"Un-American" Antisemitism?: The American Jewish Committee's Response to Global Antisemitism in the Interwar Period

The first pages of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America depict an idyllic picture of Jewish-American symbiosis characterized by security, opportunity, acculturation, and a strong feeling of at-homeness in America. Only one disruptive element cracks the façade: the election in 1940 of a fascist and antisemitic president, Charles Lindbergh. For the Jewish narrator, this shock "assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world."² In reimagining the course of Jewish history in America, Roth's 2004 novel highlights a complex relationship between antisemitism, American Jewish exceptionalism, and American democracy, which still deserves further scholarly attention.

Although a counterfactual history, Roth's novel nevertheless draws upon some facts: For one thing, between the two world wars, Jews in America turned out to be one of the chief targets of global anti-Jewish discourse. When Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator-turned-isolationist-leader made his infamous Des Moines speech of September 11, 1941, he accused Jews of pushing the United States into war against Nazi Germany.³ Calling out American Jewish leaders, Lindbergh capitalized on antisemitic myths about Jewish power and internationalism that had been taking deep roots during the interwar years. More and more during that period, American Jews crystallized antisemitic resentment toward modernity and liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic. As Cornelia Wilhelm explains, "For anti-Semites, America was symbolic for empowering the Jew and allowing him to be a driving force and supposed sole 'winner' in the modernization of society, economics, and politics."⁴

This article investigates the historical shapes of the triangular relationship between the American exceptionalism, democracy, and antisemitism recalled by Roth. It does so by looking specifically at the mutual influences between global antisemitic myths and the defense strategies of the American Jewish Committee during the interwar years. Hence, this article examines the ways in which some of those involved in Jewish defense work saw the interplay between Americanness and antisemitism at that time.

Some historians have focused on Jewish legal defense, but a deeper inspection of the impact of antisemitic myths upon Jewish strategies and self-perception, leads to questions concerning the extent to which antisemitism informed Jews' public discourse while they wrestled with dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the United States.⁵ How did American Jews define themselves politically and culturally via their efforts to tamp down antisemitism at home and abroad? Part of the answer is that the American Jewish Committee's efforts against antisemitism served also as a tool to assert both Jews' Americanness and America's exceptional model. In an ironic twist, fighting antisemitism became a way to reinforce an exceptionalist claim about the presumed weakness of American antisemitism.

Reintegrating Jewish responses into the study of antisemitism promises to complicate the narrative of the American Jewish exceptionalism. The paradigm of exceptionalism sees the American Jewish experience as unique and superior to the fate of other Jewish communities, especially when compared to persecutions of Jews in Europe. Because of its assumptions and distortions, this narrative—which is part of a broader ideology of American exceptionalism—calls for more nuanced scrutiny, as historian Tony Michels argues. The exceptionalist claim of American Jewish uniqueness relies on a set of core themes taken as given: absence of a "Jewish question," and immediate legal equality and individual rights in a liberal political system (making American Jews a singular case of "post-emancipation Jewry"); separation of church and state, and religious pluralism; lack of traditions of clericalism and feudalism; upward social and economic mobility; identification between Jewish values and American liberalism.⁶

The presumed absence or insignificance of antisemitism in the United States underpins the exceptionalist narrative. But this view includes a set of reductive assumptions about antisemitism, namely that to be noteworthy antisemitic manifestations must be necessarily lethal, violent, or political in a narrow institutional sense of the term. Conversely, the...