Opinion: Mob vs. Justice: Lessons From Leo Frank

Karen Paikin Barall

The final performance of “Parade,” a Tony Award-winning musical, was recently held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It told the story of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan, a teenage girl in Atlanta, and the flawed trial, conviction, and, ultimately, the vigilante lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish New Yorker transplanted to the American South who managed the factory where the murder took place. The trial was marred by antisemitism, bribery, coerced testimony and mob intimidation.

Though the curtain has closed, Frank’s conviction marks one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in American history, and it leaves us with critical and urgent lessons we must use to confront the challenges Jews are facing today.

Antisemitism is seeping int