Antisemitism: An American Tradition, Pamela S. Nadell, W. W. Norton, 2025, pp. 332, $31.99 hardcover
Pamela S. Nadell’s Antisemitism: An American Tradition is the first serious history of American antisemitism by an academician since the publication of Leonard Dinnerstein’s Antisemitism in America in 1994. The central argument of these two historians could not be more different. “By comparing the strength of antisemitism in the United States today with what it had been in previous decades or centuries,” Dinnerstein declared in his book’s final sentence, “the obvious conclusion is that it has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” By contrast, the last two sentences in Antisemitism: An American Tradition state, “The more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. Antisemitism in America remains, and is for the foreseeable future, an American tradition.”
Nadell, an historian at American University, has written a book for a general audience and not for her academic peers. There is no mention of either Harvard historian Oscar Handlin or Johns Hopkins historian John Higham, the two most significant figures in the historiography of American antisemitism, and she elides the questions of methodology and definition they raised some three-quarters of a century ago.
Journalist Franklin Foer had secured his own fifteen minutes of fame in April 2024 when The Atlantic published his lengthy essay “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” This golden age, Foer wrote, “has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence.” Nadell argues instead that this golden age of America’s Jews was not ending because it had never existed in the first place, at least as far as antisemitism was concerned. The title of her chapter on the postwar years is “No Age Is Golden: From the End of World War II to a New Century.” “A closer look at this ‘golden age’ of American Jewish life reveals that antisemitism did not decline in 1945,” she says, “so there was no dawn to extol. Instead, antisemitism continued without a pause.”
Her bleak view of America, Nadell believes, has been confirmed by recent outbreaks of antisemitism in Jersey City, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and Charlottesville, Virginia. The burst of antisemitism on various college campuses in response to the war in Gaza did not signify a break with the past. Rather, it revealed “a continuity that acknowledges antisemitism was and remains a powerful American tradition.” By 1900 the United States had become “a full-fledged antisemitic society,” and antisemitism is currently “deeply entrenched on this side of the Atlantic.”
While Nadell recognizes that American antisemitism has been milder than what occurred elsewhere, there has long been a set of never-changing beliefs about Jews which European immigrants brought to the New World, and which have remained important up to the present. Contemporary antisemitism, she writes, “sits atop a long history of antisemitism that made its way to this land centuries ago and that flourishes today.”
But what seems to need explaining is not the presence of antisemitism but its relative absence. Nadell does not discuss the other side of the coin, such as the various Christian ecumenical and outreach efforts directed at Jews, the willingness of Gentiles to marry Jews, to employ and be employed by Jews, to vote for Jews, and to live next door to Jews.
Most historians of American antisemitism acknowledge that antisemitism, such as it is, has evolved as political, social, and economic conditions have fluctuated. But for the most part, what antisemitism has surfaced has been an aberration. Jews were citizens of the country from its beginning, have been elected to high offices on the local, state, and federal levels, and have ascended rapidly up the economic and social ladders. Where, one must ask, are the antisemitic laws, regulations, and decrees regarding employment, residence, voting, and attending colleges and universities? These would have run counter to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of 1787, George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Newport, Rhode Island Hebrew congregation (the Government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance”), the Gettysburg address, and other formative American political statements. Americans, both Jews and Gentiles, have properly called antisemitism “un-American.” But antisemitism would never be described as “un-German,” “un-Polish,” “un-Belgium,” or “un-Russian.”
No American antisemitic political movement had ever become more than a marginal phenomenon, and the question that Barbra Streisand asked in the movie Funny Girl, “is a nose with a deviation a crime against the nation?,” has been answered with a resounding “no.” In the mid-1880s the United States refused to appoint an ambassador to the Hapsburg Empire because it refused to receive Jews at court. A quarter of a century later President William Howard Taft abrogated the 1832 treaty with Russia because it discriminated against American Jews. And even the bigots are often ambivalent about the iniquity of Jews. Any Jew could join the Ku Klux Klan, an Indiana Klan member said in the 1920s, “if he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ.”
That antisemitism has been a marginal factor in American history is reflected in the textbooks used in university courses. The index of the textbook I assigned in the American history survey course I taught, The National Experience, whose authors were some of the most eminent American historians, including John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward, had not one reference to “antisemitism,” although it did have a reference to “anti-scientism.”
The most important question in the history of American antisemitism does not concern its existence, but rather its intensity and persistence. In America it has been exceptional, exotic, and limited. As the historian David A. Gerber noted in 1986, “anti-Semitism has been a distinctively minor feature” of America’s history, and historians tended to view it “as a transitory phenomenon, with a miniscule constituency of ‘crackpot’ exponents and a minor impact on either American society or American Jews.”1
Although many antisemites have lived in the United States, antisemitism has never been an American tradition. The New York University historian Hasia R. Diner, in her history of American Jews during the late nineteenth century, emphasized the absence on this side of the Atlantic of “state-supported exclusion and violence, encrusted aristocracy, no embittered peasantry, legally established church hierarchy,” or “manipulated centuries-old Judeophobia.” “However starkly Christian Americans stereotyped the Jews,” she noted, “these words rarely led to action.” Jonathan Sarna, a Brandeis University historian and the unofficial dean of American Jewish historians, agreed. “If the country has not been utter heaven for Jews, it has been as far from hell as Jews in the Diaspora have ever known.”2
This more optimistic view regarding the status of America’s Jews is reflected in the titles of two popular post-World War II histories of America’s Jewry: Oscar Handlin’s Adventures in Freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (1954) and Henry L. Feingold’s Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (1980).
Little wonder then that Nadell’s Antisemitism: An American Tradition is replete with incidents of supposed antisemitism which are open to different interpretations. She discusses the case of Simon Witkowski, a Jew from Prussia living in Louisiana in 1887 when his store was burned down and two employees murdered. Nadell notes that “he incurred animosity for his heavy-handed management of his vast estates and his imperious control of patronage positions,” neither of which had anything to do with him being a Jew. It is equally likely that this may have been an attack on Witkowski due to his being an immigrant outsider, a capitalist, and a moneylender. After all, being a Jew did not prevent Witkowski from becoming a postmaster, a state legislator, and a successful merchant, all of which indicates that any antisemitism Witkowski faced in postbellum Louisiana was fairly limited.
The same can be said of Leo Frank, the target of the most infamous case of American antisemitism. After a controversial 1913 murder trial in which he was convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl, Frank, the manager of a pencil factory, was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a Georgia mob. Was Frank murdered because he was a Jew or because he was a Cornell-educated transplanted northerner, the manager of a factory, and, perhaps, the perceived embodiment of southern class antagonisms? Maybe it was a combination of these factors plus negative Jewish stereotyping. But at the time of Frank’s murder, another Jew headed Atlanta’s Chamber of Commerce, and outside of Georgia, no major American political figure defended the conviction and lynching of Frank, nor did any political figure, writer, or religious figure justify his murder.
Despite Nadell’s rejection of the notion of a post-World War II golden age, polls of American antisemitism revealed that antisemitism sharply declined after 1945 and America’s Jews came out of World War II more confident than they had ever been. This was perhaps best expressed by the rabbi-scholar Arthur Hertzberg in his 2002 autobiography, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity. Looking back to 1945 and the surrender of Nazi Germany, he noted that America’s Jews “took pride not only in the tens of thousands of their young who had served with valor as ordinary soldiers, but especially in the strikingly large numbers of Jewish scientists and managers among those who had produced the munitions that made victory possible.” America’s Jews wished “to be thought of as part of the brave, undaunted, victorious America…. [W]e wanted our neighbors to think of us as wrapped, together with them, in an American flag.”
Hertzberg’s belief that the war was a watershed in American Jewish history was confirmed in November 1945, three months after the end of the war, when the first issue of Commentary magazine appeared. It contained a rationale for the magazine written by its editor, Elliot E. Cohen, titled “An Act of Affirmation.” The founding of Commentary, he avowed, was an act of faith by Jews that “out of the opportunities of our experience here, there will evolve new patterns of living, new modes of thought, which will harmonize heritage and country into a true sense of at-home-ness in the modern world.”
Three years later in 1948 Brandeis University opened its doors, another event evidencing the new-found confidence of American Jews in the wake of World War II. Abram Sachar, its first president and indefatigable fund-raiser, believed it imperative for American Jewry, now that they had become part of the American mainstream, to establish a university open to all Americans. Sachar titled his history of the founding of Brandeis University A Host at Last.
What accounts for Nadell’s pessimistic view of American antisemitism and the high regard her book has received within Jewish circles and elsewhere? Part of the explanation is the seemingly congenital gloomy outlook common within Jewish circles. The Israeli statesman Abba Eban said that America’s Jews frequently refused to take yes for an answer when examining their economic and social status. For many Jews, fighting antisemitism is an important part of their identity and becomes only more so as secular Jews close in on full assimilation. At any time there are dozens of Jewish organizations whose major function is opposing antisemitism, lending a ubiquity and permanence to these concerns.3
This is not to say that antisemitism has not been a problem in America’s past, but one should not exaggerate its extent or its influence. Nadell devotes a couple of pages to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi party, even though his followers never amounted to more than a hundred or so. Congressman John E. Rankin, perhaps the vilest antisemite ever to sit in Congress, is mentioned in five different parts of the book by Nadell. Rankin had served twelve terms in the United States House of Representatives from a seat in northeast Mississippi when he decided in 1947 to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Theodore G. Bilbo. But his constant attacks on blacks, Jews, Japanese-Americans, and immigrants was an embarrassment even to the white voters of what was generally considered the most benighted state in the union. He came in last of the five candidates running for the Senate seat, winning only thirteen percent of the vote. His defeat is not mentioned in Nadell’s book.4
While Nadell’s book arrives at a time of a concerning outbreak of antisemitism on both the left and the right, it reflects the widespread emphasis within contemporary American historiography on the grievances, resentments, and tribalization of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and a focus on the negative rather than the sunnier aspects of the American past. This has only become more problematic as the postcolonial hierarchy of racial oppression has descended on academic life.
Since the 1990s, historians working in subfields such as whiteness studies and Critical Race Theory have increasingly portrayed American ideals and institutions as fundamentally white projects, structured to subordinate nonwhite groups. Within this framework, Jews—most explicitly in works such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message (2024)—are recast as members of a white, Western oppressor class, their history reread to emphasize privilege rather than vulnerability. Any antisemitism that has existed in the United States is treated as marginal, insufficient to outweigh the power presumed to flow from Jewish inclusion on the white side of the color line. This perspective has filtered well beyond the academy. In 2017, fliers appeared on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus declaring, “Ending white privilege starts with ending Jewish privilege.”
Appearing within such a rigid academic climate, Nadell’s book may be read by critics as an attempt to reclaim for Jews a place within the contemporary hierarchy of nonwhite victimhood. Even were Nadell’s evidentiary case stronger than it is, such a rehabilitation would be unlikely in today’s racially binary academy. More importantly, the specific form this new anti-Jewish hostility has taken—emerging as a byproduct of postmodern theories of power and identity—cuts against Nadell’s central claim that antisemitism in the United States is merely the latest expression of a much older tradition stretching back to the colonial era.
Edward S. Shapiro is professor emeritus of history at Seton Hall University; edshapiro07052@yahoo.com. He is the author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II (1992), Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot (2006), A Unique People in a Unique Land: Essays on American Jewish History (2022) and is the editor of Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War (1995). Shapiro appeared in our Fall 2025 issue with “The Tarnished Arches of the Hamburger King,” a review of Franchise: The Golden Arches of Black America by Marcia Chatelain.
1 David A. Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7-8.
2 Hasia R. Diner, A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 169ff; Jonathan Sarna, “Anti-Semitism and American History,” Commentary, 71 (March, 1981), 47.
3 Edward S. Shapiro, “The Cognitive Dissonance of American Jews,” Society, 49 (October, 2012), 547-52.
4 For Rankin and Bilbo, see Edward S. Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style, in Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History, 129-51.