Gangsters vs. Nazis is an eye-opening account of just how much effort American Nazis put into trying to take down the United States, before and during World War II. This book covers the various influential Jewish figures- gangsters, journalists, rabbis, judges, and politicians- who worked together in surprising ways to put a stop to it. While much has already been said about how much the United States government knew about the Holocaust as it was happening, Michael Benson looks instead at how, from coast-to-coast, Nazi-affiliated groups (some of them with the approval of Hitler’s Nazi Germany) were setting up violent militias and indoctrination camps to try to bring fascism to the United States and commit terrorist attacks against both political figures and ordinary American Jews. Fortunately, wherever these Nazis popped up, so did an alliance of “tough Jews:” gangsters, boxers and working class men, who would travel to event halls and private homes where Nazis were meeting to teach them a very important lesson: that it wasn’t safe to be a Nazi in America.

While the book has some relatively well-known stories in it (Meyer Lansky and other big-name Jewish gangsters’ campaign against the Nazis), it’s also filled with lesser known pieces of history. For example, a domestic Nazi plot in Los Angeles to capture and publicly lynch over a dozen Jewish American celebrities. It seems as if there were Nazi enclaves in most American regions during the 1930s and 40s; from the big population centers of New York and Newark to remote Minnesota, American Nazis were putting together plans to ally America with Nazi Germany and using American media, such as radio programs and printing presses to put out antisemitic propaganda to turn regular Americans against their Jewish neighbors.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of moments in the book that feel like they could be taking place in America today. Publications and groups claiming that the Jews are the world’s misfortune, that we’re the cause of wars and economic instability, that we control the world’s governments and economic chains, weren’t few and far between a century ago or now. Neither are antisemitic rallies that attract thousands of people to the streets of New York City where hate speech against Jews is defended as free speech. Benson ends the book with a plaintive question: where are the American Jews willing to be tough today, to show today’s Nazis- because there are plenty of them- that it’s still not safe to be a Nazi in America?