Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the American Racial Order: Revisiting the American Council for Judaism in the Twenty-First Century

In recent years, Jewish communal agencies, civil liberties watchdogs, pro-Israel advocates, and supporters of Palestinian rights have publicly debated the meaning of antisemitism and the wisdom of introducing certain formal definitions to the adjudication of US civil rights law.¹ The self-assurance with which these political actors attempt to delimit the boundaries of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the far less conclusive efforts of Jewish studies scholars to address fundamental definitional questions. As one recent overview observed, academic treatments of antisemitism increasingly find themselves stymied by "the absence of a general scholarly consensus about the very definition and dimensions of the phenomenon under investigation."² Uncertainty as to whether "antisemitism" represents a coherent or useful category of analysis has in turn motivated scholarship that aims to historicize the term itself by mapping the ways its meanings have shifted over time in response to political developments and changing conceptions of Jewish communal interest.

David Feldman, for example, traces the evolving usages of "antisemitism" by twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish spokesmen and concludes that the term functioned as a "flexible category that allowed Jews and non-Jews to make sense of and respond to successive political challenges." As new threats emerged and as the relationship between Jews and the state was radically transformed after 1948, representatives of Britain's Jewish community adapted their operative definitions of "antisemitism" in ways that invariably "drew attention to a value or project concerning Jewish rights that was being violated."³ By examining those projects, Feldman demonstrates that Jewish communal constructions of antisemitism often reveal more about contemporaneous understandings of Jewish rights and interests than they do about antisemitism as a supposedly transhistorical phenomenon.

Like their British counterparts, American Jewish leaders have also articulated antisemitism differently at different points in time and revisiting those historical articulations can likewise shed light on the fears, priorities, and political imaginations of the actors who embraced them. Moreover, competing Jewish conceptions of antisemitism have occasionally come into conflict with one another, fueling intra-Jewish disputes and resource struggles that clarify the stakes of American Jewish politics in a given period. This article analyzes a conception of and political approach to antisemitism that, while now defunct, once exercised nearly unrivaled hegemony over American Jewish institutions before imploding in a blaze of communal conflict during the immediate postwar decades. An examination of its final institutional advocate, the American Council for Judaism, highlights this paradigm's embeddedness in the pre-civil-rights American racial order and traces its obsolescence to the epochal social transformations of the 1960s. Central to the Council's view of antisemitism, and to earlier iterations of the paradigm in question, was an understanding of Zionism as a racializing force. Established in the waning years of Jim Crow, the Council and its affluent leadership waged a rearguard battle against American Zionism and its ethnonational conception of Jewish identity, in an effort—as they saw it—to safeguard American Jews against antisemitism.

The analysis that follows excavates the largely forgotten post-1948 history of the Council; establishes its ideological continuity with earlier, more politically dominant forces in American Jewish life; and explores the linkages between its anti-Zionism, its approach to antisemitism, and its conservative racial politics.⁴ Far from being of purely antiquarian significance, the history of the Council reveals how American Jewish constructions of antisemitism are in part a reflection of the way their proponents understand the position of Jews in the American racial order.⁵ The closing section sketches the development of the communal antisemitism paradigm that emerged hegemonic in the wake of the Council's downfall—the so-called "new antisemitism" paradigm—and highlights the role of reconstituted racial anxieties in its own formulation.⁶ Both the "new antisemitism" paradigm and the paradigm advanced by the Council link race, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism in a unique ideological assemblage intended to advance the interests of its adherents. Juxtaposing the two shows the American racial order as a persistent structuring force in intra-Jewish contests over the...