Expanded Reading for Module 5: Antisemitism in America
Books and Book Chapters
A Concise History of American Antisemitism by Call Number: DS146.U6 M53 2005ISBN: 9780742543126Publication Date: 2005A 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.
The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel by ISBN: 9781612497105Publication Date: 2021The Trump presidency has resulted in a fundamentally disruptive moment in this nation's political culture. Not only were there different policy options and directions, but the cultural artifacts of politics changed because of how this president dramatically challenged the existing norms of political behavior and action. As we have shifted from a period of American liberalism to a time of political populism, deep fissures are dividing Americans in general and Jews in particular.
The Impact of the Presidency of Donald Trump on American Jewry and Israel unpacks President Donald Trump's distinctive and unique relationship with the American Jewish community and the State of Israel. Addressing the various dimensions of his personal and political connections with Jews and Israel, this publication is designed to provide an assessment of how the Trump presidency has influenced and altered American Jewish political behavior. Writers from different backgrounds and political orientations bring a broad range of perspectives designed to examine various aspects of this presidency, including Trump's particular impact on Israel-US relations, his special connection with Orthodox Jews, and his complex and uneven relationship with Jewish Republicans.
For liberal American Jews, these four years represented a fundamental revolution, overturning and challenging much that a generation of activists had fought to achieve and protect. For Trump's supporters, it afforded them an opportunity to advance their priorities, while joining the forty-fifth president in changing the American political landscape. The "Trump effect" will extend well beyond his four-year tenure, creating an environment that has fomented the politics of hate and exposed a deeply embedded presence of anti-Semitism. How Americans understand this moment in time and the ways society will adapt can be reflected through the prism of the Jewish encounter with Trumpism that this volume seeks to explore.
Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654-1800 by Call Number: E184.3512 .P46 2005ISBN: 9780472114542Publication Date: 2005Jews and Gentiles in Early America offers a uniquely detailed picture of Jewish life from the mid-seventeenth century through the opening decades of the new republic. Though the first national census in 1790 counted barely three thousand Jews, the Jewish community was nevertheless far more important in the history of early America than their numbers suggest, author William Pencak reveals in this fascinating chronicle of an often-overlooked facet of American Jewish history. Pencak approaches his topic from the perspective of early American, rather than strictly Jewish, history. Rich in colorful narrative and animated with scenes of early American life, Jews and Gentiles in Early America tells the story of the five communities -- New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia -- where most of colonial America's small Jewish population lived. How did these communities rise and fall? How did they interact with the larger gentile population? Pencak's exploration of popular anti-semitism in the pre-Revolutionary era describes the persistence of prejudices derived from traditional European society, and his abundantly detailed community studies explore the forms these prejudices took in colonial America, some of which continue to this day.
The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture by ISBN: 9780822390848Publication Date: 2009In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names”.
Journal Articles
- Michels, Tony. “Is America ‘Different?’ A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism.” American Jewish history 96, no. 3 (2010): 201–224.Since the 1950s, the idea that the USA has been "different" for the Jews, because from the very beginning the republic accepted them as equals and because it shielded the Jews from violent antisemitism and the Holocaust, has become a consensus view among U.S. Jewish historians. Now that the exceptionalist paradigm is rejected by U.S. mainstream historiography, the time has come for Jewish historians to revise it as well. A reconsideration of U.S. Jewish exceptionalism must address the subject of antisemitism, the relative lack of which is understood as the defining aspect of American difference. However, although antisemitism in the USA did not reach the worst levels of Jew-hatred in Europe, it was serious enough. Despite claims to the opposite, the USA saw cases of anti-Jewish violence; antisemitism was far from absent in politics, government agencies, and public policy, and it spread most widely in the social realm. In the 1920s-40s discrimination against Jews in hiring, housing, education, and social clubs. became almost a norm. The post-World War II acceptance of Jews is a product of several political factors (the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the Cold War, etc.), rather than an inevitable result of American democracy. Comparisons between the USA, whose Jewish community has existed 350 years at best, and the continent of Europe, with all its political and cultural diversity and thousands-year-long Jewish history, are methodologically faulty. The concept that America is "different" has to be rejected.
- Myers, David N. “The Perils of Naming: On Donald Trump, Jews, and Antisemites.” The Journal of Holocaust Research 35, no. 2 (2021): 154–162.Antisemitism, which has been called the "longest hatred," appeared to be on a sharp decline in the United States in the early years of the new century. Over the past five years, antisemitism has surged to life, registering a 100% increase in reports of antisemitic incidents in the United States between 20016-18. That period coincides, and not by accident, with the presidency of Donald Trump, who declared himself to be a friend of Jews and a strong supporter of the state of Israel, has lapsed into stereotypical representations of Jews as beholden to money and loyal only to their own. In this way, the boundary between philosemitism and antisemitism became hard to trace. It is especially noteworthy that Trump arrogated to himself the right to define Jews, a move that calls to mind the infamous declaration of the mayor of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, Karl Lueger: "Who is a Jew-that I determine." This paper explores the naming of Jews not only in the context of Trump's declarations, but also policy formulations such as his Executive Order on antisemitism and the IHRA definition.
- Valbousquet, Nina. “‘Un-American’ Antisemitism?: The American Jewish Committee’s Response to Global Antisemitism in the Interwar Period.” American Jewish history 105, no. 1 (2021): 77–102.[...]this article examines the ways in which some of those involved in Jewish defense work saw the interplay between Americanness and antisemitism at that time. The paradigm of exceptionalism sees the American Jewish experience as unique and superior to the fate of other Jewish communities, especially when compared to persecutions of Jews in Europe. Because of its assumptions and distortions, this narrative—which is part of a broader ideology of American exceptionalism—calls for more nuanced scrutiny, as historian Tony Michels argues. [...]they internalized some of these antisemitic tropes—especially about their own power—in a way that significantly shaped their defense strategies. [...]they increasingly interpreted interwar global antisemitism as a Nazi imitation, thus glossing over its American roots.
- Winston, Andrew S. “‘Jews Will Not Replace Us!’: Antisemitism, Interbreeding and Immigration in Historical Context.” American Jewish history 105, no. 1 (2021): 1–24.White nationalist cries of "Jews will not replace us!" and, "You will not replace us!," at the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally were frequently discussed but rarely understood.1 Taken as a sign of general hostility toward Jews or the belief that Jews were vaguely threatening, the deeper meaning of the "replacement" theme in relation to antisemitism has often been missed. In this article, I locate "Jews will not replace us" in the broader historical context of a long-lasting antisemitic narrative. This fear of a Jewish plan for world domination had two major themes. First, Jews would encourage massive non-white immigration from inferior races that would outbreed and eventually replace whites. Second, they would promote racial interbreeding that would destroy whites' supposed natural advantages in intelligence and character, hastening replacement through "mongrelization." These aims would be accomplished through Jewish-directed communism by promoting a "hoax" of racial equality.
- Wright, Graham, Sasha Volodarsky, Shahar Hecht, and Leonard Saxe. “Trends in Jewish Young Adult Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism in America from 2017 to 2019.” Contemporary Jewry 41, no. 2 (2021): 461–481.Since 2016, a series of horrific acts motivated by antisemitism appear to have caused a fundamental shift in the prevalence of antisemitism in the United States. Little is known, however, about how the events during this time have affected the day-to-day experiences and concerns of American Jews. Using repeated cross-sectional data from surveys of Jewish young adults who applied to Birthright Israel, this paper analyzes recent trends in Jewish young adults’ experiences and perceptions of antisemitism. Despite the high-profile incidents during this period, there is no evidence of a major increase in experiences of antisemitic harassment among Jewish young adults—either on or off campus—between 2017 and 2019. At the same time, data show a substantial increase in concerns among young Jews about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses, with concerns about antisemitism in the United States (but not on campus) being especially concentrated among liberal Jews. These results suggest that Jewish concerns about antisemitism are linked to broader views about the climate for marginalized populations in the United States. They also point to growing Jewish anxieties over violence, safety, and acceptance in the United States. In an era of widely disseminated antisemitic conspiracy theories, even young Jews who have no first-hand experience of antisemitic harassment have become concerned.
