While Frank Cohn enlisted as a young man and then dedicated most of his career to military service, Moe Berg had already distinguished himself—as a catcher for the Dodgers and the White Sox—before World War II began. Stuart Halpern writes:

Morris Berg was born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents in a tenement on East 121st Street in Manhattan on March 2, 1902. At seven, demonstrating a passion for both the game and secret identities, he played for a Methodist Church team under the pseudonym Runt Wolfe. After graduating from Barringer High School, Berg played shortstop for Princeton, where he majored in modern languages. He and another teammate would communicate on the field in Latin. . . . Continuing to balance his intellectual and athletic interests he [later] spent the winter studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Following his 1939 retirement as a player, Berg remained a committed patriot. He undertook an undercover assignment as a sports ambassador in Latin America under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs—a U.S. government agency dedicated to countering German and Italian propaganda efforts in Latin America. He parlayed that opportunity into a job as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, in 1943.

At the OSS, his missions included posing as a businessman in Switzerland and being dropped behind enemy lines in Italy to make contact with an Italian atomic scientist. Also fluent in German, Berg was assigned to assassinate the leading German physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Werner Heisenberg in Zurich if Heisenberg indicated during a lecture there that Berlin was close to developing an atomic bomb. (Germany wasn’t, so Berg didn’t kill Heisenberg.)

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.