Roundtable on Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

American Jewish History, 2021

This article illuminates trends in the study of antisemitism in US history as they have appeared in English language academic publications between 1951 and January 2021. During this time, historians have employed a capacious definition of antisemitism. To highlight this range of scholarship, I, too, have used a broad conceptualization of antisemitism. On defining antisemitism, see

INSS, 2021

Over the course of 370 years of Jewish life in America, antisemitism has fluctuated, punctuated at times by intermittent outbursts of violent acts against Jews or Jewish property. Sometimes non-Jews in America may harbor negative opinions about Jews, and it happens that they might verbalize or otherwise act upon those opinions. Those ideas, words, or deeds, however, have not assumed the form of publicly sanctioned and legalized discrimination or violence that other American groups, primarily Native Americans and African Americans, have suffered. Still, the history of Jewish life in America is replete with evidence that anti-Jewish sentiments and behavior are embraced by some of the non-Jewish

Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It, 2020

The status and security of Jews in America are under attack, and as a result, the alliance between American Jews and Israel is also besieged. Anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise, with some perpetrators belonging to the far-Right, while the Left has mainstreamed anti-Semitic tropes. As a result, as their ancestors did in Europe, American Jews find themselves to be the ultimate “other” once again: to the Right, they are not sufficiently American; to the Left, they are not sufficiently a minority. Many American Jews feel discomfort with Zionist particularism, and identify instead with universalist progressives. They fear being ostracized for supporting Israel. American Jews have trouble seeing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic because of the way they perceive their own American nationalism and the separation of national identity from religious identity, though the anti-Israel barrage is fundamentally antiSemitic in its denial of Israel’s existence.

Oxford Encyclopedia of U.S. History, 2023

Antisemitism in the United States-whether acts of violence, social exclusion, cultural vilification, or political and legal discrimination-has resulted from antidemocratic currents refracted through bigoted beliefs about Jews. Prejudiced conceptualizations of Jews positioned them as outsiders to the nation, emphasizing Jews' refusal to accept the supremacy of Christ; depicting Jews to be racially distinct (i.e., inferior or dangerous); and imagining Jews as greedy, dirty, untrustworthy, scheming, manipulative, powerful, and dangerous. Antisemitism has consistently been (and continues to be) connected with anti-Black racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. Throughout US history, non-Jews deployed bigoted ideas about Jews for personal, professional, social, and/or political gain. As a result, with degrees of variation, Jews in the United States endured personal hardships, faced collective discrimination, and confronted political intolerance.

The Nation, 2004

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

This impressive book, offering essays by 19 authors on the topic of the recent upsurge in virulent anti-Jewish hostility, is daunting, not by sheer size, which is considerable, but by the very fact of its existence, the very fact of what must be its focus the worldwide rise of a pernicious, persistent anti-Semitism. The topic of course must be explored, and is explored with painstaking scholarship, intensive scrutiny of the subject itself, commitment, eloquence, and passion. The book is the outgrowth of a four-day conference involving 45 scholars from 10 countries at Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) in April 2014. The 19 authors represented in the book live in, and/or are affiliated with colleges and universities in Austria, England, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, and the United States. It is important, and impressive, that the contributors to the book are international, because anti-Semitism is a burgeoning international problem. The book is organized into four parts, (I) Defining and Assessing Antisemitism, (II) Intellectual and Ideological Contexts, (III) Holocaust Denial, Evasion, Minimization, and (IV) Regional Manifestations. The second chapter, ''The Ideology of the New Antisemitism,'' by Kenneth Marcus, is useful in identifying some key psychoanalytic issues. He sets the stage by underscoring that antisemitism is an ideology, quoting Sartre, who described antisemitism as a ''conception of the world'' (p. 21), giving us a broad, inclusive perspective to consider. He identifies the irrationality of otherwise educated, knowledgeable people who accept an ideology that includes the infamous blood libel, that Jews murder Christian babies to use their blood in making Passover matzoh. He continues by citing Holocaust-denial statements that Jews invented stories about a Holocaust that never happened, and by citing the belief that the antisemitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' is true. He anchors his discourse in an acknowledgment of Freudian thought, that ''the ideology of hatred is a symptom of repressed desire'' (p. 25). Marcus discusses trauma as underlying antisemitic ideology, citing projection and displacement as essential to further understanding how people deal with the conflicts generated by repressed desire, in an attempt to rid themselves of forbidden desires. He delineates various ways in which Jews are blamed for everything, quoting a 19th century CE (Common Era) tract that traces everything evil to Jews, and contemporary Islamic thought that attributes every ''catastrophe'' to Jews (p. 37).

UNPUBLISHED DRAFT, 2009

During the immediate years after World War I American Jewish commentators from across the spectrum had begun viewing anti-Jewish enmity as an interrelated phenomenon that straddled the Atlantic. On the one hand, they often blamed the growing antisemitism in America on immigrant groups like Poles and Germans. On the other, they also saw the simultaneous rise of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe as linked to the circulation of American anti-Jewish literature by Ford and his ilk. Moreover, as antisemitism in America coincided with the fact that American troops fought alongside the White forces in Russia and Polish Americans were involved in anti-Jewish atrocities, Jewish observers increasingly cast Americans as part of a larger, antagonistic Gentile world. This article appears in Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm (eds.), "American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? "

Sociological Inquiry, 1991