A USA Today Best­seller

From the author of Pulitzer Prize final­ist Hitler in Los Ange­les, the defin­i­tive sto­ry of the intre­pid activists and spies who fought against a resur­gent move­ment of hate in America‑a book that ​“should be read by every Amer­i­can who wants to know how coura­geous men and women can resist hatred.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

Amer­i­cans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tol­er­ance in the Unit­ed States. But anti­semitism and racism went up-not down-after the war’s end. Vio­lence broke out in cities across the coun­try, and the num­ber of orga­nized hate groups more than dou­bled from 1940 to 1946. In this shock­ing account of a resur­gence of White Suprema­cy in Amer­i­ca, cel­e­brat­ed his­to­ri­an Steven J. Ross reveals how four key lead­ers-Emory Burke, J. B. Ston­er, James Madole, and George Lin­coln Rock­well-worked togeth­er to ​“fin­ish the job Hitler had begun,” launch­ing dead­ly attacks on Jews and African Amer­i­cans and build­ing a net­work of ter­ror­ists across the U.S. In response to this ​“war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defama­tion League, George Mintzer of the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Com­mit­tee, and James Shel­don of the Non-­Sec­tar­i­an Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a mul­ti­pronged effort: They infil­trat­ed, mon­i­tored, and under­mined these hate groups, putting their own safe­ty on the line and scor­ing impor­tant vic­to­ries that, today, have been all but for­got­ten.

Trac­ing the extra­or­di­nary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate pro­vides a ground­break­ing recon­sid­er­a­tion of the lega­cy of the ​“Good War,” and essen­tial read­ing on how Amer­i­ca today can beat hate once again and build a just and unit­ed nation.