Published: 12 February 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THERE IS ZERO EVIDENCE that Florence Mendheim was the inspiration for Batgirl. But the real-life Jewish woman from the Bronx and the fictional daughter of Gotham City’s Commissioner Gordon were both librarians who led secret double lives fighting bad guys.
In Mendheim’s case, the villains were German-American Nazi sympathizers who met in taverns and beer gardens throughout New York City in the mid-1930s.
The daughter of a German-Jewish family that still had close contact with relatives back in Berlin, Mendheim would end her day’s work at the New York Public Library branch in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood and go spy on meetings of the Friends of New Germany, later the German American Bund.
Pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer herself and working under various aliases, she’d gather names, take notes and collect pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic material for the American Jewish Congress.
Boxes of that material now sit at the New York branch of the Leo Baeck Institute, the research library and archive focused on the history of German-speaking Jews.
FULL STORY A Jewish librarian spied on New York Nazis in the 1930s (JTA)
Photo: Florence Mendheim (Leo Baeck Institute/Florence Mendheim Collection of Anti-Semitic Propaganda)
