Editor’s Introduction

This issue’s rich collection of scholarship analyzes several ways in which antisemitism has threaded its way through the American past. We begin with Lawrence Peskin’s investigation of the correspondence of the U.S. Ambassador to Tunis, William Eaton. Written from 1799 to 1802, Eaton’s documents add nuance to our general assessment of early American attitudes toward Jews. Finding an uneasy blend of “Enlightenment toleration and paranoid anti-Jewish ravings,” Peskin suggests that Eaton’s attitudes ought to be compared to ideas expressed in other correspondence of that era in order to obtain a clearer understanding of early American Judeophobia/philia. His work advances that task.

Britt Tevis finds Jewish attorneys working a century later to defeat unsavory attitudes that blocked Jews’ entry to the United States and, in the process, helping “to shape the development of the country’s immigration laws.” Her work counters the gauzy depictions of America’s welcome of Jewish immigrants that we find so often in popular culture. In hearings where immigrants defended their fitness for entry, they were presumed unfit, and they needed to convince the immigration panels otherwise. By bringing these cases to federal court, Tevis writes, “lawyers hoped to establish a legal precedent that would ensure no other aliens would be excluded for the particular reason litigated.” Tevis shows how quick intervention and the savvy selection of cases effected change.

The immigration of high numbers of Catholics and Jews who settled in already crowded urban areas alarmed many Americans. Adrienne deNoyelles shows us how “social anxiety,” together with the fluid etiology of tuberculosis, created ideal conditions for associating TB with “new immigrants — particularly Eastern European Jews, whose urban backgrounds, indoor occupations, and popular caricatures suggested strong ties between modernity and physical weakness.” Yet, American Jewish physicians disagreed about how best to address the problem. Their differences help us to understand the subtle challenges to “American identity-building for immigrant Jews and their communities.”

This issue’s articles confirm antisemitism’s continuing presence in the United States, but, of course, never in the deadly form that emerged in Nazi Germany. Rafael Medoff provides us with an assessment of the current state of the field of Holocaust Studies, a topic that has energized many American scholars. Perhaps not surprisingly, fresh understandings of both “basic sentiments” and “previously unknown instances of . . . aid” have been unearthed. Medoff’s thoughtful analysis encourages further efforts in this important subfield.

Jacob S. Dorman analyzes the controversial career of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose slogan, “Never Again,” recalled the Holocaust and aimed to defend Jews from antisemitism. Dorman places Kahane’s career in the context of the broad social upheavals occurring in the United States, in general, but, more importantly, in the local drama played out in the crises over the desegregation of Brooklyn’s public schools in 1968. The collision of antisemitism and racist ideas in public arenas provided the soil for the growth of the JDL. Dorman explains the complex tangle of local politics, educational goals, and self-defense that tore Brooklyn apart that year.

Together, these fine articles sharpen and deepen our understanding of antisemitism, its life in American history, and the complex ways in which American Jews have fought it.