by
Henry Ford (l) and Aaron Sapiro in an article in the Vancouver Sun (Screenshot from the documentary)
A new documentary, “Sapiro V. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford,” tells the story of Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro, who in the 1920s sued one of America’s most famous antisemites, industrialist Henry Ford, in U.S. District Court in downtown Detroit.
The libel lawsuit led the automaker to publicly apologize for his antisemitic views and shut down his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which frequently published antisemitic material and attacked Sapiro, accusing him of being part of an international Jewish conspiracy.
The filmmakers describe the legal case as a milestone for American Jews and “the moment when hate speech went on trial.” The case was framed as a battle of David and Goliath.
The film is directed by Gaylen Ross and written by Ross and Carol King (not the singer), a Detroit native who lives in California.
The film, which is being shown next month, comes as antisemtism in America and around the world is on the rise. Screenings are scheduled for the New York Jewish Film Festival (Jan 14-28, 2026) at Film at Lincoln Center and the Miami Jewish Film Festival (Jan 18, 2026). It can also be seen via digital streaming Jan 19-28, 2026, and is expected to show at other venues in the future. (See trailer below)
How It Began
Born in Oakland, Calif., Sapiro was the son of poor immigrant parents.
The seeds of the confrontation began, according to the film’s website, when California Gov. Hiram Johnson hired Sapiro to help struggling farmers organize what were essentially cooperatives or unions of small-scale farmers.
Sapiro, who later practiced law in New York and Chicago, went on to help cotton growers in Mississippi, tobacco growers in Kentucky, potato growers in Utah, and finally wheat growers in Saskatchewan. The New York Times called him “the leader of one of the greatest agricultural movements of modern times.”
His success agitated Henry Ford, who launched a smear campaign against him in The Dearborn Independent. One article was titled, “Jewish Exploitation of the American Farmer’s Organizations.”
The piece singled out Sapiro, claiming he wanted “to turn American agriculture over to the international Jews, to spread Communism and Bolshevism among our people," according to the film's website.
In 1925, according to The New York Times, Sapiro filed a $1 million lawsuit alleging that Ford’s hateful articles harmed him as an attorney.
The case went to trial but was declared a mistrial due to a controversy involving a juror.
It ended with an out-of-court settlement in 1927, with Ford agreeing to publicly apologize for his antisemitic views and pay Sapiro and his associates $140,000 in expenses, according to The New York Times. Ford also shut down The Dearborn Independent.
“This announcement of Mr. Ford’s justifies all the worry, trouble and expense of the long and bitter suit at Detroit,” Sapiro said, according to the Associated Press.
"I felt certain that Mr. Ford was being deceived by subordinates and that if he were pushed face to face with what his paper had done he would do the manly thing and refute the attacks. I am proud to have been the agency to bring these things to his attention, and thereby to have enabled him to have set himself right as a maker of opinion throughout the world."
Monumental Impact
The film's website says:
It was a monumental triumph in American Jewish history. Sapiro had forced the most powerful and vocal practitioner of hate speech to condemn its use. No laws resulted… yet. But out of this case came the idea that hate speech inflicted harm on minorities, and those who uttered words of bigotry and racism could be held accountable.
Reporter Bill McGraw reported in Deadline Detroit in his 2019 story: 100 Years Later, Dearborn Confronts the Hate of Hometown Hero Henry Ford:
Ford closed the Independent in December 1927. But the damage had been done.
“Ford’s well-publicized decision was disingenuous,” wrote Victoria Saker Woeste in “Henry Ford’s War on Jews,” because he knew that even after closing the paper, his hate literature already lived on in hundreds of thousands of copies of “The International Jew."
Not all went well for Sapiro after that. In 1933, he was indicted in Chicago along with mobster Al Capone and others on allegations that they extorted dues from employers’ plants and union treasuries, using people like Sapiro and a number of union officials as their “front,” according to the New York Times.
The trial ended in a mistrial for Sapiro, and the charges were dropped.
Sapiro died in Los Angeles in 1959 at age 75.
In a tribute in the New York Times after his death, Nathan Straus wrote:
The death of Aaron Sapiro ends the career of a man who rendered outstanding service to the whole nation. He had the courage to enter into combat with a powerful individual who had been misguided into using his great wealth for activities that were undermining the foundations of our country.
