Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in WW2 Era America

by Michael Benson

So, I can state with confidence that the greatest comic-book cover in the history of the art form is Captain America Comics #1 drawn by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. The comic was a product of Timely Comics, which would later change its name to Marvel.

BE GAY DO CRIMES!!! PUNCH NAZIS!!!

“They beat up the Nazis and eventually got rid of them,” Myron recalled.

Violence can be a tool. It can solve some problems.

Any nation which permits a minority to live in fear of persecution is a nation which invites disaster. —PROFESSOR L. B. NAMIER

Lansky and Luciano both felt it, the shared attitude. Fuck the world. Fuck the whole fucking universe. They were gangsters among gangsters. Later, when they worked together in the casino biz, they were like an old married couple, finishing each other’s sentences, sometimes understanding without speaking at all.

"Achilles and his bff Patroclus" feelings right here. r/AchillesandHisBestFriend r/SapphoandHerBestFriend

the great majority of Americans, including those of German heritage, saw through the Bund’s message. They recognized hate when they saw it.

“What the Nazis need is a good ass whipping,” he said.

“You got some boys who might want to punch a Nazi?”

Fuck yeah, we got bois who want to punch Nazis!!! We got grrrls, too. Punch Nazis!

“I know just the crew—in Brownsville. The boys in the press call them Murder, Inc.”

TIL...

They should know that being a Nazi is dangerous.”

“It was a matter of pride,” Lansky said. “It was a job for Jews.”

His bow tie was a little crooked, his suits slightly crumpled, but he had eyes that told stories of the pain he’d seen, the hope he held, and the future he feared.

Other speakers included Kings County Commander Abraham Cohen, now the man in charge at the East Flatbush Community Center on Linden Boulevard, who said, “We must awaken the American public to the realization that there is no room in this country for Nazism.

O’Toole told the gathering to continue to “fight for American democracy” and urged the United States to halt relations with Germany “and any other nation that persecutes minority groups. And we must acknowledge the existence of an armed, uniformed, terroristic, antidemocratic, un-American fascist force in our city.”

Then a man from the Communist Party got up there and said that they didn’t want to be lumped in with those Yorkville creeps, and he pledged that the communists would fight “for the protection of our basic American values.”

Damn commies! Gotta be jumping in with everyone all the time. Punch Nazis.

Perlman asked, “Jake, do you know anyone who might want to punch out a few Nazis?”

You son of a bitch, I'm in!

his old pal Sparky Rubenstein said he needed volunteers to kick some Nazi ass.

I just can't get over this. This book is amazing, & I'm happy I bought it. I know when I'm having a bad day I will re-read this.

When Jacob was four years old, Fanny had Joseph arrested multiple times and twice charged with assault.

Damn, you go, woman! I can't imagine the courage it took for her to call the cops on her abuser. In that culture and time, too.

He didn’t like to brag about it, but he stomped one of those German American meatheads himself once.

The ACGPO was dedicated to oppose by lawful means subversive propaganda against the Constitution of the United States of America.

The photographer made a mental note of this guy, learned who he was, and later had the cops arrest him for “criminal mischief.”

The next morning, Municipal Judge Gibson German—that was his name—dismissed all of the charges and told the combatants to keep their hands to themselves.

Ordered to keep their 'hands' to themselves. "You get a bat! And you get a bat! And they get a bat! Everybody gets a bat!"

“It is disgraceful for a ruling party of a state of seventy million inhabitants to drive a helpless minority of less than five hundred thousand to destruction.”

“Down with fascism!”

There were eight arrests, six men and two women. The women had started brawling outside the hall when one shouted “Hooray for Hitler!”

Women can punch Nazis, too. This is an all-inclusive activity.

Their job had nothing to do with speed. It was to pull the cart for twenty years before dropping dead in the street,

*Black Beauty* by Anna Sewell was set about a hundred years earlier. Things hadn't progressed very far in the fight for animal rights.

As a rule, he’d fight for whichever side paid him better, but he hated Nazis so much that he’d bust them up for free.

He did grow up to be a Jewish gangster though, no doubt about that, a Jewish hit man who eventually went to prison for life for murder, served fifty years, and lived to be eighty-nine, dying on November 23, 2014, in a Florida nursing home.

Once assembled and trained, Arno’s army called themselves the Anti-Nazi Minutemen of America, the Minutemen for short, in homage to the Revolutionary War patriots who could assemble and go to battle with only sixty seconds’ notice.

tear gas was propelled into the crowd. Lots of it this time. So much that the entire neighborhood was affected. Irvington residents up and down the street spent a sleepless night trying to wash the fumes from their crimson eyes.

Use milk, real cow's milk. It helps neutralize tear gas. And throw away contacts that have been exposed to tear gas.

In New York City, Judge Perlman understood that Pelley’s troops, like the Bund storm troopers, needed a punch in the mouth.

wanna go punch some Nazis?

Someone was going to have to keep an eye on him or else, sure as shootin’, there’d be a dead Nazi on the floor with his face in the sawdust and the tiniest of all possible holes behind his ear.

"Hey Ice Pick, wanna go punch some Nazis?" "Nooo, not like that!"

Judge Larson said to Blaisdell, “There can be no more potent breeder of public disorder, than a deliberate stirring up of class against class, and race against race. This undermines the patriotic unity of our nation, and is in direct opposition to that tolerance of race and religion which our constitution provides for, and which is a distinguishing feature of the fundamental law of our

when it came time to beat up Nazis,

I just can't get enough of this! it's 4/15/2024. A former president who has a big ugly orange pumpkinhead, is currently in court in NY for paying hush money to an escort. Fraud case. Paid her as a 'business expense'. Ukraine is losing the war, slowly but surely. Israel went after Palestine earlier this year. Argentina's president has severe mental illness, and is an authoritarian anarchocapitalist. Things get more dystopian day by day.

Birns was born in 1907 as Alexander Birnstein in the town of Lemes, which was in Austria, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia, depending on when you looked at the map.

Oh, hey, my in-laws are from then! Plus, my FIL was also Yugoslavian.

but was quickly acquitted by twelve jurors who knew what was good for them.

The La Brea Tar Pits

I love this place. A large tar pit was the only active dig site, the last time I visited. And it was only open for about 6 wks in the summer. We were there in November. I didn't care. La Brea Woman no longer stands guard at the entrance, her bones revealed in a flash of lightning. She terrified me as a child. It felt like a rite of passage when I was finally able to look her in her eyes. I miss her.

Lewis left the LAPD encounter horrified.

ACAB

Need a Nazi stomped? No sweat.

Mickey later said that whomping Nazis was his “patriotic duty.”

Fuck yeah! Punch a Nazi for America!

thought the filthiness of his gym toughened up the fighters who trained there.

No, it probably just caused a lot of infections, flus, colds, polio... but no TB. The BCG vaccine was developed in 1921. It remains the only viable TB vaccine.

Mickey said that he knew for a fact that Ben would love to sock a Nazi, too, that he’d openly discussed, pardon the expression, icing Nazis.

Bugsy Siegel was the best looking of the Jewish gangsters, with heavy-lidded eyes, a movie-star jaw, and a cool-breeze demeanor.

He kind of looked as if James Dean, and Paul Newman had a baby with a smooth forehead. Same gene pool. It's also got Brad Pitt, and, oddly enough, Sean Penn.

cynegetic

of, or, related to, hunting.

He was stripped of his US citizenship for having made a false oath of allegiance, and right after Pearl Harbor, he was placed under house arrest in Chicago as a “risk to military security on the Pacific Coast.”

This is what we should be doing, right here & now, in the Spring of 2024. Nazis, white supremacists, and radicalized Theofascists in the government.

every time the Nazis planned a get-together on American soil, people arrived by the hundreds to protest and attack the Nazi message and the Nazis themselves.

Inside, while Kunze was talking about the blessing of Aryanism, newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, the well-dressed wife of Sinclair Lewis, author of the anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here, threw back her head and cackled a loud laugh of derision.

That is one insanely courageous woman.

Asked why she had laughed so loudly, she said, “I laughed because these Nazis were exercising the free speech which one day they would deny everyone.”

It's not that funny when you give it some thought.

In case there was any question as to where the policemen’s allegiance rested, a cop belted storm trooper Arthur Grove in the eye.

He punched a Nazi.

Patrolman William Mitchell suffered a fracture of his left thumb and wrist, broken as he pummeled a Nazi’s thick skull.

Ouch!

The crowd, befitting the venue, merely clapped politely until Mayor LaGuardia took the stage and called the Garden Party an “exhibition of international cooties.”