Flyers calling for New Yorkers to join the Jewish Defense League were spotted in Kew Gardens last week. Eagle photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
Flyers calling for recruits to join a far-right Jewish group once dubbed a terrorist organization by the FBI were recently spotted in Queens, plastered to a parking meter across the street from the office of the borough’s top cop.
Around 10 flyers advertising membership to the Jewish Defense League were stuck onto a parking meter on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, a couple hundred feet from the Queens district attorney’s office inside Queens Criminal Court and the Queens borough president’s office at Borough Hall.
One of the flyers claimed that the neighborhood, where a large number of Jewish residents live, was being “monitored” by the New York City chapter of the JDL, which was founded in the late 1960s by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who urged Jews to respond to real or perceived antisemitism with violence and who himself was convicted several times of terrorism-related crimes.
About a week after the signs were spotted by the Eagle, they had been mostly torn down or defaced. It’s unclear if the signs posted on the Queens Boulevard parking meter were the only JDL ads placed in the neighborhood.
The JDL was largely believed to have been dormant over the past two decades, but the ideology behind the group’s founding has reportedly seen a resurgence following the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Fuck Gaza for their atrocities on October 7th and fuck you if you support them,” one of the signs found in Queens read. “Nazi scum[,] your time will come.”
A member of a JDL offshoot group, the JDL 613 Brotherhood, was arrested in March for plotting to firebomb the New York City home of prominent Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani. While JDL USA, the group purportedly advertising in Queens, has distanced itself from JDL 613, both groups consider themselves the rightful practitioners of Kahane’s teachings.
Na’amah Devine, an organizer for JDL USA based in Chicago, confirmed to the Eagle that the group looks for members in the five boroughs.
“[W]e have recruiting stickers all around New York City and other cities,” Devine said.
The JDL member declined to comment further on the organization, directing the Eagle instead to its website, where the JDL is described as “the most controversial and most effective Jewish group in American history.”
Devine said the group doesn’t “give out numbers” when asked by the Eagle about the number of JDL USA members in New York City, adding that the group was forced to “dismantle” its chapter system because of the actions of the JDL 613 Brotherhood.
Devine, who publicly condemned the alleged bomb plot orchestrated by JDL 613 Brotherhood member Alexander Heifler, told the New York Times that around 200 people are vetted members of JDL USA.
A pamphlet posted on JDL USA’s website says that the organization “unconditionally and unequivocally condemns all forms of terrorism” and that it is “an above-board, law-abiding organization.”
The JDL is no longer listed as a terror organization by the FBI.
Some local officials denounced the signs in the area of Queens home to a large Jewish population, while others downplayed their significance.
City Councilmember Lynn Schulman, who represents Kew Gardens in the city’s legislature, told the Eagle in a statement that she “does not tolerate hate of any kind.”
After being made aware of the flyers by the Eagle, Schulman’s office reported the signs to the NYPD and the Department of Transportation, which maintains the city’s parking meters.
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said that “those who perpetuate hate, violence and extremism will never have a home in The World’s Borough, where residents of all races and religions proudly live in harmony alongside one another.”
“To this far-right hate group and any other extremist looking to radicalize our neighbors, promote violence in our communities or place targets on entire ethnicities, Queens has two words for you — kick rocks,” he added. “You or your ideology will never be welcome in our borough or in our city.”
But not all officials were concerned about the flyers.
“I don’t think they are indicative of a larger movement,” said Assemblymember Sam Berger. “I wouldn’t say there is something growing here.”
Berger said he hadn’t seen any evidence in person or in online groups that the JDL’s presence was taking root in Queens.
He also questioned whether the signs were placed by actual members of the JDL.
“Anybody can take the name JDL,” he said, adding that the Democratic Socialists of America has distanced itself from some who have claimed to act on the organization’s behalf – unlike the JDL, the DSA has never been designated by the federal government as a terrorist group.
But while he believes the JDL’s presence is minuscule, Berger said he would “take it very seriously” should that presence grow.
“Whatever point you’re trying to make [should] not come across through acts of terrorism,” he said.
The Queens district attorney’s office declined to comment.
The JDL has a long history in Queens.
At the time of the group’s founding in 1968, Kahane was working as a rabbi at the Rochdale Village Traditional Synagogue in Queens.
It was from the World’s Borough that his far-right ideology spread.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, center, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in 1977. AP file photo by Charles Tasnadi
A year after its creation, the group had added a San Francisco chapter and claimed to have around 5,700 members, according to a 1969 profile of the group in TIME Magazine.
Under Kahane, whose slogan was “Every Jew a .22,” the group grew more violent, mostly targeting representatives of the Soviet Union. It also harassed and attacked Arab and Muslim groups and people.
In the first decade of the JDL’s existence, JDL members were arrested for bringing firearms and explosives to John F. Kennedy Airport in an attempt to hijack a plane operated by an Arab airline, for bombing a Soviet trading company based in the United States, and, on various occasions, for illegally buying and transporting guns.
Kahane’s philosophy was also adopted by spin-off groups.
In 1978, a group calling itself the “New Jewish Defense League” took credit for a failed plot to bomb the home of an Egyptian UN diplomat living in Queens.
Kahane was assassinated in 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born U.S. citizen who later went on to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. The group continued to commit acts of terrorism under Irv Rubin, its new leader. Rubin died by suicide in 2002 while awaiting trial on conspiracy charges – he was arrested for crafting a plan to bomb a mosque and the office of a Californian congressman.
Following Rubin’s death and the JDL’s labeling as a terrorist organization by the FBI, JDL chapters began to shutter. While the organization maintained an online presence, it was largely believed that there were no active chapters of the JDL in the years preceding the October 7th attacks.
But Kahane’s ideology appeared to reemerge after the Hamas terror attacks and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza.
The rabbi’s beliefs have also seen a resurgence as the city has experienced a spike in antisemitic hate crimes, which accounted for over 50 percent of all hate crime incidents in 2025.
In November 2023, the New York Daily News published an op-ed by “Manhattan resident and Jewish philanthropist” David Blumenfeld, who called for a new group to carry the JDL’s mantle and serve as “a strong, proud, and effective national organization that will be felt on the streets, on campuses, and within the halls of Congress.”
“Through a new JDL we can be galvanized to defend ourselves, to recognize that we are being attacked for who we are, to confront intimidation on the street and online, and to fight back in the manner the JDL did,” Blumenfeld wrote.
It also appears that JDL 613 chapters began to form post-October 7.
Instagram accounts for JDL 613 chapters in Brazil, Portugal, and Atlanta were respectively created in March 2025, November 2025 and January 2026.
The Instagram account for the JDL 613 Brotherhood chapter that Heifler allegedly belonged to, which is based in New Jersey, was created in April 2025.
Though the group’s website was deleted after the arrest, a shop selling JDL 613 Brotherhood merch remains online. Among the items sold are T-shirts that read, “Kahane was right,” “every Jew a .22,” and “curbstomp your local Palestine supporter.”
In a message to the Eagle, Devine called the JDL 613 Brotherhood a “wannabe, copycat…offshoot” group.
But like the JDL 613 Brotherhood, JDL USA members are followers of Kahane’s movement.
“JDL USA is essentially the modern iteration of Rabbi Kahane’s original group,” she said during an interview with the New York Times, which she recorded and uploaded to YouTube. “We have connections and support with people who were involved in the original group in the ‘70s.”
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of The New York Board of Rabbis, told the Eagle that while he doesn’t think joining the JDL is an “appropriate response” for Jewish New Yorkers afraid for their safety, he’s more concerned “with the attacks on Jews” that have surged in the city.
Potasnik said he’s noticed an uptick in the number of Jewish New Yorkers taking self-defense classes or making trips to gun ranges, though he hasn’t heard of specific instances of people joining the JDL.
“When people feel unprotected, they’re going to do these things,” he said. “People are going to get arms. They are going to do all the things that they normally would not do, but now they want to do.”
