GANGSTERS VS. NAZIS.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

In Gangsters vs. Nazis, crime historian Michael Benson invites us to cheer for Jewish mobsters who attacked Hitler supporters and sympathizers in cities such as New York, Chicago, Newark, and Los Angeles during the 1930s. Benson credits New York Judge Nathan D. Perlman, who conspired with the legendary Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky to disrupt meetings of the German American Bund, with "thinking outside of the box and teaching anti-Semites that Jews were tough and it could be dangerous to be a Nazi."

Perlman's outside-the-box thinking, which led to violent confrontations with Bund members and fascist Silver Shirts across the country, involved many acts of aggression, including bloody beatings that stopped just short of murder. While Benson occasionally acknowledges that the campaign was entirely illegal and deliberately punished antisemites for exercising their First Amendment rights, he has little patience with such objections.

According to "the company line," Benson writes, "hate speech was protected by the freedom of speech." But in reality, he avers, "hate...