The Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies presents
The 2025 Tobias Lecture in Jewish Studies
“Shmoozing with Priests and Cops:
Covering Catholic Fascism in the Yiddish Press”
Klaus C. Yoder
Assistant Professor of Religion, Vassar College
Monday, March 10
4:00pm
Memorial Union, Old Madison Room
(800 Langdon St, Madison, WI)
Zoom livestream also available – click here to register and receive the link
In the summer of 1939, dozens of concerned citizens wrote to the mayor of New York City expressing their suspicions that the New York Police Department had a Christian Front problem. The Front was a Catholic-dominated political formation inspired by the radio personality Father Coughlin, whose antisemitic vision of “social justice” included purging the nation of leftists, bankers, and other perceived Jewish influences. In January 1940, after the arrest of seventeen Brooklyn-based Christian Front paramilitary members for sedition, a survey of the NYPD revealed that 407 officers admitted to being members of the Christian Front.
During this period, the New York Yiddish press printed extensive coverage of these events along with editorials and investigative series that interpreted the nexus of Catholicism, policing, and right-wing politics for their readers. Drawing on this Yiddish-language journalism, this presentation situates these events and discourses in the broader religious and political history of the NYPD and asks what they signify for interpreting the ongoing relationship between religion, race, and state violence.
Klaus C. Yoder teaches in the Religion Department at Vassar College and co-hosts the podcast Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil. His current research focuses on the overlapping histories of Catholicism, policing, and right-wing politics.
Co-sponsored by Religious Studies, the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, and German, Nordic, & Slavic+
For a downloadable PDF of this poster, click here