The mother from Montana who became a leader in fighting a neo-Nazi

DAN COLEMAN tells the story of how real estate agent Tanya Gersh took on and helped defeat alt-right antisemite Richard Spencer

“HOW HAS A MOTHER from Montana become a leader in fighting antisemitism?” This is the question posed by the LinkedIn profile of Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, a small resort town in the Rocky Mountains that’s a gateway to the jagged peaks, lakes and glacier-carved valleys of Glacier National Park.          

The answer to Gersh’s rhetorical question garnered attention across the US on September 5 when the New York Times profiled her central role in a struggle against antisemitic extremism, a struggle waged by her, her rabbi, Whitefish mayor John Muhlfeld and a community against one of America’s most notorious right-wing extremists and his mother.

Richard Spencer, who Vanity Fair has characterised as a “loathsome, alt-right skunk”, is a notorious neo-Nazi, antisemite and white supremacist. Spencer is the founder of altright.com and directs the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white supremacist think tank. The latter operated out of the $US3 million Whitefish summer home owned by Spencer’s mother, Sherry. And that’s where the trouble began.

According to the Times, shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, a video of Spencer’s “racially charged” address to an NPI conference went viral. Concerned Whitefish residents met to discuss protesting in front of the NPI headquarters. It was then that Gersh heard from Sherry Spencer, who expressed interest in selling the property.

A few weeks later, Ms Spencer published a piece in the American online publishing platform Medium claiming that Gersh had threatened that “if I did not sell my building, 200 protesters and national media would show up outside — which would drive down the property value — until I complied.” The post in question is no longer available, marked by Medium as “under investigation or in violation of the Medium Rules.”

At this point, Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, caught wind of the matter and decided that Gersh was a Jew worth going after. Anglin called on his followers to rally and march in Whitefish.