Historian criticizes Beck's "ludicrous" embrace of anti-Semitic author

In an interview yesterday with Media Matters, a prominent historian criticized Glenn Beck's"ludicrous" promotion of an anti-Communist screed written in the 1930s by a" crackpot" anti-Semite.

On June 4, Beck praised The Red Network: A 'Who's Who' and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, a 1934 book written by Elizabeth Dilling. Beck said:"This is a book -- and I'm a getting a ton of these -- from people who were doing what we're doing now. We now are documenting who all of these people are. Well, there were Americans in the first 50 years of this nation that took this seriously, and they documented it."

As we noted, Dilling was a virulent anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. According to Glen Jeansonne, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee history professor who has written about Dilling, she referred to President Eisenhower as"Ike the Kike" and labeled President Kennedy's New Frontier program the"Jew frontier."