Abraham Levy risked his livelihood and his life confronting the German American Bund while American authorities and much of the Jewish establishment remained reluctant to act.
By David Bedein | TheJ.ca | Aug 31, 2026
I recently watched a documentary about the campaign to oppose the German American Bund rally held at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 20, 1939.
The film brought back memories of my grandfather, Abraham Levy, and the price he paid for confronting America’s Nazi movement before the United States government was prepared to act.
More than 20,000 Bund supporters filled Madison Square Garden that night. The stage featured Nazi banners, uniformed storm troopers, swastikas and an enormous portrait of George Washington.
Outside, tens of thousands of protesters gathered to denounce the rally. Inside, a 26-year-old Jewish protester named Isadore Greenbaum rushed the stage and was beaten by Bund storm troopers before police removed him.
The rally was not an isolated gathering of eccentric political extremists. The German American Bund was the leading pro-Nazi organization operating in the United States. It organized rallies, distributed Nazi propaganda, and operated youth camps that attempted to indoctrinate American children.
The film credited the American Legion with helping organize opposition and provide logistical support for the counterdemonstration.
That immediately made me think of Grandpa Abe.
During the 1930s, Abraham Levy served as a commander of an American Legion chapter on Long Island. He led a vocal local campaign against the German American Bund and demanded government action against its rallies, youth camps and other activities.
Grandpa Abe understood that the Bund was not simply another political organization exercising its right to free expression. It was promoting the ideology of Adolf Hitler inside the United States and preparing young Americans to admire Nazi Germany.
His goal was straightforward: persuade the United States government to shut down the American Nazi movement before it became an even greater danger.
The government did not finally dismantle the Bund until after Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Until then, Grandpa Abe’s warnings were largely ignored.
According to what he later told me, the only meaningful support he received from the organized Jewish community came from his Long Island rabbi, Rabbi Harold Saperstein.
Grandpa Abe paid a terrible price for refusing to remain silent.
His business was ransacked.
He was kidnapped.
They threw him into a swamp and left him there.
Those experiences did not stop him.
I was very close to Grandpa Abe. During the summer of 1961, when I was 11, we watched the trial of Adolf Eichmann together at my grandparents’ home in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
Eichmann had played a central role in organizing the deportation of European Jews to ghettos and extermination camps. Israel captured him in Argentina in 1960 and placed him on trial in Jerusalem the following year.
As we watched the proceedings, Grandpa Abe told me about his campaign against the Nazis in New York.
He described how openly the Bund had organized and how difficult it had been to convince American authorities and Jewish leaders to recognize the danger. His stories made the Eichmann trial more than a distant historical proceeding. They connected the crimes of Nazi Europe to the movement that had attempted to build support for Hitler inside the United States.
Grandpa Abe then gave me a copy of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent who reported from Nazi Germany during Hitler’s rise and the opening years of the Second World War. His monumental history of Nazi Germany was published in 1960.
The book was enormous and filled with words that an 11-year-old could not easily understand.
Grandpa Abe helped me with the difficult passages.
What impressed me most, even at that young age, was how much had been known while the events were taking place.
The rise of Hitler was not hidden.
Nazi ideology was not hidden.
The persecution of the Jewish people was not hidden.
The German American Bund did not conceal what it admired. Its members wore uniforms modeled after those of Hitler’s movement. They displayed swastikas, gave Nazi salutes and taught children to revere Nazi Germany.
The world also received information about the systematic murder of European Jewry while the killing was underway. Journalists, diplomats, government officials and community leaders had access to mounting evidence about the Nazi campaign.
The claim that nobody knew has never satisfied me.
My grandfather knew.
He recognized the danger when American Nazis organized youth camps, marched openly through American communities and filled Madison Square Garden with swastikas.
He demanded action before such action became politically safe or popular.
He was attacked, threatened, and nearly killed for doing so.
Yet he persisted.
Grandpa Abe taught me that the proper time to confront a movement built on hatred is not after it has achieved power.
It is not after governments finally acknowledge the threat.
It is not after public opinion makes opposition fashionable.
The time to act is when hatred first begins to organize, march and demand legitimacy.
That lesson has never left me.
Neither has the memory of the man who taught it to me.
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