By Jerry Klinger
LOS ANGELES — He was called the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles. His name was hissed with venom and hatred.
His name was Leon Lewis.
Leon Lewis was the first national executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League. He relocated to Los Angeles because his World War I related injuries made life for him in the colder climes very difficult.
Lewis monitored and responded to antisemitism wherever he could. He kept a close eye on the rise of Nazism and Adolph Hitler.
The Depression hit everyone in the U.S. hard. The Nazis recognized an incredible opportunity. German Americans, deeply distressed by economic circumstances, were the doorway to insinuate themselves into America.
Southern California was home to the largest concentration of German American disabled veterans from the Great War. With deft activity, funding, and focus, Nazi Germany penetrated the largest German-American organization in Southern California, the “Bund,” the “Federation.”
Gaining political control of the Bund, the Nazis, through the guise of social and cultural links, injected rabid antisemitism everywhere. They encouraged American Bund hatred of the Jew to red hot levels.
Plots were fermented in the Bund to create the conditions for a revolution to overthrow the American government. They planned assassinations of large segments of the Jewish film industry, killing the Jewish heads of studios, entertainers, and social influencers. The Nazi led Bund planned bombings and attacks on U.S. Military armories, killing, if necessary, American soldiers in their quest for chaos and weapons.
Lewis became alarmed. He gathered evidence and went to the Los Angeles Chief of Police, Davis. Davis was not interested in a few cranky Germans. He was interested in Communists. Lewis went to the ADL and leaders in the L.A. Jewish community. They disagreed on how to proceed, opting to keep a low profile.
By the late 1930s, Southern California Nazism was growing, spreading rapidly. Lewis knew he had to act even if the Jews were not going to help, even if alone.
Lewis secretly created a spy network with sympathetic disabled German American World War 1 veterans he knew. The veterans were horrified by Nazism and how it could turn German Americans into dangerous pariahs in their own country. They volunteered to penetrate the Bund. They volunteered to take on the very dangerous task of finding out how the Nazis were going to steer antisemitism as their catalyst to destroy America.
These brave men and women reported back to their spymaster, Leon Lewis. Lewis funded the entire operation on his own. The evidence he accumulated was turned over to friends in U.S. Naval intelligence and the FBI.
The worst enemy of the Bund was public scrutiny before they were ready to act. Lewis understood that. Lewis, using his spy network, planted dissension inside the Bund. The dissension centered on financial fraud and Bund voting control. By design, it spilled into a public trial that exposed the Bund leadership for what they were, Nazi fronts.
From the 1930s to 1945, the spy network continued working, turning evidence over to the FBI to route out continuing Nazi plots. Tragically, a number of the “spies” died under mysterious circumstances, to this day unsung. Lewis and his own family were among those to be singled out by the Nazis for “special treatment.”
Lewis stayed at his mission for America, for American Jewry. If organized Jewry would not fund him, another group, secretly agreed to, the American Film Industry.
Without firing a single shot, Lewis broke the back of the Nazi SoCal Bund.
After World War II, Lewis returned to his law practice. He died in 1954 of a heart attack. He never told his family what he had done. Years later, they would learn about his incredible accomplishments.
August 20, 2025, in the tiny Northern Wisconsin town of Hurley, where Lewis was born, the first ever public American tribute to Lewis was dedicated. The tribute was a historical interpretive marker placed with honor, dignity, and pride in front of the Hurley, historical courthouse. The marker was donated by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation and made possible by the very strong support of the Iron County Historical Society and the Hurley community.
Logically, why was a marker not placed in Los Angeles? Why, because no matter how hard JASHP tried to place one, contacting every Jewish organization, every L.A. historical society, no one was interested in the Jew who had saved SoCal from the Nazis.
If L.A. is interested, JASHP is still willing to fund one.
The text of the marker in Hurley reads:
“Leon Lewis, a Jewish Los Angeles attorney, ran an anti-Nazi spy ring from 1933 to 1941. Born in Hurley, Wisconsin, Lewis obtained his law degree in 1913 from the University of Chicago and served in the US Army in France during WWI. Lewis later was the first national executive secretary of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League and founder of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Relations Committee. Because of governmental indifference, even sympathy to rising fascism in the 1930s, Lewis enlisted non-Jewish WWI veterans to infiltrate Nazi organizations in Southern California. After disrupting a plot by militants to sell weapons to American Nazis, Lewis developed allies in U.S. Naval Intelligence. Lewis’s agents uncovered another plot to seize west coast military armories as part of a planned fascist insurrection, Naval Intelligence shut it down. Lewis’s agents prevented assassinations of prominent Jewish citizens and supported prosecution of American Nazis in the 1930s and during WWII.
2025 by Iron County Historical Society, Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.”
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Jerry Klinger is the President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation.