Talk about good timing. Antisemitism, an American Tradition, a powerful new book by American University professor Pamela Nadell, has just been published. The book comes at a time when certain sectors of America have become feverish with hatred towards Jewish people.
Antisemitism, An American Tradition goes from colonial America to the modern day, offering a shameful history of prejudice against Jews. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, one colossal administrator tried but failed to deport them. “Year-in and year-out,” Nadell writes, Christians “heard the Gospels recount how the Pharisees, whose heirs would become the Jews’ rabbis, displayed enmity to Jesus and how, when the Roman imperial governor Pontius Pilate gave the Jews the chance to save a prisoner, the crowd freed the bandit Barabbas and clamored to crucify Jesus.” Ministers frequently preached on the Jews’ guilt. In the 1660s, in Boston’s Second Church, the Puritan clergyman and Harvard College president Increase Mather vilified them in sermons published as “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.”
In colonial Maryland, “denying that Jesus was the Son of God was a capital crime.”
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There were some bright spots. In 1790, George Washington visited a Hebrew congregation and then wrote a letter thanking them. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” he wrote. “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” Nadell observes that many Jews could live their lives with a level of peace that was unknown in the Old World.
Historically, the first calumny against Jews was that they are Christ-killers. Then came the “Shylock” stereotype that painted them as money-grubbers. That was followed by accusations of “dual loyalties” to America and to Israel. There was also the truly insane legend of Jews using the blood of babies for satanic rituals.
“In the two centuries before the Civil War,” Nadell writes, “America’s Jewish community comprised about half of one percent of the nation’s population. Nevertheless, Jews had come to occupy a considerable place in the American imagination both as the people who were Christ’s murderers and as those striving to undermine the country with their crooked business practices.”
In 2025, Jews are still occupying an outsize place in the American imagination, at least if you wade into the ugly swamp that is social media.
If I have a criticism of Antisemitism, an American Tradition, it is that Nadell doesn’t celebrate how much Jewish people have influenced American culture in positive ways. From Vaudeville to Hollywood, in literature, comic books, rock and roll, and civil rights, Jews have enriched the U.S. in ways that are staggeringly disproportionate to their small numbers in the population — and many Americans love them for that.
Nadell observes that there have been times in history when Jews anticipated a “golden age” when they would truly be accepted or at least left alone. One was after World War II, when the raw evil of the Holocaust was too evident to be denied. Jews integrated into the universities and into American life in a way that was not always easy but was at least a step forward from the pestilential hate in Europe. Sadly, these eras never seem to completely come to fruition — there’s always a setback.
The most appalling section of Antisemitism, An American Tradition describes the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, when there were armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into Israel and over 1,000 Jews were killed and thousands more kidnapped, raped, and tortured. The reaction among too many was to blame the victims.
As Nadell notes, “Nowhere has this been more evident in the US than on college and university campuses. When a Jewish reporter for Columbia University’s Daily Spectator covered an assault on an Israeli student, the student journalist was so harassed that she left campus.” At Harvard, rooms housing Jewish student organizations were vandalized and urinated on, and dorm room windows were plastered with “F*** Jews.” A Stanford University task force published almost 150 pages showing how antisemitism at this storied institution was “widespread and pernicious.”
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Nadell reports that “antisemitism came from peers, teaching assistants, resident advisors, faculty, administrators, and staff.” Jews on campus were taunted, “Go back to Brooklyn!” and threatened: “We know your names, we know where you work, and soon we are going to find out where you live.”
Perhaps the universities can make Antisemitism, An American Tradition required reading.