How a NY judge enlisted Meyer Lansky to organize Jewish mobsters to fight the Nazis who held the 1939 MSG rally

Many have noted the striking similarities between Donald Trump’s racist and hate-filled rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden and a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at the old Garden. But what’s missing from the numerous news stories is the historical context.

Back then American Nazis scapegoated the wave of Jewish immigrants as being responsible for the nation’s woes during the Great Depression. Today, the MAGA cult's conspiracy theories target Black and Latino immigrants.

On Sunday, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s draconian anti-immigration policies, declared: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” He claimed criminal gangs were crossing “our border to rape and murder with impunity.”

Back on Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” celebrating George Washington’s birthday. Kuhn told the crowd of 20,000 packing the Garden: “We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.” 

The video above, posted by The Lincoln Project, features footage  from the Oscar-nominated documentary short A Night at the Garden (2017).  I wrote about the 1939 rally in a February 2022 story titled: In 1939, Nazis packed Madison Square Garden to celebrate George Washington's birthday.

At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage, shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was then tackled and beaten by Kuhn’s brown-shirted security detail  who ripped off his pants. Police quickly intervened and took him into custody. Greenbaum was fined $25 for disturbing the peace.

When he returned to his Brooklyn home, Greenbaum unexpectedly received a congratulatory telegram from a local judge, Nathan D. Perlman, and a lavish gift basket signed by Meyer Lansky, the nation’s most prominent Jewish mobster. 

And it was the odd couple of the Jewish judge and organized crime boss who secretly teamed up to blunt the rise of fascism in the U.S. by organizing Jewish gangsters and boxers to intimidate and fight the German American Bund and another fascist group, the Silver Shirts, or Silver Legion.

This incredible story was detailed in the book “Gangsters vs Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis In Wartime America,” released in paperback in July, by true crime writer Michael Benson.

At the time, the Bund did not exist in a vacuum. There was a strong isolationist movement led by the America First Committee (AFC), which advocated that the U.S. remain neutral in any European war. Its most visible spokesman was aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was openly antisemitic and sympathized with Nazi Germany. Much of the AFC’s funding came from millionaires such as General Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck and Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick. 

Henry Ford, known for changing the auto industry, was a virulent antisemite who was the only American complimented by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. Ford even bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent to spread his antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And there was a Catholic priest, Father Charles E. Coughlin, who expressed antisemitic views and pro-Nazi opinions in his radio broadcasts that reached tens of millions of listeners.

It’s also worth noting that Hitler was inspired by Jim Crow segregation laws in the U.S. as a model for his antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws. In his book, Benson included this 1933 quote from Hitler.

“We will undermine the morale of the people of America. Once there is confusion and after we have succeeded in undermining the faith of the American people in their own government, a new group will take over; this will be the German-American group, and we will help them assume power.”

The German American Bund was formed in 1936 and professed to be a pro-American organization. But its actual mission was to "Nazify” the German-American community and sway public opinion in favor of Hitler’s fascist regime. The Bund  received covert guidance and financial support from Nazi Germany. Kuhn, who openly imitated Hitler when speaking at rallies. ranted that Jewish communists and bankers were responsible for the country’s problems.

“They were going to make America great,” Benson said in an interview for The Times of Israel.

“The book takes place in that twilight zone between what is legal and what is just… The villains within the book are all within the law, and the heroes are all outside the law,” Benson said.

By 1938, brown-shirted Bund members were goose-stepping in parades in New York City and elsewhere. The group had opened  about 20 Nazi youth indoctrination camps around the country.

The Jewish community viewed the Bund as a growing menace after receiving reports from relatives back in Europe about Nazi persecution, but its leaders were hesitant to directly confront the menace.

The Bund and other pro-Nazi groups operated openly with impunity because there were no hate crime laws on the books and their rallies were protected under the First Amendment.

And that’s when Judge Perlman, a former Republican congressman, while musing over a drink at a Manhattan saloon came up with an out-of-the box idea that what the American Nazis needed was “a good ass whipping.”

Perlman put in a call to  Lansky, who with his childhood friend, Italian Mafia don Charles “Lucky” Luciano had grown rich from bootlegging during Prohibition and then organized the Five Family system of the New York mob. The character Hyman Roth (Lee Strasman) in “The Godfather, Part II” was modeled after Lansky.

Perlman organized a face-to-face meeting in early 1938 with Lansky and the prominent Reform Jewish Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.

As Benson recounted, Perlman told Lansky that antisemitic Nazis were becoming “bolder” and marching in the street. “They think we are soft,” the judge said. He added that “Nazism is flourishing in the United States” with “powerful men” making antisemitic remarks and some newspapers and magazines backing them up.

Perlman then asked Lansky, “You got some boys who might want to punch a Nazi?” And Lansky replied that he did indeed, adding “You understand we can do better than punch?”

Rabbi Wise then interjected, “I’m sorry, we cannot condone killing. There must be no killing.” Perlman agreed, saying, “Broken bones  … are to be encouraged. They should know that being a Nazi is dangerous.”

Perlman offered to pay Lansky, but the mob boss, whose family had emigrated from what is now Belarus in 1911, refused. Benson quotes Lansky as saying, “I need no pay, Judge. I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering. They are my brothers.”

Lansky turned to Jewish members of the notorious Brooklyn-based mob enforcement organization known as Murder, Inc., responsible for hundreds of contract killings. Lansky told the crew of professional killers that they could “marinate” but not “ice” those attending Bund events.

Luciano offered the help of Italian members of Murder, Inc., but Lansky refused, saying, “It was a job for Jews.”

On April 20, 1938, Kuhn and hundreds of Bund members gathered after a march in a ballroom in thepredominantly German-American Yorkville neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side, to celebrate Hitler’s 49th birthday.

That’s when Lansky and his crew donned American Legion hats and armed with baseball bats, pool cues, brass knuckles and other street fighting gear attacked the ballroom from three directions.

Lansky recalled what happened that night:

The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only 15 of us, but we went into action. We … threw some of them out the windows…Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up … We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.

 Remarkably no one was killed that night. And Lansky was good to his word during the rest of the year-long campaign to squelch American Nazis.

In New Jersey, Newark’s Jewish mob boss Abner “Longie” Zwillman turned to an ex-boxer and gym owner Nat Arno to recruit Jewish tough guys to break up Bund meetings. They called themselves the Anti-Nazi Minutemen of America.

In Chicago, Perlman reached out to Al Capone’s Jewish associate Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, who recruited Jewish fighters operating out of a boxing gym. They included world champion Barney Ross, who was recruited to fight the Bund by his friend Jacob “Sparky” Rubinstein. Rubinstein later moved to Dallas, where he changed his name to Jack Ruby, and opened a nightclub, He achieved notoriety for fatally shooting accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV.

In a story reminiscent of the Spike Lee film “BlacKkKlansman,” a blond, blue-eyed Jewish journalist, Herb Brin, infiltrated the Bund in Chicago. The intelligence he collected also helped the Jewish fighters plan attacks on Bund meetings.

In Los Angeles, a Jewish attorney, Leon L. Lewis, recruited spies, some of them women, to infiltrate the Bund and report on its activities. Perlman put in a call to L.A. mob bosses Ben “Bugsy” Siegel and Mickey Cohen to go after the Bund.

In Minneapolis and other Midwestern cities, the main threat was posed by the Silver Shirts, a Christian militia founded by a former Hollywood screenwriter William Dudley Pelley, who envisioned himself as America’s Hitler. The Silver Shirts advocated re-enslaving African- Americans and deporting Jews. 

In the 1938 Minnesota gubernatorial race, the Silver Shirts claimed that incumbent Democratic-Farmer-Labor party Gov. Elmer Benson was using taxpayer money to support 10,000 Jewish immigrants engaged in “criminal communistic and anti-Christian activities.”

“If it can’t be done with ballots … there must be bullets later!,” the group declared.

Legitimate Jewish institutions in Minneapolis had been gathering intelligence and monitoring Silver Shirt activities. This information was passed on to local Jewish mob boss Davey Berman. Benson wrote that Berman told Perlman that “it would be his honor to slap those Silver Shirt assholes around.”

By early 1939, the Jewish gangsters had disrupted Nazi rallies across the country, causing attendance to drop sharply. When the Bund held public meetings, hundreds of ordinary Jews and their supporters felt emboldened enough to protest and take action.

Although the Bund had been damaged and was in disarray, Kuhn announced plans to hold his “Pro-America Rally” on Feb. 20 at the Garden, drawing Bund members from around the country. About 1,700 New York police officers were deployed around the Garden to protect the rally.

The gangsters didn’t have to do anything because thousands of anti-Nazi protesters, many of them Jewish, surrounded the Garden that night, blocking traffic, hitting the Nazis and pelting them with objects as they arrived under police escort.

Benson wrote that the rally at the Garden turned out to be “the Bund’s last gasp.” The Bund issued a press release claiming that the rally was a big success.  But newspaper headlines highlighted the huge “riot” that had taken place outside the arena. The U.S. government outlawed the Bund after the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941.

_________________________________________________________                                  EPILOGUE

Perlman’s role in the anti-Nazi battle was not revealed at the time. He went on to serve as a senior official at the American Jewish Congress and became a consultant to  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, whom President Harry S. Truman appointed to serve as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of former Nazi leaders.

Lansky, the financial mastermind behind the national crime syndicate, would build a gambling empire that would include casinos in Las Vegas, Cuba and the Bahamas. During World War II, Lansky and Luciano cooperated with Naval Intelligence to ensure security at New York ports. He was never convicted of anything more serious than illegal gambling and died of lung cancer, at age 80, in Miami, Florida. 

Pelley disbanded the Silver Shirts after Pearl Harbor. In 1942, he was convicted on federal charges of sedition and insurrection, receiving a 15-year prison sentence. After his release in 1952, he devoted himself  to writing about UFOs and extra terrestrials.

And Kuhn, the wannabe Führer, was convicted in December 1939 on charges of embezzling about $15,000 from the Bund, spending part of the money on a mistress. He ended up serving 43 months in Sing Sing prison. His U.S. citizenship was revoked and he was subsequently interned as an “enemy alien.” He was deported to Germany after the war.

Let’s hope that history repeats itself after Nov. 5 with wannabe dictator Donald Trump ending up in prison like his fascist predecessors, totally discredited and spiritually broken.