Leonard Dinnerstein’s 1968 Blood Libel and Hoax Against Georgia: Crack the Jew’s Neck

Reading Time: 10 minutes [1840 words]

Career professor of Judaic Studies, Dr. Leonard Dinnerstein in the Highlighted Paragraph, Transcribed below.

On page one hundred ten of the November 1968 American Jewish Archives journal, in his article "Leo M. Frank and the American Jewish Community," Leonard Dinnerstein writes:

"Beyond the main testimony, the jurors had little more on which to base their decision than hearsay, rumors, and unsubstantiated accusations. Yet most members of the public were thoroughly convinced of the defendant's guilt and made their voices heard. The intense summer heat necessitated that the courtroom windows be left open, and remarks from the crowds could be heard easily by those inside. 'Crack the Jew's neck!' 'Lynch him!' were some of the epithets emerging from the more boisterous. Threats were also made 'against the jury that they would be lynched if they did not hang that damned sheeny'" [1].

A Falsification of History, Documented in the Author's Own Correspondence 1968 vs 2014

The above quoted paragraph carries no citation. The three most incendiary quotations in Dinnerstein's article, and arguably in the entire twentieth-century Anglo-American secondary literature on the Frank case, are floated into the text on no evidentiary anchor at all by the author.

The footnote markers immediately before and after the significant paragraph in question, attend to other matters. The quotations themselves, including the nested formulation presented, as though they were facts drawn from a recorded source, rest on nothing substantial other than a metaphorical "trust me." The gravitas is that Dinnerstein writes in 1968 as a newly minted PhD (1966) and the publication is the American Jewish Archives journal (AJAJ), presumed to be a scholarly source of academic integrity. Instead the AJAJ weaponizes antisemitism as a rhetorical incendiary for ethnic warfare between Jews and Gentiles.

This is the pattern Dinnerstein's work would repeat and expand in The Leo Frank Case (1968 dissertation, published 1968 as a book by Columbia University Press, reissued 1987, 2008). Quotations presenting antisemitic mob sentiment are placed in the text at load-bearing points without source documents behind them. The 1968 journal article is one of the earliest and purest specimens of the technique.

When the Halls of Academia Become Incendiary Weapons of Sophisticate Culture War

Forty-six years later, in the December 24, 2014, email to a prominent Wikipedia editor/admin preparing the Leo Frank article for peer review, Dinnerstein conceded the problem. He wrote that he would "drop the phrase 'Hang the Jew'" and agreed with the editor "that the source for the phrase, 'Hang the Jew' is not sufficient." He further acknowledged that Jim Conley "was probably the murderer of Mary Phagan," a position that collapses the moral-historical scaffolding of his 1968 article.

The 1968 article is built on a specific architecture. Its thesis is that Frank was an innocent Jewish factory superintendent convicted through antisemitic pressure, and that the mechanism of wrongful conviction was a courtroom atmosphere of mob intimidation, represented in the text by the three un-sourced quotations on page one hundred ten. Remove the mechanism and the thesis has no engine. A reader asked to accept that the jury convicted Frank because of antisemitism needs to be shown the antisemitism operating on the jury. That is the work the fabricated courtroom quotations were placed in the text to do. Without them, the jury verdict must be explained on the evidence actually entered at trial, which is ground the 1968 article carefully avoids.

The concession that Conley "probably" committed the murder compounds the collapse. In this 1968 framing, Conley is the false accuser whose testimony the antisemitic atmosphere allowed the jury to credit. If Conley was the actual murderer, the historical question becomes how his testimony, in combination with the other evidence, produced a unanimous grand jury indictment on twenty-one votes, a unanimous trial conviction, and the trial evidence affirmance in the Georgia Supreme Court. An antisemitic mob thesis does not account for that outcome. It would require either that a self-protective killer framed Frank so persuasively that the Georgia bench and bar were fooled across three levels of review, or that the evidence against Frank was genuinely strong enough to convict, potentially, independent of Conley. Either possibility dissolves the moral framing of religious bigotry, on which the 1968 article rests.

Dinnerstein's private concession of insufficiency, also exposes a problem of scholarly conduct and academic integrity. It was made in a private email after a FaceBook correspondence, not in a published correction. The 1968 article remained in print, the 1966 PhD dissertation became the 1968 Columbia University Press book, the book was reissued in 1987 (University of Georgia Press), 1991 (Notable Trial Library), 1999 (University of Georgia), and again in 2008 (University of Georgia), and the narrative built on the unsourced courtroom quotations continued to be cited as authoritative and is foundational to Dinnerstein's undercurrent that antisemitism drove the Leo Frank conviction.

Dinnerstein never entered a formal erratum or publicly corrected this egregious example of academic fraud, never revised the book in later editions to flag the evidentiary problem, and never published the admission that the source for the incendiary phrases was, in his own words, insufficient. A scholar who privately concedes that a load-bearing element of his life's work cannot be defended, while allowing the public record of that work to stand unchanged, has crossed from error into suppression into flagrant academic dishonesty of the malfeasant kind.

Two observations follow.

First, the phrases quoted in the 1968 paragraph ("Crack the Jew's neck," "hang that damned sheeny") and the phrase Dinnerstein conceded in 2014 ("Hang the Jew") belong to a single lexical family. They are of the same origin, or absence of origin in their design. If by Dinnerstein's own 2014 admission the evidentiary base for "Hang the Jew" is insufficient, the evidentiary base for its 1968 siblings is no better. He did not publish a correction or a retraction. The 1968 paragraph remains in the printed record and has been cited downstream for more than half a century as though it were established fact.

Confabulation

Second, the proper category for this concoction is confabulation. In scholarly usage the term describes the construction of narrative detail where source material is absent, presented as though it were drawn from sources, sometimes without the author's full awareness of what has happened in his own composition process. The 1968 paragraph supplies atmospheric detail (summer heat, open windows, mob pressure) to generate the impression of eyewitness reportage, then inserts into this artificial atmosphere three direct quotations that appear nowhere in the trial proceedings, nowhere in the three major Atlanta newspapers of August 1913, and nowhere in the appellate record that Rosser and Arnold filed in 1913 and 1914. The quotations were not overheard. They were written, as a matter of fact, in Dinnerstein's office more than fifty years after the trial ended, and placed into the historical record by typographical insertion rather than by documentary retrieval and citation.

Why It Matters

The Dinnerstein paragraph has functioned as a foundation stone for the mainstream pro-Frank narrative, repeated by ADL and SPLC. It has been cited, paraphrased, remixed, rebooted, and absorbed into subsequent books, encyclopedia entries, museum panels, documentary film voiceovers, and Wikipedia revisions throughout history. Each downstream use borrowed credibility from Dinnerstein's academic standing at the University of Arizona and from the imprimatur of the American Jewish Archives. None of the downstream users, apart from the editor who pressed Dinnerstein in 2014, appears to have asked where the quotations actually came from. The 2014 email shows the reason: when pressed, Dinnerstein himself could not defend them.

Final Thoughts and Conclusive Summary

A paragraph that was read for half a century as courtroom reportage is, in fact, an authorial construction built to sustain what amounts to an antigentile blood libel narrative of trial by persecution, unsupported by source material, and the author admitted as much, in writing, in 2014. Yet, the antisemitic death threat hoax is still be promulgated by Leo Frank's defenders, who can clearly see Dinnerstein's claim has no citation origin.

The historiographical status of the paragraph should be adjusted accordingly. Every book, article, documentary, museum panel, and encyclopedia entry that rests on it, whether directly or by inheritance through Dinnerstein's later imitators, should be reexamined on the same ground. The burden is not on the skeptic to disprove phrases the author himself could not defend. The burden is on those who continue to cite them to produce the primary source, from 1913, that Dinnerstein never cited and in 2014 conceded did not exist.

This antisemitic death threat hoax, isn't the only hoax that Leonard Dinnerstein has promoted publicly, he also promoted the Mary Phagan bite wound hoax. I encourage you to read a copy of my 2025 book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan. It buying my book is not within your budget, my 1987 first edition book of the same title is in the public domain. I have declared it so.

Enclosed is segment 9 and 10, of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Volume 3, The Leo Frank Case, Lynching of a Guilty Man. Here you can see how widespread this disgusting hoax has been spread to rehabilitate a perverse libertine, child-rapist and convicted sex killer, Atlanta B'nai B'rith President Leo Max Frank. These falsifications and distortions of history continue to cause great harm to my family, who to this day, 113 years later, still have to fight tooth and nail for historical truth.

Footnotes

1. Dinnerstein, L. (1968). Leo M. Frank and the American Jewish community. American Jewish Archives, 20(2), 107-126, at p. 110. https://archive.org/details/american-jewish-archive-journal-volume-20-number-2-leo-m-frank-and-the-american-/page/n3/mode/2up

Dinnerstein's 2014 admission

2. Dinnerstein, L. (2014, December 24). Re: Leo Frank [Email correspondence to J. Enright].

Bibliography

Editions of Dinnerstein's book, showing the four missed opportunities for correction after the 1968 article

Dinnerstein, L. (1966). The Leo Frank case [Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, History Department]. https://archive.org/details/TheLeoFrankCaseByLeonardDinnerstein

Dinnerstein, L. (1968). The Leo Frank case. Columbia University Press. https://www.amazon.com/Leo-Frank-Case-Leonard-Dinnerstein/dp/0231030673

Dinnerstein, L. (1987). The Leo Frank case (Rev. paperback ed., Brown Thrasher Books). University of Georgia Press. https://archive.org/details/leofrankcase00dinn

Dinnerstein, L. (1991). The Leo Frank case. Notable Trials Library.

Dinnerstein, L. (1999). The Leo Frank case (Reissue). University of Georgia Press.

Dinnerstein, L. (2008). The Leo Frank case (Rev. ed., with new preface). University of Georgia Press. https://www.ugapress.org/9780820331799/the-leo-frank-case/

The historical record Dinnerstein's quotations do not appear in

Frank v. State, 141 Ga. 243, 80 S.E. 1016 (Ga. 1914). (Brief of Evidence, trial record, and appellate record). https://archive.org/details/leo-frank-georgia-supreme-court-case-records-of-1913-1914

Alexander, H. A. (1914). Some facts about the murder notes in the Phagan case (privately published).

The Atlanta Constitution, The Atlanta Journal, and The Atlanta Georgian, July 28 through August 26, 1913 (trial coverage).

Downstream scholarly correction of the Dinnerstein narrative

Oney, S. (2003). And the dead shall rise: The murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank. Pantheon Books.

Webb, C. (2004). A glimmer of hope: The Leo Frank case, interview with Leonard Dinnerstein. Southern Jewish History, 7, 1–28.

Contextual biographical note

Dinnerstein, L. (born May 5, 1934; died January 22, 2019). Emeritus professor of American history, University of Arizona; director of Judaic Studies Program, 1993–2000.