Pamela S. Nadell’s Antisemitism: An American Tradition is a book the author wishes she didn’t need to write. But countless conversations in the antisemitic-protest-filled aftermath of Hamas’s October 7th attack against Israel sparked many friends and colleagues to share their own personal experiences of Jew-hatred with her.
Nadell chronicles the unfortunate litany of anti-Jewish discrimination in the US from early-American test-oaths that precluded Jews from holding public office to the contemporary shooting in Poway and the Unite the Right rally. Though America has offered Jews a haven for longer than any other country in the history of the world, it has also hosted antisemitic government decrees (General Grant’s Order #11 during the Civil War), cemetery vandalization, quotas that blocked Jews from universities, blood libels, riots, Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden, and countless recent public calls for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
Included in Nadell’s account are examples ranging from Mordecai Manuel Noah being fired from his diplomatic position in the early nineteenth century because he was a Jew to bias in dental school admissions in Emory University. The author shows that — from the lynching of Leo Frank to the rantings of the virulent Jew-hating preacher Father Coughlin to the Crown Heights riots — Jews have been publicly denounced, physically beaten, and even killed.
Nadell’s somber and sobering book serves as a chronicle and a warning. “Every day brings news stories about antisemitism permeating American life,” Nadell writes. “October 7th has become the dividing line for American Jews. Since then, more than 90 percent of Jews consider antisemitism an American problem … Antisemitism remains now and for the foreseeable future an American tradition.” America will no doubt continue to collectively strive to abide by its promise of freedom and liberty — but that potential will continue to be tested by those who possess the world’s oldest hatred.
Dr. Stu Halpern is Senior Advisor to the Provost of Yeshiva University. He has edited or coedited 17 books, including Torah and Western Thought: Intellectual Portraits of Orthodoxy and Modernity and Books of the People: Revisiting Classic Works of Jewish Thought, and has lectured in synagogues, Hillels and adult Jewish educational settings across the U.S.
