Did Charles Coughlin, the notorious Jew-hating Catholic priest from suburban Detroit – whose 1930s radio program was estimated to have reached a weekly national audience of 30 million – have a later-in-life conversion… to Zionism?
“The Radio Priest” was the textbook definition of an American demagogue, blaming Jews for most of the world’s ills including luring the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor as a way to bring the U.S. into World War II. Through his one-million circulation Social Justice magazine, Coughlin also republished weekly installments from the infamous 1903 antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion – long after Henry Ford and his notoriously antisemitic Dearborn Independent newspaper publicly apologized for doing so. Never defrocked by the Catholic Church, never apologetic for his antisemitic tirades, Coughlin served as parish priest of Royal Oak’s Shrine of
the Little Flower from 1926 until his 1966 retirement.
From Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Zionist?
The William Davidson Digital Archive of Jewish Detroit History, which comprises all content from the Detroit Jewish News and Detroit Jewish Chronicle since 1916, offers some clues. A surprising story buried on page 30 of the February 10, 1978 edition of the Detroit Jewish News includes a 1966 photo of the priestly garbed Coughlin purchasing a $500 State of Israel Bond in the presence of local Jewish community activist Jack Gelfand, and witnessed by his wife, Mildred. Proceeds from State of Israel Bonds are used to build infrastructure and support economic development.
(Publication of the photo has its own backstory. Detroit Jewish News publisher and editor Philip Slomovitz initially refused to run it in 1966 unless Coughlin apologized and repudiated his views – he didn’t. Slomovitz finally allowed the photo to run, one month after Gelfand’s death, without explanation.)
Coughlin wasn’t buying the bond to diversify his personal investment portfolio – certainly not from “Jewish financiers” – or to gift it to a Shaarey Zedek, Temple Israel or B’nai David bar mitzvah boy. According to the photo’s accompanying story, when asked why he bought the bond, the priest replied, “all people need a roof over their heads.”
While the relatively modest purchase hardly elevated Coughlin to “ardent Zionist” or Zionist Organization of America Balfour Ball honoree status, the Twentieth Century’s most notorious American antisemite supported Jewish sovereignty as represented by the state of Israel. His words can also be interpreted to acknowledge Palestinian aspirations.
In the aftermath of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s rancorous and razor-thin victory last week over Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary, some Jewish party faithful believe he borrowed pages from the same populist script used by Coughlin – but with a contemporary twist: Blame the world’s ills, and America’s, on support for Israel by Jews and non-Jews. Dr. El-Sayed can begin restitching the supposed “big tent” of the Democratic party that he and others helped to tear – in Michigan and nationally – by building upon what even Coughlin came to believe:
All people need a roof over their heads. Recognize the importance, necessity and reality of the state of Israel to the global and Michigan Jewish communities. Doing so need not conflict with pursuing dignity, autonomy and self-governance for Palestinians – or require the purchase of an Israeli bond.
