Leon Lawrence Lewis (September 5, 1888 – May 21, 1954) was an American attorney, the first national secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, the national director of B'nai B'rith, the founder and first executive director of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Relations Committee, and a key figure in the spy operations that infiltrated American Nazi organizations in the 1930s and early 1940s.
[6] After graduating from law school, Lewis accepted the position of national secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, and began to work on discrimination cases in the Midwest.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Lewis enlisted—but first, through the ADL, convinced President Wilson to order the removal of all anti-Semitic statements from U.S. Army training manuals.
He stayed in Germany for six months after the end of the war, primarily to care for wounded soldiers and achieve recompense for families of the dead.
[6] They also foiled a plot by U.S. Marines to sell weapons to American fascists, and exposed Dietrich Gefken's plan to take over West Coast military armories.
[10][11] Leon Lewis is featured in the 2022 podcast Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra[12] for his heroic role in exposing the plot by the Silver Shirts[13] and other heavily armed pro-Nazi groups in the U.S. to overthrow the federal government and install a fascist regime.