The Death Of American Antisemitism

Blakeslee examines the history and current status of Jews and antisemitism in the United States to reveal what we know of antisemitism and the ways in which this knowledge is seriously flawed. He explores the significant historical role antisemitism played in the formation of Jewish advocacy organizations and the subsequent success they enjoyed over several decades of publicly combating antisemitism. He then examines three specific incidents in the 1990s and the ways the advocacy organizations responded. Antisemitic attitudes and incidents in the United States have dropped steadily since the post World War II revelations about the Holocaust. While antisemitism has not disappeared entirely from the American scene, it has dwindled to the point where the Anti-Defamation League considers the average American not antisemitic. Blakeslee probes why, if this statement is accurate—and prevailing statistics suggest it is—prominent Jewish advocacy organizations continue to lavish so much attention and money on an issue of little actual significance. A provocative study for all sociologists, researchers, and concerned lay people involved with the heated debate over antisemitism, Jewish identity, assimilation, Black-Jewish relations, and organizational studies.

A Concise History of American Antisemitism shows how Christianity's negative views of Jews pervaded American history from colonial times to the present. The book describes the European background to American anti-Semitism, then divides American history into time periods, and examines the anti-Semitic ideas, personalities, and literature in each period. It also demonstrates that anti-Semitism led to certain behaviors in some United States officials that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Clear and forceful, A Concise History of American Antisemitism is an important work for undergraduate course use and for the general public interested in the roots of the current rash of anti-Semitism.

Is antisemitism on the rise in America? Did the "hymietown" comment by Jesse Jackson and the Crown Heights riot signal a resurgence of antisemitism among blacks? The surprising answer to both questions, according to Leonard Dinnerstein, is no--Jews have never been more at home in America. But what we are seeing today, he writes, are the well-publicized results of a long tradition of prejudice, suspicion, and hatred against Jews--the direct product of the Christian teachings underlying so much of America's national heritage. In Antisemitism in America, Leonard Dinnerstein provides a landmark work--the first comprehensive history of prejudice against Jews in the United States, from colonial times to the present. His richly documented book traces American antisemitism from its roots in the dawn of the Christian era and arrival of the first European settlers, to its peak during World War II and its present day permutations--with separate chapters on antisemititsm in the South and among African-Americans, showing that prejudice among both whites and blacks flowed from the same stream of Southern evangelical Christianity. He shows, for example, that non-Christians were excluded from voting (in Rhode Island until 1842, North Carolina until 1868, and in New Hampshire until 1877), and demonstrates how the Civil War brought a new wave of antisemitism as both sides assumed that Jews supported with the enemy. We see how the decades that followed marked the emergence of a full-fledged antisemitic society, as Christian Americans excluded Jews from their social circles, and how antisemetic fervor climbed higher after the turn of the century, accelerated by eugenicists, fear of Bolshevism, the publications of Henry Ford, and the Depression. Dinnerstein goes on to explain that just before our entry into World War II, antisemitism reached a climax, as Father Coughlin attacked Jews over the airwaves (with the support of much of the Catholic clergy) and Charles Lindbergh delivered an openly antisemitic speech to an isolationist meeting. After the war, Dinnerstein tells us, with fresh economic opportunities and increased activities by civil rights advocates, antisemititsm went into sharp decline--though it frequently appeared in shockingly high places, including statements by Nixon and his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "It must also be emphasized," Dinnerstein writes, "that in no Christian country has antisemitism been weaker than it has been in the United States," with its traditions of tolerance, diversity, and a secular national government. This book, however, reveals in disturbing detail the resilience, and vehemence, of this ugly prejudice. Penetrating, authoritative, and frequently alarming, this is the definitive account of a plague that refuses to go away.

Uneasy At Home

In Antisemitism in North America, leading scholars offer a wide variety of perspectives on why the Jews in North America have sometimes faced considerable bigotry but have, in general, found a home far more hospitable than the ones they left behind in Europe.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • The prescient founder of The Free Press delivers an urgent wake-up call to all Americans exposing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in this country—and explains what we can do to defeat it. “A praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism.”—The New York Times On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh, as well as the continued surge of hate crimes against Jews in cities and towns across the country, raise a question Americans cannot avoid: Could it happen here? This book is Weiss’s answer. Like many, Weiss long believed this country could escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. With its promise of free speech and religion, its insistence that all people are created equal, its tolerance for difference, and its emphasis on shared ideals rather than bloodlines, America has been, even with all its flaws, a new Jerusalem for the Jewish people. But now the luckiest Jews in history are beginning to face a three-headed dragon known all too well to Jews of other times and places: the physical fear of violent assault, the moral fear of ideological vilification, and the political fear of resurgent fascism and populism. No longer the exclusive province of the far right, the far left, and assorted religious bigots, anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics as well as the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. A hatred that was, until recently, reliably taboo is migrating toward the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens us all. Weiss is one of our most provocative writers, and her cri de coeur makes a powerful case for renewing Jewish and American values in this uncertain moment. Not just for the sake of America’s Jews, but for the sake of America.

The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United States of America since the World War is a paradox that attracts attention at once. The most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and tolerance. How can such a movement exist in such a nation? The apparent contradiction leads us at once into the many contradictions of the psychology of large groups of human beings, which both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer which we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the group, into the relation of groups to the smaller groups of which they are composed and of those smaller groups to each other, into the genesis and implications of tolerance and intolerance. This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify the principles there worked out by application to the difficult and crucial problem of the present study. If a theory of group and sub-group can explain the existence and the development of anti-Semitism in America, it will have solved a problem of exceptional complexity and significance, one central to the whole field. This will involve a study of the mind of the American people, in brief outline, with its various movements of intolerance in their bearing on the present one. It will also necessitate a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples, historic and contemporary, from which the American movement derives in part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the American people as a united group, taking into view the tendencies of the sub-groups within the bounds of their common nation, or over-group. Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice against the Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the Franco-Prussian War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on the race theory. Anti-Judaism is, of course, much older, as old as the people against whom it was directed. In most ancient times, as represented by the Egyptian taskmasters and the Haman of the Book of Esther, it was like any other national hatred or prejudice. Later it took on a distinctly religious coloring, so that we find a Philo going to Rome to appeal for the Jewish colony in Alexandria or a Josephus writing a defense of his people against Apion. With the growth of Christianity into a persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictly a religious matter, based on the New Testament story that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Medieval laws on the Jews were, then, often based on the principle of expiation, such as the yellow badge which distinguished the wearer when he left the compulsory shelter of the Ghetto. A different form of religious motivation was shown in the frequent accusations of desecrating the Host or of using the blood of a Christian child in preparing the unleavened bread of Passover, which appears in the Canterbury Tales and was revived as recently as 1911 in the notorious Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this went occasional mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our Southern states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which drove the entire Jewish population from England in 1294, from Spain in 1492, and from other countries at other times, for a longer or shorter period.

"Beneath the surface of our society]," writes historian Robert Wistrich, are "ancient myths, dark hatreds, and irrational fantasies that] continue to nourish antisemitism." But the larger question has to do with why we are so prone to believe them. To that end, Steven K. Baum has an answer. In this book, Baum carefully guides the reader through the social mind and explains how the formation of social beliefs can be used as a narrative to determine reality. He offers a new perspective regarding how antisemitic legends and folk beliefs form the basis of our ongoing social narrative. Baum asks the reader to consider a social unconscious-the cauldron of cultural fantasies that consists of superstitions, magical thinking, and racial tales. This witches' brew concocts a Social Voice that can be loud or quiet, benign or hostile, fleeting or permanent. Most importantly, this voice is undeniably antisemitic and racist. As is often the case in the court of public opinion, those who own the narrative, win. In Antisemitism Explained, Baum reminds us to think critically about our own social narrative and to be careful about what we choose to believe.