As the former chairman of Chicago's Jewish Defense League (JDL) for ten of its ten and a half years, I led from the front.  Fighting scared the hell out of me, but survival burned in my heart.  My folks never raised a finger in the Holocaust, and I could not follow those footprints.  Frank Collin's neo-Nazi party legally won the right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1978, where the largest group of Holocaust survivors lived outside Israel.  David Goldberger, an ACLU Jewish attorney, led the Nazis to that victory.  Per former Illinois senator Howie Carroll, Collin "begged" him to find an alternative site because the Nazi leader said the JDL would kill him in Skokie.  Collin had his demonstration in downtown Chicago, and Skokie was spared the ghosts of the Holocaust.

Skokie was not Charlottesville.  The JDL never went into a battle with weapons, even though the FBI plant in our group asked for my permission to bring weapons to fights.  My response was no.  Both sides in Charlottesville had weapons.  We weren't against weapons, but being constantly blasted by the Jewish leadership in the media, we couldn't afford additional bad press.  Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, a powerful Chicago figure and federal judge, invited me to his office before the pending JDL/Nazi confrontation.  His suite was a picture gallery of him and world leaders.  After we spoke, he realized I wasn't the extremist he was expecting.  I had graduated from the University of Illinois and knew my history.  We were both Marine Corps vets.  He beseeched me to avoid a Nazi street fight, but my response was that it's best to fight a cancer while it's small.  We agreed to disagree, and the mood was civil.

I offered to work with the FBI, but they figuratively spat in my face.  Subsequently, a Chicago Police undercover sergeant walked into my office and asked me to work with him.  We shook hands, and I asked him to put out his cigar.  He said he could see I was going to be a problem and smiled.  We became solid friends, and I promised that no JDL member would ever fight with a Chicago cop.  In ten years, it never happened.  The cops had our backs, and I think I survived thanks to the Irish Catholic undercover officer, while our leaders in California and New York were murdered.  Early on, he told me the Klan and the Nazis had decided to kill me.  He said, "Carry a gun," but couldn't authorize it.

I was nearly killed four times.  Some of our enemies carried fighting sticks, and many of our men were injured.  I walked away from every fight, but I was injured every time and still suffer intense pain from those injuries.  Never losing my temper in a fight, even with people kicking, punching, and hammering me with sticks, helped me survive.  In Charlottesville, people fighting were raging out of control.  We urged our guys to keep cool in fights.

Bigotry is a mental illness.  The fiery hatred I saw in videos of Charlottesville was matched in my time when ten of us went to Nazi headquarters before the scheduled Nazi march in Skokie and challenged Collin to come out and fight right there.  Police were like locusts, and hostile crowds, five and six deep on the sidewalks for blocks, screamed out their hatred of Jews.  Two tough-looking plainclothes dicks stood in the doorway like Chicago Bears linemen, blocking the entry.  We refused to bust our way past the coppers, and once inside, the Nazis could have legally shot us.  But that one incident of JDL insanity convinced Collin he had some crazy Jews on his hands.  My police contact told me the Nazis were worried.

In Charlottesville, both sides fought with the police, and the numbers there were huge, way beyond what we faced.  However, the threat of deadly harm was present in both locales.  In 1977, I had to leave town for business and appointed a guy to take charge at a Nazi demonstration, cautioning him to keep all our members together.  He didn't, and a tough 50-year-old member got isolated.  Eight Nazis beat him to a pulp with fighting sticks.  They caved in his skull; he became epileptic, lost his job, wife, and everything else.  It was heartbreaking.

Every time we fought hate groups, I was marked by a team of four or five men, hoping to beat me to death.  Thankfully, my buddies picked off a few of them, and I grounded a few of them, and, though injured, I was alive to return another day.  In Charlottesville, it looked like a total free-for-all without any direction.  

No one ever drove a car into our men.  I saw women fighting the Nazis in Charlottesville, but the JDL said no to women fighting.  Charlottesville was a mob on both sides.  In Chicago, both sides had organized teams of fighters.  Success was easier to measure when battling it out in Chicago.  Hardly ever were the police between us and the Nazis as in Charlottesville.

Today's hate groups know that many Jews are armed and that "never again" is their password.  The 1930s and '40's are gone.  However, I was stunned by the huge numbers of Nazis in Charlottesville, invigorated by their own success.  Did those marchers forgot that 50 million people died in WWII because of what their flags represent?  Those parading under the swastika need a WWII history refresher.  Six million Jews and 5 million Christians, unarmed, were slaughtered by Nazi cowards.  So many American Christian families lost loved ones fighting Hitler.  Shame on Christians, and anyone else, for marching in Charlottesville under the swastika.  Their flag is Old Glory and nothing else!  Their loved ones who died for freedom would turn over in their graves knowing that their family members are fighting what these G.I.s died for in WWII.

Once we took an American and a Nazi flag from Collin.  He wanted only the Nazi flag back.  That says it all.

Frank Collin's dad, Max Cohan, was shoved into Dachau early on but managed to get out and survived.  I knew him, and his psyche was shattered.  Collin was booted out of the main Nazi Party because his dad was a Jew.  The father of the leader of the main Nazi Party in Chicago fought Nazis in the Norwegian underground.  Those fathers suffered under the swastika only to have their sons become Nazis.  Such deep pain never heals.

Charlottesville is far more threatening to American liberty than Collin was in the 1970s.  My wife and I always keep current passports, means of protection, and financial readiness for the day we hope never comes.  The JDL members were American patriots, but a country controlled by Nazis would laugh at that, and Collin told me he'd kill all the Jews.

Upon college graduation, I enlisted in the Marines, declined an offer to apply for jet fighter pilot school, and served in the ranks, rising to infantry sergeant.  The Corps put the grit in my gut to stand for the American flag and the Constitution.  It's doubtful that many of these hatful types served their country.  We Marines became brothers in arms and looked past religion, color, and ethnicity and stood shoulder to shoulder against those who would destroy the finest country in the world, the USA.  These hate groups, no matter whose side they are on or what they call themselves, are not Americans in spirit or behavior.  I hope American patriots look past everything if bad times come and stand as one to save a nation, with all its failings, which has been a light of hope unto this angry world.