the sheriff, and the FBI blew them off, whether it was Los Angeles, New York, Boston. And if you go back to something that some of your listeners may remember from freshman year of college, if you ever took a big, you know, world history course, we talk about contract theory and the formation of states. And the two people are most talk about are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. And what they both agreed is that people come together to form civilization in order to protect themselves. Hobbes, it's a defense against the big, the big tough people who would kill you, that they would use force unless you gather together. For Locke, it's more optimistic. People get together because they realize their lives will be better. But both agreed that when a government no longer protects the lives of its citizens, which is its first obligation, that government is no longer a legitimate government. And in the case of Jews in America, they realized in the 1930s, particularly in New York and LA, the two cities I know the best, that in Los Angeles, the police commissioner, or rather the police chief, James Tugun Davis, didn't give a damn. All he cared about was catching communists. The sheriff was the same Eugene Biscalouz in the 30s and 40s. And the FBI, which was run by the very anti-Semitic J. Edgar Hoover, didn't give a damn about the Nazis. When his local FBI in Los Angeles asked him in the uh, like around 1940, we want to put Hermann Schwinn, the leader of the Nazis in LA and the number two Nazi in America, the future American Fuhrer, we want to put him under surveillance. Hoover wrote back, no, uh, Mr. Schvin has broken no law, and therefore you can't put him under surveillance. But Jedgar Hoover had ordered that same FBI bureau to put Charlie Chaplin under surveillance, to put Upton Sinclair, the author, under surveillance, even though they broke no laws. And so Jews and blacks both realized that no government authority was going to protect them. So starting in the 1933, Leon Lewis in Los Angeles started a spy operation that went from 1933 to the end of World War II. And in New York, uh, as the war was closing down, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and what I'll simply call the Anti-Nazi League all started spying as well because they realized authorities on the East Coast and in the South weren't doing anything. And the ADL has continued those operations. It's never stopped them. The American Jewish Committee stopped its spying around 1968, arguing that there was no more anti-Semitism in America, that the golden age of jewelry was here. We didn't need any more undercover operations, so we're going to put all our money not into monitoring fascists and far-right wing groups, but into helping civil rights. And the anti-Nazi League spying, the most ambitious of all of them, continued until the head of the organization died in 1976. And they were recruiting Christians who went undercover and joined these far-right groups. And just so your listener know your listeners know, when I talk about far-right groups, I talk about groups, the first group I write about are the Columbians, which are a Nazi group formed in Atlanta in 1946, who are marching on the main streets of Atlanta in Nazi uniforms, goose stepping down the main streets, like Peach Street. And when they go and approach the uh Ku Klux Klan to unify with them, to have an alliance, the Klan says, No, we will not ally with you. You are too extreme in your racial views. Or uh groups like the American uh Nazi Party, led by George Lincoln Rockwell, denounced the John Birch Society, which many of us growing up thought was as far right as you could go. He called them a bunch of liberals. So these people are way off the reservation. And when I say off the reservation, I mean they are from 1946 until the 1970s. They are calling for death to Jews, the extermination of all Jews in America, and the deportation of all blacks to Africa. This is going on during many of our lifetimes.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Trying to get a sense of scale. When we think about some of these groups, some of the most extreme groups that you're talking about, and it is uh it it it would be funny if it weren't so deadly serious, but the idea that, well, the KKK, you know, they're not the extremists in this story, and they're not. But when we look at some of like the American Nazi Party, do we have a sense of how big some of these groups were? How many total people were involved at any given time? How significant are the numbers? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

You can't look just at numbers. That's the thing I would tell you. In the same way, you can't look at um, you know, one of the questions people would throw at me uh when I wrote Hitler in Los Angeles and when I went out on a book tour, well, how many of this was real and how much was it just bluster, just big talk? And the answer is can you ever take a chance when your life's at stake? And more to the point, one of the key points I make in this book is you have to understand that um an assault is not simply a physical assault. An assault is not being beaten, is not being knifed, is not being shot. The fact that Jew Jewish children and Jewish adults t today are afraid to walk around with the Star of David hanging openly. The fact that black parents to this day have to have what they call the talk with their young teenage kids when they get ready to drive, telling them if you get pulled over by a policeman, hands on the wheel, if you get out of the car, hands up in the air, never talk back, this is an assault against the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When you have to worry that you may be bombed in your temple, that you may be bombed in your church, that your rabbi's home may be bombed, that your minister's home may be bombed, that some crazy person is going to come into your temple with guns and shoot you. They don't have to do that. Simply living with that kind of threat over you is an assault on a daily basis. And that has been going on, I would argue, from the end of World War II to today. It's just that at some times it's more obvious than at other times. And as so it's not simply the numbers, uh, because James Sheldon, who ran the uh uh Anti-Nazi League, who had taken it over from Samuel Untemeyer, a Jewish lawyer who founded it in 1933, died in 1940, and they turned it over to a Methodist who felt that he could be more in a way more radical than the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League, because they couldn't accuse him of being a Jewish spy master, because he was a Methodist. So he took that as, okay, that's going to give me more freedom. But what he argued is don't look at the numbers, look at the influence. And he estimated in uh 1968 that there were 10 million Americans, even though the four major groups I write about, um, and the hate group leaders, what I call the Godfathers of white supremacy, none of them have more than a few thousand members. The National States Rights Party has tens of thousands of members, but those aren't the kind of numbers that are going to scare you. But many people don't want to join, but are very sympathetic. And James Sheldon estimated, because he was going through all the hate group literature, he was monitoring the reports from his spies, he had the most aggressive spy operation going, he had spies in place in many of the organizations as leaders. He estimated in 1968 that there were 10 million Americans who either belonged to these hate groups, subscribed to their publications, or simply read their publications. That's 10 million Americans. That's a lot of people. And that's not 10 million Americans who are looking at conservative groups. That's 10 million people who, again, are looking at groups that the John Birch Society and the Klan don't want to have anything to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

It's really helpful the way you framed it, both in terms of how you can have that outsize influence, but also the actual number in the end is a very large number, especially when you think about the total population of the United States in 1968, which I won't ask you to say, but you probably know it. What what was it? Do you know? I'm going to guess 200 million. Okay. That's what I'm just going to guess. Well, it's a significant number of people. So I appreciate that. I'm thinking about some surprises you must have experienced along the way, even as a seasoned historian, even given your own story of your mom and dad and their experience and and and their friends, that friendship group who were mostly survivors, you might think, well, there's nothing that someone like Professor Ross is going to come across that's going to make him scratch his head and say, What? But I'm sure there were some moments. So I'd love to hear a couple of those surprises, even just one, that you as a historian, when you came across it, said, Oh my goodness, this will be powerful to share with my reader. And I didn't know.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Well, I grew up in New York City. Grew up well, if you grew up in the boroughs, if you grew up if you say you grew up in New York City, it means you grew up in Manhattan. No, Queens counts. Yeah, sort of. So I'm reading one of the groups that I write about is called the National Renaissance Party. And they're led by a man who starts it as a very young man in his young twenties, James Maidal, who is a rabid anti-Semite. His anti-Semitism is only exceeded by his mother, who apparently it was a rather strange relationship because they slept in the same bed for his whole life. They shared a bedroom and shared a bed.

SPEAKER_01 33:12

Nothing weird about that, Professor Russell.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

She was a good but she wasn't a Jewish mother. You could have understood if she was a Jewish. Anyway, he is based in New York City, and starting in 1953, uh not in the periods it pulls back, but from 1963 through the 1953 through the end of the 60s, uh every Friday, almost every Friday afternoon on First Avenue and somewhere 81st, 82nd Street, he has permission to set up a platform to dress in his Nazi uniform, to have his uh stormtroopers, he calls his um security echelon, the SE, as opposed to the SA or SS, who wear uniforms fashioned after the SS. They are out in the Upper East Side, and he is giving his Nazi speeches, calling for death to Jews, saying Hitler has not gone far enough. We need to be more modern, we need to execute every Jew in America, and we need to send every black man, woman, and child to Africa. And I'm thinking, there are a lot of survivors I know. What if they happen to be walking up the East 80s one Friday afternoon and they see James Maidal and his Nazis? What would they even think? And I'm thinking, what, Steve, what if you had walked up there one afternoon? It would have that would I have to say, of all the things I read, to me that was the most bizarre because it's the most personal. It is something I could imagine having done, and I wouldn't have known what to do. I would have been, as the Brits would say, gobsmacked. I I just wouldn't believe my eyes. A Nazi in a Nazi uniform in the city that has more survivors than anywhere outside of Israel, really? And the authorities couldn't do anything because it was free speech, and as long as he got a permit, he was allowed to do it. Although later on, by the 60s, the neighborhood, the Yorkville neighborhood, which was in that area, which had during World War II had been a center of Nazi support, even the neighbors there started getting tired of him. And when he would come out, they would start blaring their radios, they would throw stuff from windows at him, uh, and he eventually just brought his own loudspeaker system so he could talk over them. But that I would say had to be one of the more bizarre things. And the other thing is the the person who went on the hate, the far the godfather of white supremacy who lasts the longest was a man named Jesse B. Stoner. And he was preaching hate from uh the early 40s when he became the youngest uh clan organizer in Klan history. He was the uh clan organizer for Tennessee, and he lasted until the early 21st century. Um he was the most rabid of all of them, the most anti-Semitic, the most racist. Um and he would travel the South on the back of a truck, flatbed truck, and he would stop at different places to teach people how to make bombs. This is the 50s, how to make bombs so that you could put them in the homes of uh black ministers who were too loud, the homes of Jewish rabbis who were too outspoken, uh, and in black churches that were too anti, you know, too outspoken, calling for civil rights, things like this. Imagine on the flatbed saying, here's how you make a bomb, giving them very simple for very simple bombs. These were going on. And when people say to me today, have things ever been bad this bad? And my answer is, well, in terms of the assault against democracy, no. But in terms of the assault against Americans, yeah, it was a lot worse in the 50s, when between the turning point in all this is Brown versus Board of Education, which they referred to as the first shot of the Second Civil War. I argue the Second Civil War began in October 1945 when the Klan resumed its cross burnings and called for a war against those who opposed the true American dream. Uh but in 1954, Brown versus Bordovett, which ended segregation, and a year later, 90% of the Southerners polled said they would rather have chaos and anarchy than to obey that law. Um there were between 54 and 59, 60, I think there were roughly 80 bombings of churches, synagogues, uh Jewish community centers, rabbis homes, and more to the point black ministers' homes. These were bombs going off. People moving into Atlanta, blacks trying to move into the white working class areas of Atlanta would be met by a truck in 1946. Uh, I mean, as the truck was coming in, they would be met by 100, 200 people who were part of the Colombians, said you can't can't can't come here. This is white area. And if they blew them off and said, We're we're unpacking, the next day the porch was blown up. And a note sent that next bomb will be inside the house, not outside.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Chilling and important to remember that that's part of the American story, as much as we might want to excise it, and when we fantasize about this golden age that m might have been golder, you know, more golden than the age we're in right now, but we think of it as some type of, you know, nirvana where everything was just perfect for the Jews. And obviously that wasn't ever the case. I want to just focus in on the term anti-Semitism, which you've used several times today. I'd love to hear your definition of what you think it uh, what does it represent? And perhaps a little bit about what do you think underlies it and causes it. Some people describe it as sort of a shapeshifter, you know, and it continues to evolve and uh transfigure itself in powerful ways at sort of every moment. But in this moment, when for many of us we've never experienced this kind of anti-Semitism in our own lifetimes, notwithstanding the fact that we might certainly understand that even in America, it was at one point, you know, just as bad or far worse. But if you haven't experienced it yourself, it's a very different kind of thing. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your definition and also some of the root causes underneath it.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah. Well, first thing I would say is it's a terrible term. Jesse uh B. Stoner, um, who, you know, I came to know all these men very well, these four. And people would say to me, How could you have written one book and then turn around and write another about the most awful human beings ever? And my answer is a smile, and this is my revenge. This is my revenge and my people's revenge against these awful human beings, and they are not known, and now they are known, and their names are known, and I hope their families are embarrassed, really embarrassed by their families' history. Stoner said one thing I thought very interesting. He started uh his first political party was called the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, and then he called it the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, and after both of them never got valence, he said, I need a more neutral name. And he was one of the founders of the National States' rights party. But when he was asked, why didn't you call your parties the anti-Semitic Party? He said, No one in the South knows what anti-Semitism is, but they know what anti-Jewism is. And that is, and I think very interesting that anti-Semitism is again a very flexible term, and it means different things to different people. And my definition of anti-Semitism is very simple that um uh people who act in prejudicial ways against other human beings simply because they are Jewish. Now we are living in an era where anti-Semitism has gone beyond that. And what I would say uh until 1948, you never had to add an Israel. Now anti-Semitism can mean you're Jewish and you're part of Israel. Even if you're Jewish and America and you have nothing to do with Israel, so much of what I see the anti-Semitism today uh and stuff I've seen even on my campus, although USC is in pretty good shape, we have not had the kind of anti-Semitism that I've seen elsewhere. Um people confuse anti-Israel policy of what's going on now with anti-Semitism. That, you know, uh if you're uh I'm speaking out against Israel and all Jews are complicit there, that's anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment. That's why I think it's a definition today is difficult because simply if you put Israel to the side, it's very simple. You hate Jews and you believe the worst of them. And why do you hate them? You don't even know why you hate them, other than their scapegoats. And I think, you know, the in many ways the simplest explanations are often the best. And the simplest one is always they're jealous of us. And I think that's true. Wherever Jews have gone, they've gone whenever they've had to get on a diaspora, they've arrived often with very little money, and yet they manage to succeed. Wherever Jews have gone, they have managed to succeed, and that creates huge jealousy. And in many of the anti-Semites that I write about here, they'll argue blacks and Jews, but blacks actually even more than Jews, are getting all this aid from the government and we're not getting anything. Now, mind you, there's truth to that in terms of during the 60s, uh, black communities were getting more money poured into them in many ways than white, poor white communities. Although what many people don't know is even up to the time welfare was abolished, there were more white families on welfare than black families. So when welfare was abolished, it actually hurt poor whites more than poor blacks.

SPEAKER_01 44:17

Well, I'm thinking about your own story that we started with a little bit and the journey from the child of Holocaust survivors. I think you wrote in the book that you were the first in your family to go to college.

SPEAKER_00 44:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

And then, you know, you went to Columbia, Oxford, Princeton. When you were in those institutions in the 1970s, uh 60s and 70s, tell me a little bit about some of the anti-Jewish sentiments that you experienced or anti-Semitic sentiments that you experienced. Because again, some ignorant of our American history might think, well, that was part of that golden age. It must have been really easy for Professor Ross. And elsewhere in the book you talk about the name change, but Steve Ross still sounds plenty Jewish to me. I'm just wondering what was that like in those places which had meaningful Jewish populations? But but fairly recently, because there were quota systems all through the 50s and up until probably the mid-60s, what was it like to be Jewish on those campuses and not just Jewish, but the child of Holocaust survivors?

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Well, I'll just take one step back when you talk about quotas. Um I I mentioned I grew up in Queens, and long before there was um any uh social media, there was Jewish there was Jewish telephone. And things got around community. So in the area I grew up in Beechhurst, Princeton, where you went to school, was known as probably the most anti-Semitic campus of the Ivies and the most restrictive. And somewhere around 1965, one of my neighbors, Steve Rose, who I didn't really I'd met once, but I didn't really know. Steve Ross and Steve Steve Rose, he got into Princeton, Jewish, and everyone in the neighborhood knew about it. He a Jew got into Princeton. That was well, I would say Columbia, I um encountered no anti-Semitism in my four years there. Uh when I went to Oxford, it was strange.

SPEAKER_01 46:25

By the way, is uh interesting and crazy because my daughter just graduated from Barnard, Columbia, and she experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment, but some direct anti-Semitism, like why don't you go back to Poland? Um so she she experienced that, which is a very sad state of affairs, but please keep going.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Yeah. Um well, my freshman year was uh spring 68, so that was a very interesting time. Uh and it was mainly focused on SDS and uh radical politics for my four years there on campus.

SPEAKER_01 47:04

And when I went to but the radical politics didn't bleed into anti-Jewish sentiment. Nope. And and even though it was uh post-67 war, it didn't bleed into anti-Israel sentiment.

SPEAKER_00 47:15

Nope. Not that I was aware of. First of all, many of the SDS leaders were Jewish and were not self-loathing Jews either. Uh Israel was still thought of David beating Goliath. And as I said, I didn't have any there. When I went to England, the the English were so the English were very quietly anti-Semitic, but very openly anti-American. So what I experienced was anti-Americanism rather than I never experienced any direct anti-Semitism. When I got to Princeton, I only had I had one incident there that was openly anti-Semitic. I was in the basement of the library there, Firestone Library, in the Xerox room. And as I was leaving, an older gentleman was also leaving, had to be in his 70s. I feel like he wasn't a gentleman. No, I I say that because I I don't want to start name calling. An older gentleman who may not have been a gentleman walks up to me and says, and at that point I had a big Hebrew I mean and he walks up to me and he said Hebrew, we used to call it Jufro. But okay, good, all right. And he said, if and I can't remember which president it was, Goheen maybe, if President Goheen was still here, your people wouldn't be here. And uh he walked right out past me. And I thought, I'm not gonna let you say that and get away with it. So I walked right up to him and he got very nervous. And I said, Uh, what do you mean by your people? And then when we got in the elevator together, and I kept saying, What do you mean by your people? Why don't you tell me? You know what, you coward? You can say that, but now you're not gonna talk to me. You can't say things like that here and get away with it. And I followed him up to the door leading out of the library, and then I thought, this guy, he must have been in his 70s, which when you're in your twenties, that seems like you're, you know, one foot near the grave. And I thought, geez, I better not follow him out of here. He might get a heart attack. And even though he's an anti-Semite, but I kept saying to him, don't ever come back here and say that kind of stuff. And that was it. That was the only time I uh and I would say even at USC, I've been there 48 years, and I have not personally experienced anti-Semitism. What I did see is after October 7th, and particularly after the encampments, I saw a lot of ignorance on campus, a lot of confusion, a lot of people saying, I'm not anti-u-Semitic, I'm just anti-Israel, which um in many cases I think was true. They didn't know. And the naivete, when I would ask some students, do you know what from the river to the sea means? They'd say, yes, that everyone lives in peace and harmony. Liver to the sea, we will all be free. I said, no, that's actually not what it means. It means from the river to the sea, we're going to wipe out all the Jews. And they were, really? I I So You know, I would say for me personally, I have been remarkably, I've left a life, led a life remarkably free of open anti-Semitism. Although I live in an anti-Semitic uh I live in a country now that tolerates anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

Well, first of all, I'm so grateful, Professor, for your time. And what I want to ask you to sort of bring us home with and try to conclude a little bit with is, you know, how this book, the secret war against hate and the the subtitle I think is so important, American Resistance to Anti-Semitism and White Supremacy. And as you tell us in the book, as you show us, it is American. It's much broader than just some Jewish leaders got together and tried to fight this, but had incredible allies, these spies who uh who could pass as non-Jews because they were non-Jews, and they could pass as whites because they were whites. And they were right there, arm in arm, not just because they were Phylosemitic, or maybe not at all because they were Phyllosemitic, but because they were Americans who cared about what this nation stands for and what I hope at its essence really is or or could be. And so I guess the question and the takeaway is in this moment where when you started writing this book, we were probably in a very different place. I don't know how many years ago you really started working on this, but was it pre-October 7th?

SPEAKER_00 51:52

Uh yeah, I I yeah, I started working on it twenty in twenty uh in 2020, it's the beginning of 2020. And I handed it in in 2025, December 2025.

SPEAKER_01 52:03

So for as we go back in our minds to that moment, it's a lifetime ago, right? So you start working on it before the pandemic, and then as you are deep in the book, October 7th, and now on your own campus, you're seeing some of those things, albeit uh notwithstanding the fact that it was much worse on other campuses, right here in LA, UCLA was uh compared to USC as a campus, you know, uh in some ways night and day, but you're you're still not uh escaping it, and you're reading what's going on in other places. And so you see all that in the journey of this book, but it really is American resistance to anti-Semitism and white supremacy. So what I'd love is uh perhaps something that can what we think about in our Jewish tradition as a nachemta, something that when we read about a difficult moment or a tragic moment, a challenging moment, we always try, the rabbis always try to end with something that offers some consolation. You know, but Professor Ross, it's true. All of those things are true, and don't forget, and so we end with something that gives us a little bit of consolation. I found a lot of that in the book, especially uh in the in the heroes that you tell us about, and especially as I already referenced, in the fact that there were allies who were not Jewish, who were not black, but who felt like this is not who we want to be. So I'd love you to share an echemta with us. Maybe it's uh a vignette from the book that you haven't shared with us yet, or maybe it's a broader kind of trend historically, as someone who's been studying this for his lifetime. Where might you help us end that would give us some?

SPEAKER_00 53:41

I think the first thing to remember is um first thing I would advise all your listeners, stop watching news endlessly. It only reignites your trauma. Read newspapers, watch a little, but if you keep watching it, as I know some people are glued, it makes you crazy. It also gives you a disproportionate sense of what is happening in our country. And here's I am an optimist. For me, the glass is always half full. My wife says what glass? We are very different. There are more, there are more, there is more that binds us together as Americans than separates us. We forget that. Look at the Soviet Union, look at parts of the world, look at the Middle East. Um, we are Americans, and right now we're in a difficult period because there are many Americans openly calling for hate. In part, and this is where our president administration comes in, because it's not trying to ease it, it's ramping it up because these are Donald Trump's people. But these people were here long before Donald Trump, and they will be here long after Donald Trump. So, what can we do? Well, we are very lucky that Americans we can vote. Vote them out of office. And particularly what I'm seeing is an apathy amongst my younger students, an apathy amongst freshmen, sophomores, juniors. If you have kids, if you have friends, the next election, vote. Urge them to vote. The easiest thing to do, the easiest thing to change is change through the ballot box, not through the bullets. Bring two people who aren't intending to vote to vote. You don't want to do many of these people who are heroic risk their lives. I can't ask anybody to go undercover and risk their life, but I can ask you to vote. And I can ask you the solution I have, you know, because people will also say, Well, Professor Ross, what can we do? As though I'm some Svengali and can predict the future. I wish I could. But the one thing I do understand, um, and I would put this in everyone's mind, uh, the founding father who is most beloved by the far right is Thomas Jefferson. When Timothy McVeigh, the man who blew up the uh federal building, the mural building in Oklahoma City, when he was captured by authorities, he was wearing one of Jeff he was wearing a Jefferson t-shirt that had Jefferson's quote that the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of tyrants and dictators every few decades. Well, I thought to end the book, could I find, could I, you know, as the British would say, hoist them on their own petard. Could I find something from Jefferson that might offer us a window into what we can do? So take the man most popular by the right and use him against the right. And uh in the notes from the state of Virginia that was published in the 1780s, 1780s now, Jefferson says, and I'm going to paraphrase, from time to time there will always be political hucksters who come along and try to convince the American people that their personal needs are the needs of the American people. And ultimately the American people will come to realize that that is phony and it's not the case. But the way they can realize it, and the way we can protect ourselves from fraud, is through education. Because an educated citizenry might be fooled for a short period of time, but they won't be fooled for long. And to that end, Jefferson called for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing public education in perpetuity. For as long as you want to go to university, free. It's all free. Because he understood that in a republic it is up to citizens to decide. And if citizens are uneducated, they can't decide. If you take a look at the polling numbers, the MAGA base is almost all high school or less. Those opposing Trump or more college, some college and more. We used to every four years have both party candidates claiming to be the educational president. Well, we don't have anybody who's claimed that in the last election or two. And one of the first things Donald Trump did when he got into office is abolish the Department of Education. So to the extent people want to work politically, restore the Department of Education, get involved in your local school board districts. This, by the way, was the right uh the Republican right-wing strategy after Barry Goldwater lost in 64, that they were going to start taking over schools and going from the PTA to local school boards, to city councils, to state legislators, to congresspeople, to senators and governors. And that's what I would argue those who believe in American democracy. And I don't care if you're a conservative or a liberal, I care if you're a far right or far, far left, where you just hate other Americans. And the minute you hate other Americans, you're not really an American. You can dislike people who don't think like you. You can call for policies, but you can't call for hate, for intimidation or death because somebody just doesn't agree with you.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

Well, Professor Ross, I want to thank you so much for your book, The Secret War Against Hate. And I think where you ended reminds us that what we should do in a way that's not secret at all is fight hatred. And I guess I'll just end with the beautiful teaching at the very heart of our Torah. We're sitting in our Beitmid Rash here, and behind us is uh our Aronha Kodesh. And in the Torah, in that ark, at its very center is Vayahaftada Kamocha. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And one of my favorite teachings about that is that when you really understand that in so many fundamental ways, your neighbor is like you and has the same desires for a life of goodness and a life of love and a life of uh plenty, all the things that we would want for ourselves. Our neighbor also wants for herself. When we understand that, we can be more loving to one another. So I want to thank you for your time. I want to thank you for this book, and I want to thank you for the lessons in it. Thank you. Well, that's our episode. Thanks for listening to Search for Meaning. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. It really helps others discover the podcast. And consider sharing Search for Meaning with a friend. They might appreciate the insights and inspiration found here. Special thanks to our editor Josh Sterling and our production coordinator Raz Husseini. Our theme song was composed by Maestro David Cates and myself, produced by Kenley Mattis, and features a vocal by cantor Josh Goldberg. Stay healthy, stay hopeful, and stay tuned.