Records of the Jewish Defense League

The records of the Jewish Defense League represent one collection housed within the Archive of the American Soviet Jewry Movement (AASJM). These papers reflect the effort, beginning in the 1960s through the late 1980s, of thousands of American Jews of all denominations and political orientations to stop the persecution and discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union. The American Soviet Jewry Movement (ASJM) is considered to be the most influential Movement of the American Jewish community in the 20th century. The beginnings of the organized American Soviet Jewry Movement became a model for efforts to aid Soviet Jews in other countries, among them Great Britain, Canada, and France. The movement can be traced to the early 1960s, when the first organizations were created to address the specific problem of the persecution and isolation of Soviet Jews by the government of the Soviet Union.

The Jewish Defense League was founded in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, Bertram Zeweibon, Morton Delinsky, Irving Calderon, and Chaim Bieber, as an Orthodox Jewish organization with the mission to combat inner city crime, Antisemitism, and the decline in the quality of Jewish life employing direct, often militant, tactics. The JDL also became one of the pioneer organizations in the American Soviet Jewry movement. It advocated Jewish interests in African-American/Jewish relations and in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and promoted Aliyah Zionism and opposed the assimilation of Jews outside of Israel. The JDL philosophy included restoring Jews to their ancient values and the expulsion of the Arab population from Israel. By 1970, the JDL was an ultra-nationalist militant youth movement composed of urban, suburban, student and working-class Jews. The Soviet Jewry movement gave the JDL national prominence and wide support, transforming it from a small vigilante group to an organization up to 15,000 members strong. The controversial methods of the JDL earned it a reputation of a terrorist and racist organization among the mainstream Jewish agencies and U.S. law enforcement agencies. Members of the JDL conducted bombings of Soviet and Arab properties in the United States. A series of threats and violent attacks were directed at individuals and organizations that the JDL perceived as antisemitic and dangerous to the Jewish people. The Anti-Defamation League characterized the JDL's ideology as racist, violent, and extreme, and multiple instances of JDL activity were officially classified as terrorist attacks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Ultimately, the FBI characterized the Jewish Defense League as a violent and extremist organization.

References

Anti-Defamation League Backgrounder:The Jewish Defense League. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.adl.org/extremism/jdl_chron.asp

Article of Organization, 1970, Jewish Defense League, Records, I-374, Box 1/Folder 1, Collection of the American Jewish Historical Society, Boston, MA and New York, NY.

Kahane, L. (2008). Rabbi Meir Kahane: His life and thought. Jerusalem: Urim Publications.