History of antisemitism in the United States

Historians have long debated the extent of antisemitism in America's past and contrasted American antisemitism with its European counterpart. Earlier students of American Jewish life minimized the presence of antisemitism in the United States, which they viewed as a late and alien phenomenon on the American scene arising in the late nineteenth century. More recently, scholars have asserted that no period in American Jewish history was free of antisemitism. The debate continues about the significance of antisemitism in different periods of American history. [cite web |title=The American Jewish Experience in the Twentieth Century: Antisemitism and Assimilation |author=Jonathan D. Sarna and Jonathan Golden |url=http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/jewishexpb.htm]

Antisemitism has always been less prevalent in the United States than in Europe. Anti-Jewish sentiment started around the time of the American Civil War, when General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order (quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln) of expulsion against Jews from the portions of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi under his control. ("See General Order No. 11")

In the first half of 1900s, Jews were discriminated against in some employment, not allowed into some social clubs and resort areas, given a quota on enrollment at colleges, and not allowed to buy certain properties. Antisemitism reached its peak during the interwar period. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the antisemitic works of Henry Ford, and the radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s indicated the strength of attacks on the Jewish community.

Following the Second World War and the American Civil Rights Movement, anti-Jewish sentiment waned.

Colonial era

North America

In the mid 1600s, Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of New Amsterdam, sought to bolster the position of the Dutch Reformed Church by trying to reduce religious competition from denominations such as Jews, Lutherans, Catholics and Quakers. He stated that Jews were "deceitful", "very repugnant", and "hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ". He warned in a subsequent letter that in "giving them liberty we cannot (then) refuse the Lutherans and Papists". However, religious plurality was already a legal-cultural tradition in New Amsterdam and in the Netherlands. His superiors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam overruled him in all matters of intolerance.

There were only about 250 Jews living in North America in the 17th century. These faced a number of restrictions, including being banned from practicing law, medicine, and other professions. As late as 1790, one year before adoption of the Bill of Rights, several states had religious tests for holding public office, and Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Carolina still maintained established churches. Within a few years of the ratification of the Constitution, Delaware, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia eliminated barriers that prevented Jews from voting, but these barriers did not fall for many decades in Rhode Island (1842), North Carolina (1868), and New Hampshire (1877). Despite these restrictions, which were often enforced unevenly, there were really too few Jews in 17th- and 18th-century America for anti-Semitism to become a significant social or political phenomenon at the time. And the evolution from toleration to full civil and political equality for Jews that followed the American Revolution helped ensure that anti-Semitism would never become official government policy, as it had in Europe.

By 1840, Jews constituted a tiny, but nonetheless stable, middle-class minority of about 15,000 out of the 17 million Americans counted by the U.S. Census. Jews intermarried rather freely with non-Jews, continuing a trend that had begun at least a century earlier. However, as immigration increased the Jewish population to 50,000 by 1848, negative stereotypes of Jews in newspapers, literature, drama, art, and popular culture grew more commonplace and physical attacks became more frequent.

Civil War

By the time of the Civil War, tensions over race and immigration, as well as economic competition between Jews and non-Jews, combined to produce the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism to that date. Americans on both sides of the slavery issue denounced Jews as disloyal war profiteers, and accused them of driving Christians out of business and of aiding and abetting the enemy.

Major General Ulysses S. Grant was influenced by these sentiments and issued General Order No. 11 expelling Jews from areas under his control in western Tennessee:

The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled …within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.

This order was quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln but not until it had been enforced in a number of towns.cite web |first=Gustavo |last=Perednik |title=Judeophobia - History and analysis of Antisemitism, Jew-Hate and anti-"Zionism" |url=http://www.zionism-israel.com/his/judeophobia11.htm]

Grant later issued an order "that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the road southward." His aide, Colonel John V. DuBois, ordered "all cotton speculators, Jews, and all vagabonds with no honest means of support", to leave the district. "The Israelites especially should be kept out…they are such an intolerable nuisance."

Immigration from Eastern Europe

Between 1881 and 1920, approximately 3 million Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to America, many of them fleeing pogroms and the difficult economic conditions which were widespread in much of Eastern Europe during this time. Pogroms in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, prompted waves of Jewish immigrants after 1881. Jews, along with many Eastern and Southern European immigrants, came to work the country's growing mines and factories. Many Americans distrusted these Jewish immigrants.

The earlier wave of Jewish immigration from Germany, the latter (post 1880) came from `the Pale’ - that region of Eastern Poland, Russia and the Ukraine where Jews had suffered so under the Czars. Along with Italians, Irish and other Eastern and Southern Europeans, Jews faced discrimination in the United States in employment, education and social advancement. American groups like the Immigration Restriction League, criticized these new arrivals along with immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe, as culturally, intellectually, morally, and biologically inferior. Despite these attacks, very few Eastern European Jews returned to Europe for whatever privations they faced here, their situation in the US was still improved.

Between 1900 and 1924, approximately 1.75 million Jews immigrated to America's shores, the bulk from Eastern Europe. Where before 1900, American Jews never amounted even to 1 percent of America's total population, by 1930 Jews formed about 3½ percent. This dramatic increase combined with the upward mobility of some Jews contributed to a resurgence of antisemitism.

Jewish role in banking system

Beginning in the early 1880s, declining farm prices also prompted elements of the Populist movement (see Populist party) to blame Jewish financiers for their plight. Although Jews played only a minor role in the nation's commercial banking system, the prominence of Jewish investment bankers such as the Rothschilds in Europe, and Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, made the claims of anti-Semites believable to some.

The Morgan Bonds scandal injected populist anti-Semitism into the 1896 presidential campaign. It was disclosed that President Grover Cleveland had sold bonds to a syndicate which included J. P. Morgan and the Rothschilds house, bonds which that syndicate was now selling for a profit, the Populists used it as an opportunity to uphold their view of history, and prove to the nation that Washington and Wall Street were in the hands of the international Jewish banking houses. The currency issue itself was loaded with anti-Semitism as the Populist returned again and again to crucifixion metaphors to argue against the gold standard. The reference was clear. The same Jews who were responsible for the death of Jesus were responsible for the currency crisis. The message was clear to the many Protestants who filled the ranks of the Populists.

Early Twentieth Century

In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews were discriminated against in employment, access to residential and resort areas, membership in clubs and organizations, and in tightened quotas on Jewish enrollment and teaching positions in colleges and universities.

Russian antisemitic propaganda

Russian antisemitic propaganda was circulated in the United States, where prejudice against Jews previously had assumed such forms as covert social discrimination. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion alleged the existence of a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The writing has been revealed to be originally an antisemitic, and subsequently an anti-Zionist, conspiracy theory first published in 1903 in Russian.

The text was popularized by those opposed to the Russian revolutionary movement, and was disseminated further after the revolution of 1905, becoming known worldwide after the 1917 October Revolution. It was widely circulated in the West in 1920 and thereafter. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of the "Protocols", and the hoax continued to be published and circulated despite its debunking.

Jewish organizations

New national organizations were formed for the purpose of improving conditions for American Jewry in general and in advancing its acceptance by American society. Perhaps the most important national Jewish organization was the American Jewish Committee, founded in 1906. Mainly drawn from the elite Western European Jews, it set out to safeguard the civil and religious rights of Jews and to combat discrimination and prejudice. Another important national organization, sharing similar aims, was the American Jewish Congress, founded in 1922.

Lynching of Leo Frank

In Atlanta, a Jew named Leo Frank was falsely accused of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old Christian girl in 1913. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but the governor of Georgia, John Marshall Slaton, convinced that Frank was innocent, commuted his sentence. A Georgia mob kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.

As a response to the lynching of Leo Frank, Sigmund Livingston founded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) under the sponsorship of B'nai B'rith. The ADL became the leading Jewish group fighting anti-Semitism in the United States.

The lynching of Leo Frank coincided with and helped spark the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan disseminated the view that anarchists, communists and Jews were subverting American values and ideals.

World War I

With the entry of the United States into World War I, Jews were targeted by anti-Semites as "slackers" and "war-profiteers" responsible for many of the ills of the country. For example, a U.S. Army manual published for war recruits stated that, "The foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native-born." When ADL representatives protested about this to President Woodrow Wilson, he ordered the manual recalled. The ADL also mounted a campaign to give Americans the facts about military and civilian contributions of Jews to the war effort.

1920s

Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period.Fact|date=January 2008 The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the antisemitic works of Henry Ford, and the radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s indicated the strength of attacks on the Jewish community.

One element in American antisemitism during the 1920s was the identification of Jews with Bolshevism where the concept of Bolshevism was used pejoratively in the country. (see article on "Jewish Bolshevism").

Immigration legislation enacted in the United States in 1921 and 1924 was interpreted widely as being at least partly anti-Jewish in intent because it strictly limited the immigration quotas of eastern European nations with large Jewish populations, nations from which approximately 3 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1920.

Educational discrimination

To limit the growing number of Jewish students, a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools instituted a quota system referred to as Numerus clausus. These included Harvard University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Boston UniversityFact|date=August 2007. In 1925 Yale University, which already had such admissions preferences as "character", "solidity", and "physical characteristics" added a program of legacy preference admission spots for children of Yale alumni, in an explicit attempt to put the brakes on the rising percentage of Jews in the student body. This was soon copied by other Ivy League and other schoolsFact|date=August 2007, and admissions of Jews were kept down to 10% through the 1950s. Such policies were for the most part discarded during the early 1960s.

In 1922, educational discrimination became a national issue when Harvard announced it was considering a quota system for Jewish students. Although it was eventually dropped, the quota was enforced in many colleges through underhanded techniques (as late as 1945 Dartmouth College openly admitted and defended a quota system against Jewish students). Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions, restricted the entrance of Jews. This era of “polite” Judeophobia through social discrimination, underwent in the 1930’s an ideological escalation.

Restriction on immigration

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act severely restricting immigration. Although the act did not specifically target Jews, the effect of the legislation was that 86% of the 165,000 permitted entries were from Northern European countries, with Germany, Britain, and Ireland having the highest quotas. The act effectively diminished the flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to a trickle.

1930s

Anti-semitism grew in the years leading up to America's entry into World War II. Anti-Semitic agitators included Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund and Father Charles Coughlin. Father Charles Coughlin, a radio preacher, as well as many other prominent public figures, condemned "the Jews," and Henry Ford reprinted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper. Fact|date=February 2007A new ideology appeared which accused “the Jews” of dominating Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of causing the Great Depression, and of dragging the US into WW2 against a new Germany which deserved but admiration.

During the 1930s and 1940s, right-wing demagogues such as the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Charles Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley, and the Rev. Gerald Winrod linked the Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the threat of war in Europe to the machinations of an imagined international Jewish conspiracy that was both communist and capitalist. Smith, a Disciples of Christ minister, was the founder (1937) of the Committee of One Million and publisher (beginning in 1942) of The Cross and the Flag, a magazine that declared that "Christian character is the basis of all real Americanism."

American attitudes towards Jews

Anti-Semitism in the United States was also proven in national public opinion polls taken from the mid nineteen thirties to the late nineteen forties. The results showed that over half the American population saw Jews as greedy and dishonest. These polls also found that many Americans believed that Jews were too powerful in the United States. Similar polls were also taken, one of which posed that 35-40 percent of the population was prepared to accept an anti-Jewish campaign.

In one 1938 poll, 41 percent of respondents agreed that Jews had "too much power in the United States," and this figure rose to 58 percent by 1945.

In 1939 a Roper poll found that only thirty-nine percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. Fifty-three percent believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted" and ten percent believed that Jews should be deported. cite web
last = Smitha
first = Frank E.
url = http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch22.htm
title = Roosevelt and Approaching War: The Economy, Politics and Questions of War, 1937-38
accessdate = 2008-04-23 ] Several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group. [http://etd-submit.etsu.edu/etd/theses/available/etd-0322102-113418/unrestricted/Greear040102.pdf#search='charles%20coughlin%20Jews']

Although only 0.6 percent of the nation's 93,000 commercial bankers in 1939 were Jewish, the idea that Jews controlled the banking system remained a popular myth. Political anti-Semitism also was high during the war years, with 23 percent of respondents in one 1945 survey saying they would vote for a congressional candidate if the candidate declared "himself as being against the Jews" and as many as 35 percent saying it would not affect their vote. Jews also noted the influence of anti-Semitism when the U.S. State Department opposed efforts to lower immigration barriers to admit Jews and other refugees fleeing the Holocaust and Nazi-occupied Europe.

Thus, anti-Semitism was fairly widespread in the U.S, a sentiment which reduced the inclination of Americans to help the Jews in Europe.

Charles Coughlin

The main spokesman for antisemitic sentiment was Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly radio program drew between 5 and 12 million listeners in the late 1930s. Coughlin's newspaper, Social Justice (periodical), reached a circulation of 800,000 at its peak in 1937.

After the 1936 election, Coughlin increasingly expressed sympathy for the fascist policies of Hitler and Mussolini, as an antidote to Bolshevism. His CBS radio broadcasts became suffused with themes regarded as overtly antisemitic. He blamed the Depression on an "international conspiracy of Jewish bankers", and also claimed that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution. On 27 November 1938, he said "There can be no doubt that the Russian Revolution ... was launched and fomented by distinctively Jewish influence."

Coughlin began publication of a newspaper, "Social Justice", during this period, in which he printed antisemitic polemics such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Like Joseph Goebbels, Coughlin claimed that Marxist atheism in Europe was a Jewish plot. The 5 December 1938 issue of "Social Justice" included an article by Coughlin which closely resembled a speech made by Goebbels on 13 September 1935 attacking Jews, atheists and communists, with some sections being copied verbatim by Coughlin from an English translation of the Goebbels speech. At a rally in the Bronx in 1938, he gave a Nazi salute and said, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing." [William Manchester, "The Glory And The Dream", 1974, Bantam Books, p. 176.]

On November 20, 1938, two weeks after Kristallnacht, when Jews across Germany were attacked and killed, and Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues burned, Coughlin blamed the Jewish victims, [Marc Dollinger (2000): "Quest for Inclusion". Princeton University Press. p.66] saying that "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." After this speech, and as his programs became more antisemitic, some radio stations, including those in New York and Chicago, began refusing to air his speeches without pre-approved scripts; in New York, his programs were cancelled by WINS and WMCA, leaving Coughlin to broadcasting on the Newark part-time station WHBI. This made Coughlin a hero in Nazi Germany, where papers ran headlines like: "America is Not Allowed to Hear the Truth."

On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin's followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler's persecution) into the US, chanting, "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!" The protests continued for several months. Donald Warren, using information from the FBI and German government archives, has also argued that Coughlin received indirect funding from Nazi Germany during this period. [Warren, "Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio," 1996.]

After 1936, Coughlin began supporting an organization called the Christian Front, which claimed him as an inspiration. In January, 1940, the Christian Front was shut down when the FBI discovered the group was arming itself and "planning to murder Jews, communists, and 'a dozen Congressmen'" [ [http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/coughlin.html Father Charles Edward Coughlin (1891-1971)] by Richard Sanders, Editor] and eventually establish, in J. Edgar Hoover's words, "a dictatorship, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany." Coughlin publicly stated, after the plot was discovered, that he still did not "disassociate himself from the movement," and though he was never linked directly to the plot, his reputation suffered a fatal decline [cite journal |journal=New York Times |date=January 22, 1940] .

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war in December 1941, the anti-interventionist movement (such as the America First Committee) began to sputter out, and isolationists like Coughlin were seen as being sympathetic to the enemy. In 1942, the new bishop of Detroit ordered Coughlin to stop his controversial political activities and confine himself to his duties as a parish priest.

Pelley and Winrod

William Dudley Pelley founded (1933) the anti-Semitic Silvershirt Legion of America; nine years later he was convicted of sedition. And Gerald Winrod, leader of Defenders of the Christian Faith, was eventually indicted for conspiracy to cause insubordination in the armed forces during World War II.

Henry Ford

The pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford propagated antisemitic ideas in his newspaper "The Dearborn Independent". The radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s attacked Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the notion of a Jewish financial conspiracy. Such views were also shared by some prominent politicians; Louis T. McFadden, Chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency, blamed Jews for president Roosevelt's decision to abandon the gold standard, and claimed that "in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money." [cite book |last=Arad |first=Gulie Ne'eman |title=America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism |year=2000 |publisher=Indiana University Press |location=Indianapolis |isbn=0253338093 |pages= p.174 ]

A notable event was the temporary embracing of antisemitism by the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who reprinted the discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper, "The Dearborn Independent". Condemned widely, Ford later apologized for this action.

America First Committee

The avant-garde of the new isolationism was the America First Committee, which included the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and many prominent Americans. The America First Committee opposed any involvement in the war against Fascism.

Officially, America First avoided any appearance of antisemitism and voted to drop Henry Ford as a member for his overt antisemitism.

Ford continued his good friendship with the prominent America First member Lindbergh. Lindbergh visited Ford in the summer of 1941. One month later, in a speech delivered on September 11 1941 at an America First rally, Lindbergh claimed that three groups had been "pressing this country toward war": the Roosevelt Administration, the British, and the Jews - and complained about what he insisted was the Jews' "large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government." [cite web |url=http://www.pbs.org/perilousfight/social/antisemitism/ |title=PBC: The Perilous Fight. Antisemitism |accessdate=2006-10-08]

In an expurgated portion of his published diaries Lindbergh wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence…. Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”

German American Bund

The German American Bund held parades in New York City in the late 1930s which featured Nazi uniforms and flags featuring swastikas along side American flags. The zenith of the Bund's history occurred 1939 at Madison Square Garden. Some 20,000 people heard Bund leader Fritz Kuhn criticize President Franklin D. Roosevelt by repeatedly referring to him as “Frank D. Rosenfeld”, calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal", and espousing his belief in the existence of a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy in America. The New York district attorney prosecuted Kuhn. The US House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) were very active in denying their ability to operate. With the start of the US involvement in World War II most of the Bund's members were placed in internment camps, and some were deported at the end of the war.

Refugees from Nazi Germany

In the years before and during World War II the United States Congress, the Roosevelt Administration, and public opinion expressed concern about the fate of Jews in Europe but consistently refused to permit immigration of Jewish refugees.

In a report issued by the State Department, Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat noted that the United States accepted only 21,000 refugees from Europe and did not significantly raise or even fill its restrictive quotas, accepting far fewer Jews per capita than many of the neutral European countries and fewer in absolute terms than Switzerland.

According to David Wyman, "The United States and its Allies were willing to attempt almost nothing to save the Jews." [David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York, 1984), p. 5.] + There is some debate as to whether U.S. policies were generally targeted against all immigrants or specifically against Jews in particular. Wyman characterized Breckenridge Long as a nativist, more anti-immigrant than just anti-semitic. U.S. opposition to immigration in general in the late 1930s was motivated by the grave economic pressures, the high unemployment rate, and social frustration and disillusionment. The U.S. refusal to support specifically Jewish immigration, however, stemmed from something else, namely antisemitism, which had increased in the late 1930s and continued to rise in the 1940s. It was an important ingredient in America's negative response to Jewish refugees. [cite book |author=Charles Stember, ed. |title=Jews in the Mind of America |year=1966 |pages=pp. 53-62]

SS St. Louis

The Nazis were aware of rising western antisemitism and so the German Propaganda Ministry and the Nazi party conceived of a propaganda exercise which would demonstrate that Germany was not alone in its territorial, exclusionary hostility to Jews as a permanent minority within the political economy of their state. They (German propagandists) wanted to demonstrate that the “civilized” world agreed with their assertion that Jews constituted a continuing, “hidden-hand” of influence on national and economic affairs. They wanted to demonstrate that no other Western country or people would receive them as refugees. Firstly it would appear that the Nazis were allowing the Jewish refugees a new life in Havana. With no one allowing the passengers entry they would be in no position, in the future, to morally object when Germany dealt with their 'problem' Jewish population. The SS St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean in May 1939 carrying one non-Jewish and 936 (mainly German) Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II. [cite press release | title = United States Holocaust Memorial Museum completes ten-year search to uncover the fates of St. Louis passengers | publisher = United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | date = 2006-10-06 | url = http://www.ushmm.org/museum/press/archives/detail.php?category=07-general&content=2006-10-06 | accessdate = 2007-07-17 ] Rosen, p. 563.] On 4 June 1939, having failed to obtain permission to disembark passengers in Cuba, the "St. Louis" was also refused permission to unload on orders of President Roosevelt as the ship waited in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. Initially, Roosevelt showed limited willingness to take in some of those on board despite the Immigration Act of 1924, but vehement opposition came from Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and from Southern Democrats — some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred.

The Holocaust

During the Holocaust, antisemitism was a factor that limited American Jewish action during the war, and put American Jews in a difficult position. It is clear that antisemitism was a prevalent attitude in the US, which was especially convenient for America during the Holocaust. In America, antisemitism, which reached high levels in the late 1930s, continued to rise in the 1940s. During the years before Pearl Harbor, over a hundred antisemitic organizations were responsible for pumping hate propaganda throughout the American public. Furthermore, especially in New York City and Boston, young gangs vandalized Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, and attacks on Jewish youngsters were common. Swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans, as well as antisemitic literature were spread. In 1944, a public opinion poll showed that a quarter of Americans still regarded Jews as a “menace.”

It has been estimated that 190,000 - 200,000 Jews could have been saved during the Second World War had it not been for bureaucratic obstacles to immigration deliberately created by Breckinridge Long and others. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX90.html "Breckinridge Long (1881-1958)"] , Public Broadcasting System (PBS), accessed March 12 2006.]

Postwar

After the war, nativism continued to influence American policy towards refugees and evoked a reluctance to admit European refugees, termed after the war ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Yet, the new president Harry Truman viewed the question of the million European refugees who had survived the war and who opposed repatriation to their country of origin as a “world tragedy.” [President Harry S. Truman, Message to the Congress of the United States, 7 July 1947. Official File (OF) 127, Harry S. Truman Library (HSTL), Independence, Missouri.] Thus, he slowly encouraged the United States to take the lead in seeking a solution. Among the Displaced Persons (DPs), about 20 percent were Jews who languished in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria or Italy, waiting for emigration visas. [ Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Survivors in DP Camps and She’erith Hapleitah,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps, Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Jan. 1980 (Jerusalem, 1984).] However, no country was willing to admit them in large numbers. [Françoise S. Ouzan, Antisemitism in the U.S. at the end of the war and in its aftermath: Attitudes toward displaced persons]

Antisemitism in the United States began to decline in the late 1940’s. As they became aware of the Holocaust, many Americans found themselves ardently opposed to the bigotry that led to such genocide. Unfortunately, many of the conceptions that Jews were a Godless people who controlled U.S. money and wealth remained. Accordingly, “Fifty-seven anti-Semitic groups still existed in the United States throughout 1950’s.”cite book |last=Dinnerstein |first=Leonard |title=Anti-Semitism in America |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1994 |pages=pg 162] In many cases, anti-Semitic sentiments were shared by devout Christian groups who viewed the Jews as “materialistic, dishonest and vulgar.”

1950s

The beginning of the decade saw AntiDefamation League resume its fight to reform the laws that had limited Jewish immigration from the 1920s through the 1940s. The League urged liberalization, but Congress, over President Truman's veto, maintained the national origin quotas by adopting the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. [cite web |title=History of the Anti-Defamation League: 1913-2000 |url=http://www.adl.org/ADLHistory/print_adl_history.asp]

Jews became the target of accusations that they were subversive Communists.

Liberty Lobby

Liberty Lobby was a political advocacy organization which was founded in 1955 by Willis Carto in 1955. While Liberty Lobby was founded as a conservative political organization, Willis Carto was known to hold strongly antisemitic views, and to be a devotee of the writings of Francis Parker Yockey, who was one of a handful of post-World War II writers who revered Adolf Hitler.

Many critics, including the Anti-Defamation League, have noted that Willis Carto, more than anybody else, was responsible for keeping organized antisemitism alive as a viable political movement during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when it was otherwise completely discredited.

Liberty Lobby attempted to promote a public image of being a conservative anti-Communist group, along the lines of the John Birch Society, but while the John Birch Society publicly rejected white supremacy and antisemitism, Liberty Lobby promoted them. Francis Parker Yockey's "Imperium" was republished by Willis Carto's Noontide Press, which also published a number of other books and pamphlets promoting a racialist and white supremacist world view, and Liberty Lobby in turn sold and promoted these books. While Liberty Lobby was intended to occupy the niche of a conservative anti-Communist group, Willis Carto was meanwhile building other organizations which would take a much more explicit neo-Nazi orientation. Among these were the National Youth Alliance, a Willis Carto-founded organization that eventually became the National Alliance when Carto lost control of it and it fell into the hands of William Pierce. The National Alliance is considered to be the most well-known neo-Nazi group currently operating in the United States. Also founded by Carto was the Institute for Historical Review, a group known for publishing Holocaust denial books and articles.

Late twentieth century

Despite declining in the mid-twentieth century, antisemitism in the United States underwent a modest revival towards the end of the century.

NSPA march in Skokie

Skokie, Illinois was traditionally home to a sizable Jewish population, and although in recent years the town has significantly diversified, the Jewish population in Skokie, as well as in other suburbs, has also grown significantlyFact|date=April 2007. In 1977 and 1978, members of the National Socialist Party of America (an offshoot of the American Nazi Party) attempted to march through Skokie. The NSPA planned to rally in Marquette Park, Chicago; the city reacted by placing a ban on all demonstrations in the park.

Seeking another venue, the NSPA chose Skokie. Because of the large number of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, it was believed that the march would be disruptive, and the village refused to allow it. The American Civil Liberties Union interceded on behalf of the NSPA in "National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie".

An Illinois appeals court lifted the injunction issued by a Cook County Circuit Court judge, ruling that the presence of the swastika, the Nazi emblem, would constitute deliberate provocation of the people of Skokie. However, they also ruled that attorneys for the town of Skokie had failed to prove that either the Nazi uniform or printed materials that the Nazis allegedly intended to distribute would incite violence. [cite web |url=http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Znbf4M8AYs8J:www.digitalpast.org/cgi-bin/showfile.exe%3FCISOROOT%3D/skokiepo001%26CISOPTR%3D165+Skokie+swastika&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us |title=No swastikas allowed: Lift march injunction |first=Diane |last=Dubey]

However, due to a subsequent lifting of the Marquette Park ban, the NSPA ultimately held their rally in Chicago.

African-American community

In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s, the Black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially when a native form of Islam attracted African Americans in search of an identity, while the Muslim world was at war with the Jewish state. On April 14, 1970, the radical Black power leader Stokely Carmichael declared: “I have never admired a White man, but the greatest of them was Hitler.”

In 1984, civil rights leader Jessie Jackson speaking to Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman referred to Jews as "Hymies" and New York City as "Hymietown." He later apologized. [ [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/jackson.htm Washington Post] Retrieved March 12, 2008]

According to Anti-Defamation League surveys begun in 1964, African Americans are significantly more likely than white Americans to hold antisemitic beliefs, although there is a strong correlation between education level and the rejection of antisemitic stereotypes for all races. However, black Americans of all education levels are nevertheless significantly more likely than whites of the same education level to be antisemitic. In the 1998 survey, blacks (34%) were nearly four times as likely as whites (9%) to fall into the most antisemitic category (those agreeing with at least 6 of 11 statements that were potentially or clearly antisemitic). Among blacks with no college education, 43% fell into the most antisemitic group (vs. 18% for the general population), which fell to 27% among blacks with some college education, and 18% among blacks with a four-year college degree (vs. 5% for the general population). [http://www.adl.org/antisemitism_survey/survey_print.asp "Anti-Semitism and Prejudice in America: Highlights from an ADL Survey - November 1998"] , Anti-Defamation League, accessed March 12 2006.]

Current situation

Many in the Jewish community celebrated the vice-presidential candidacy of Senator Joseph Lieberman as marking a milestone in the decline of antisemitism in the United States.

New antisemitism

In recent years some scholars have advanced the concept of "New antisemitism", coming simultaneously from the left, the far right, and radical Islam, which tends to focus on opposition to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel, and argue that the language of Anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are used to attack the Jews more broadly. In this view, the proponents of the new concept believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and attribute this to antisemitism. [Sources for the following are:
*Bauer, Yehuda. [http://web.archive.org/web/20030705131522/http://humanities.ucsc.edu/JewishStudies/docs/YBauerLecture.pdf "Problems of Contemporary Anti-Semitism"] , 2003, retrieved April 22, 2006.
*Chesler, Phyllis. "The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It", Jossey-Bass, 2003, pp. 158-159, 181.
*Doward, Jamie. [http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1278580,00.html Jews predict record level of hate attacks: Militant Islamic media accused of stirring up new wave of anti-semitism] , "The Guardian", August 8, 2004.
*Kinsella, Warren. [http://www.warrenkinsella.com/words_extremism_nas.htm The New anti-Semitism] , accessed March 5, 2006.
*Sacks, Jonathan. [http://israel.jcca.org/articles.htm?y=620051118152416 "The New Antisemitism"] , Ha'aretz, September 6, 2002, retrieved on January 10, 2007.
*Strauss, Mark. [http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=2791 "Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem"] in Rosenbaum, Ron (ed). "Those who forget the past: The Question of Anti-Semitism", Random House 2004, p 272.]

In the context of the "Global War on Terrorism" there have been statements by both the Democrat Ernest Hollings and the Republican Pat Buchanan that suggest that the George W. Bush administration went to war in order to win Jewish supporters. Some note these statements echo Lindberg’s 1941 claim before the US entered World War II that a Jewish minority was pushing America into a war against its interests. ["The echoes of Lindbergh's 1941 speech charging 'the Jews' with dragging America into war can be heard in our own time.] During 2004, a number of prominent public figures accused Jewish members of the Bush administration of tricking America into war against Saddam Hussein to help Israel. U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina) claimed that the US action against Saddam was undertaken 'to secure Israel.' Television talk show host Pat Buchanan said a 'cabal' had managed 'to snare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests.'" [Rafael Medoff, [http://www.wymaninstitute.org/articles/2004-09-lindbergh.php President Lindbergh? Roth's New Novel Raises Questions About Antisemitism in the 1940s--and Today] , David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, September 2004. Retrieved June 20, 2007.] Hollings wrote an editorial in the May 6, 2004 "Charleston Post and Courier", where he argued that Bush invaded Iraq possibly because "spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats."

College campuses

On April 3, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced its finding that incidents of antisemitism are a "serious problem" on college campuses throughout the United States. The Commission recommended that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights protect college students from antisemitism through vigorous enforcement of "Title VI" of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further recommended that Congress clarify that Title VI applies to discrimination against Jewish students. [U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: PDFlink| [http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/050306FRUSCCRRCAS.pdf Findings and Recommendations Regarding Campus Antisemitism] |19.3 KiB . April 3, 2006] "

Nation of Islam

Concerns about anti-Semitism in the African-American community, one of the principal sources of anxiety among American Jews, were fueled in late 1993 and early 1994 by statements made by Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan. Strains were exacerbated when, on November 29, 1993, Farrakhan deputy Khalid Abdul Muhammad, delivered an anti-white, anti-Catholic, homophobic, and virulently anti-Semitic address to an audience at Kean College in New Jersey.

Some Jewish organizations, Christian organizations, Muslim organizations, and academics consider the Nation of Islam to be antisemitic. Specifically, they claim that the Nation Of Islam has engaged in revisionist and antisemitic interpretations of the Holocaust and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade. [ [http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~antis/papers/occasional.papers.html H-ANTISEMITISM OCCASIONAL PAPERS, NO. 1M ] ] The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) alleges that NOI Health Minister, Abdul Alim Muhammad, has accused Jewish doctors of injecting Blacks with the AIDS virus, [ [http://www.adl.org/focus_sheets/focus_islam.asp Nation of Islam ] ] an allegation that Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad has denied.

The Nation of Islam claimed that Jews were responsible for slavery, economic exploitation of black labor, selling alcohol and drugs in their communities, and unfair domination of the economy. Expressions of antisemitism have been voiced by Louis Farrakhan and other leaders of his “Nation of Islam.” Judaism is openly called “a gutter religion” and in 1994 labeled Hitler “a genius.” His aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad declared that “Jews are “bloodsuckers... You’re called Goldstein, Silverstein and Rubenstein because you’ve been stealing all the gold and silver and rubies all over the world.”

Some members of the Black Nationalist Nation of Islam claimed that Jews were responsible for the exploitation of black labor, bringing alcohol and drugs into their communities, and unfair domination of the economy.

The Nation of Islam has repeatedly denied charges of antisemitism, [ [http://www.noi.org/statements/statements_press_10-07-2000.htm Farrakhan and the Jewish Rift; A Historic Reference ] ] and NOI leader Minister Louis Farrakhan has stated, "The ADL... uses the term 'anti-Semitism' to stifle all criticism of Zionism and the Zionist policies of the State of Israel and also to stifle all legitimate criticism of the errant behavior of some Jewish people toward the non-Jewish population of the earth." ["The Final Call," February 16, 1994]

American attitudes towards Jews

Polls and studies over the past two decades point to a steady decrease in antisemitic attitudes, beliefs, and manifestations among the American public. A 1992 survey by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith showed that 20 percent of Americans --between 30 to 40 million adults-- held antisemitic views, as against 29 percent in 1964. However, another survey by the same organization concerning antisemitic incidents shows that the curve has risen without interruption since 1986.

The number of Americans holding antisemitic views declined markedly six years later when another ADL study classified only 12 percent of the population--between 20 to 25 million adults--as "most anti-Semitic." Confirming the findings of previous surveys, both studies also found that African Americans were significantly more likely than whites to hold anti-Semitic views, with 34 percent of blacks classified as "most anti-Semitic," compared to 9 percent of whites in 1998.

According to an Anti-Defamation League survey 14 percent of U.S. residents had anti-Semitic views. The 2005 survey found "35 percent of foreign-born Hispanics" and "36 percent of African-Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, four times more than the 9 percent for whites". [ [http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/4680_12.htm ADL Survey: Anti-Semitism Declines Slightly in America; 14 Percent of Americans Hold 'Strong' Anti-Semitic Beliefs ] ] The 2005 Anti-Defamation League survey includes data on Hispanic attitudes, with 29% being most antisemitic (vs. 9% for whites and 36% for blacks); being born in the United States helped alleviate this attitude: 35% of foreign-born Hispanics, but only 19% of those born in the US. [cite web |title=Anti-Defamation League Survey |url=http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/4680_12.htm]

Antisemitic organizations

There are a number of antisemitic organizations in the United States that emphasize Aryan white supremacy. These include the Christian Identity Churches, the Aryan-White Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazis, and gangs of skinheads, whose total membership is estimated at 3,000. Several fundamentalist churches also preach antisemitic messages.Fact|date=June 2008

The 1998 ADL survey also found a correlation between anti-Semitism and sympathy for right-wing antigovernment groups. Although anti-Semitism has declined over the past 35 years, the activities of some anti-Semitic groups have intensified. From 1974 to 1979, membership in the Ku Klux Klan rose from a historic all-time low of 1,500 to 11,500, and throughout the 1980s various Klan factions allied themselves with more explicitly neo-Nazi groups like the Aryan Nations (see neo-Nazi movements). The founding (1979) of the California-based Institute for Holocaust Review helped popularize the anti-Semitic notion that the Holocaust was a hoax. Farm foreclosures and economic distress in the rural Great Plains and Midwest during the mid-1980s prompted organizers for groups like the Posse Comitatus to spread anti-Semitic rhetoric throughout rural America. From 1986 to 1991 the numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads grew tenfold, reaching approximately 3,500 distributed among more than 35 cities. And the mid-1990s saw the formation of paramilitary citizens' "militias" (see militia movement), many of which were accused of circulating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and preaching religious bigotry.

Hate crimes

Escalating hate crimes targeting Jews and other minority groups prompted passage of the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990 and spurred 41 state legislatures, as of 1998, to enact a patchwork of laws providing for police training about bias crimes, stiffer jail terms for perpetrators, and mandatory hate-crimes data collection by law enforcement. From 1979 to 1989 the ADL recorded more than 9,617 anti-Semitic incidents, including 6,400 cases of vandalism, bombings and attempted bombings, arsons and attempted arsons, and cemetery desecrations. The tally peaked at 2,066 in 1994, but declined over the next three years, consistent with the downward trend in national crime statistics. According to 1996 Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, of 8,759 hate crimes recorded that year, 13 percent were anti-Semitic.

ee also

*History of antisemitism
*History of Jews in the United States

Notes

Further reading

*Buckley, William F. In Search of Anti-Semitism New York: Continuum, 1992.
*Dinnerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
*Dinnerstein, Leonard. Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
*Dobkowski, Michael N. The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.
*Gerber, David A., ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1986.
*Jaher, Frederic Cople. A Scapegoat in the Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
*Levinger, Lee J. Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press [1972, c1925] .
*Martire, Gregory and Ruth Clark. Anti-Semitism in the United States: A Study of Prejudice in the 1980s. New York, N.Y.: Praeger, 1982.
*McWilliams, Carey. A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979, c1948.
*Quinley, Harold E. and Charles Y. Glock. Anti-semitism in America; new introduction by Harold E. Quinley; new foreword by Theodore Freedman. New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Books, [1983] , c1979.
*Rausch, David A. Fundamentalist-evangelicals and Anti-semitism. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1993.
*Scholnick, Myron I.The New Deal and Anti-Semitism in America. New York: Garland Pub., 1990.
*Selzer, Michael, ed."Kike!:" A Documentary History of Anti-Semitism in America. Foreword by Herbert Gold. New York, World Pub. [1972] .
*Slavin, Stephen L. and Mary A. Pratt. The Einstein Syndrome: Corporate Anti-Semitism in America Today. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, c1982.
*Volkman, Ernest. A Legacy of Hate: Anti-Semitism in America. New York: F. Watts, 1982.