Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

The Yeshiva University Professor Who Secured U.S. Residency for John Lennon

All you need is love, but sometimes a good immigration lawyer is also helpful.

That’s what the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is reminding people today, the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Like countless Jews before him, the former Beatle faced resistance to his efforts to gain U.S. residency — though in his case the problem wasn’t xenophobia or anti-Semitism. An outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Lennon made himself an enemy of the Nixon administration, which used a drug charge in England as a pretext to seek his deportation.

The lawyer who ultimately secured Lennon’s stay in the United States — over the course of four rounds in federal court — was Leon Wildes, a Yeshiva University law professor who now sits on the board of HIAS.

“I wasn’t very familiar with the Beatles,” Wildes says in a fall 2010 article in Passages, an HIAS publication. “The night I met the Lennons to discuss their legal situation, I went home and told my wife that I had met with Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto.”

Wildes’ wife quickly set him straight, and the lawyer and his clients eventually triumphed after a five-year legal battle.

Three decades after the Beatle’s death, Wildes says a living Lennon could have made a strong ally for HIAS’s brand of advocacy and activism. “John was brilliant,” said Wildes, who remains in touch with Yoko Ono. “It’s a tragedy that we don’t have him around to speak up respectfully against the injustices of immigration law or the way it’s carried out. He had that gift.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.