How Reactionary Zionists Became the New Birchers

We are seeing a kind of modern-day John Birch Society with Zionist characteristics. I call it the Jonah Birch Society.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

(Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images for ADL)

The University of Washington Jewish Alumni Association is a new kind of alumni group. It isn’t raising money or providing continuing education. It isn’t a social network of graduates, meeting up at sporting events or trading professional contacts. It is an advocacy organization—it even endorses political candidates—but it does not advocate on behalf of the university. Rather, it advocates for Israel, and it does so by attacking UW, where I teach. To join, interested recruits must provide their name, e-mail address, and answer “Are you a Zionist?” The options in the drop-down menu are “Hell yes,” “Of course,” “Maybe,” and “No.” Applicants must also provide a “reference for security verification.”

Unlike the university’s actual alumni association, established in 1889, the UWJAA formed just recently, in the summer of 2024—after the dismantling of the school’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment that spring and shortly before UW’s board of regents met to discuss an Israeli boycott and divestment proposal from student activists. To call the UWJAA an organization would be an overstatement. Its political activity—which mostly consists of backing MAGA-aligned Republicans and the Trump administration—would be prohibited if it were a formal alumni association of a public university. But of course it is not trying to be.

A scroll through the UWJAA’s X account reveals persistent attacks on university students and faculty. Those attacks often get attention. This past January, the group claimed that Aria Fani, an Iranian scholar critical of US and Israeli policy toward Iran, was “teaching party-line propaganda” and demanded his firing. Two months later, Fani was removed as director of the university’s Middle East Center after he shared further criticism of the United States, Israel, and Zionism on center listservs.

The UWJAA is a morbid symptom of a larger sickness in American political life—the same condition driving efforts like Canary Mission, the website that doxxes pro-Palestine faculty and students, and JewBelong, the too-clever-by-half billboard campaign by New Jersey marketers Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart. All of these groups are part of a constellation of largely secretive organizations using astroturfed pressure campaigns to drive a reactionary assault on pro-Palestine activism, higher education, free speech, and the left.

These efforts—which have been supercharged by the surge of pro-Palestine activism in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza—fuse the historically antisemitic conspiracism of the American far right with the panicked but aggressive militancy of reactionary Zionism. Together, these forces make up a kind of modern-day John Birch Society with Zionist characteristics. I call it the Jonah Birch Society.

Like the original John Birch Society, the Jonah Birchers live in a universe of constant, impending doom, where every institution is secretly colluding with or under the spell of an all-powerful enemy that threatens the foundations of the United States itself (and Israel). But where once fringe cold warriors saw communism around every corner, today’s delusional conspiracists are reordering the world with similar zeal against an all-pervasive antisemitism they use to tarnish anyone to their left. And like the first Birchers, the Jonah Birchers are backed by deep-pocketed donors who appeal to a frightful and often suburban common sense. Theirs is a culture war in the purest sense, waged primarily through media aimed to keep their supporters vigilant and their opponents afraid. The result is a blend of antisemitic assaults on the left and the public good, which is presented as a necessary defense of Jews—even and especially against Jewish critics, whom Jonah Birchers deride as “Kapos” or “ As-a-Jew Jews .”

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Even while the Jonah Birchers take advantage of modern-day technology—Canary Mission, for instance, connects Jewish-American donors to a transatlantic network of operatives on behalf of Israel—their core playbook is boringly old-fashioned. As Matthew Dallek describes in Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right , the John Birch Society was a social movement focused not just on policy but on politics too. Birchers used lectures, media, and connections to police to turn nonsensical delusions into a national common sense. One of the organization’s favorite tactics, in fact, was to put up billboards—most notoriously, one of Martin Luther King Jr. at Highlander Folk School, or what the Birchers called a “communist training school.” Decades later, JewBelong also puts up billboards, emblazoned with trollish lines like, “You don’t have to go to law school to know that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” and “Remember when college was for losing your virginity, not your…