40 | JUNE 20 • 2024 
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f you think anti-immi-
gration and antisemitic 
sentiments are running 
high now, look back to exactly 
a century ago, a year when 
one young and little-known 
Detroit lawyer named 
Theodore 
Levin stood 
against the 
nativist tide.
Thousands 
of Ku Klux 
Klan mem-
bers paraded 
through the 
streets of many cities, includ-
ing Kalamazoo and Jackson. 
The Klan controlled the 
government of Indiana and 
ruined that year’s Democratic 
National Convention. 
The nation seemed caught 
up in nativist, anti-immigrant 
and often anti-Jewish hysteria.
People, especially politi-
cians, were worried about 
communist agents from the 

Soviet Union secretly infil-
trating our society, and it was 
often said that most of these 
“Bolsheviks” were Jews.
With that background, 
Congress was moving swift-
ly toward passing the most 
severe anti-immigration bill 
in our nation’s history: the 
Immigration Act of 1924, then 
usually known as the Johnson-
Reed Act, after its sponsors. 
That act severely reduced 
the flow of all newcomers and 
set quotas that were based 
on the 1890 census, before 
most Eastern and Southern 
Europeans, many of them 
Jews, had begun to arrive.
That idea was extreme-
ly popular at the time. 
Americans had returned from 
Europe after World War I 
and were anxious to return to 
“normalcy” and resume their 
isolationist outlook on the 
world.

AN IMMIGRATION 
ADVOCATE
But 27-year-old Theodore 
“Ted” Levin thought differ-
ently. His parents had escaped 
what had been the Russian 
empire, met and married, 
and lived in Chicago. Born 
in 1897, he was the oldest of 
eight children who, after his 
father lost his job in a cigar 
factory there, grew up in 
near-poverty in Toronto and 
then London, Ontario. 
Eventually, Ted and his 
brother Saul would move to 
Detroit and put themselves 
through law school at night 
at the University of Detroit — 
Ted by teaching himself how 
to work in machine shops.
Detroit in the early 1920s 
was one of the few places 
that did not want severe 
restrictions on immigration. 
Thanks to the auto industry, 
the Motor City’s population 
was exploding, and immigrant 

labor for the auto plants was 
very much needed and wel-
comed. 
The Levin brothers knew 
all about the American dream 
and wanted to preserve it for 
others. They got their LL.B 

A look at the amazing legacy of the man behind the 
name of Detroit’s U.S. Courthouse: Theodore Levin.

 Standing 
Against the Tide

JACK LESSENBERRY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS 

Theodore Levin

WIKIPEDIA

A courtroom in the 
Theodore Levin 
U.S. Courthouse in 
Detroit

Legal Guide

continued on page 42

