Antisemitism, American Jewish Historians, and their Publics

Pamela Nadell's testimony to Congress on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act not only engages with the material of American Jewish history but is a fascinating episode within it. Nadell, a distinguished historian of American Jews, places her experience in the context of ongoing Jewish communal infighting, but her account also opens onto other histories worth revisiting as Jewish Studies scholars navigate the rocky shoals of what we are increasingly coming to understand as post-Charlottesville or post-Pittsburgh America.¹

The phenomenon of "Anti-Semitism Awareness Acts" in and of itself needs to be explained as a product of a range of historical forces, many of which are explored in more depth elsewhere in this issue.² It does not exist without the politicization of college campuses since at least the 1960s, the rise of a pro-Israel consensus in American politics, or the intensification of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.³ It gains its power because of the seeming innocuousness of what Nadell describes as its "bland title." Decades-long efforts by Jewish organizations, Holocaust educators, creators of popular culture, and others have convinced most Americans that "antisemitism" is bad.⁴ The pervasiveness of liberal multiculturalism—perhaps especially in the Internet age of "likes," "shares," and "slacktivism"—means that most also agree that "awareness" is good.⁵

As Nadell notes, however, there is no universally agreed upon definition of antisemitism. And "awareness" seems purposely vague. In fact, in recent history, the majority of congressional "Awareness Acts," like the Scleroderma Research and Awareness Act and the Ovarian and Cervical Cancer Awareness Act," have targeted various medical ailments. The Byron Nash Renal Medullary Carcinoma Awareness Act, for instance, provides federal funding for states that educate individuals with sickle cell disease on that condition.⁶ Perhaps this language seemed appropriate because of popular associations of antisemitism with disease; but whereas most such acts center on education, this one instead offers a definition in order to assist in enforcement.⁷ The cure is not preventative medicine, but surgery—on a malignancy whose symptoms and root causes are highly contested.

Beyond the bill itself, I am struck by the fact of the hearing and by the dynamics among its participants. First, a debate about antisemitism on the floor of the United States House of Representatives seems noteworthy because of the complex history of Jews and the American state, especially around the politics of antisemitism. The United States Constitution of 1789 and the Naturalization Act of 1790 never mentioned Jews, thus subsuming them under the category of "free white person[s]," and understanding them to be different from the majority primarily in matters of belief and worship.⁸ And yet Jews have long been visible in ways that overflow this categorization. At various points—from the Damascus Affair in 1840 to the plight of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 1980s—Jews have petitioned presidents and members of Congress to act against anti-Jewish discrimination, usually in other countries. Antisemitism, often framed as a violation of "religious freedom," was something that mostly happened elsewhere and that helped buttress narratives of American exceptionalism.⁹

The US state, and Congress in particular, has also been a producer of antisemitism. I regularly teach a document from the 1920 Congressional Committee on Immigration that is reprinted in the reader The Jew in the Modern World. Entitled "Temporary Suspension of Immigration," the document explicitly states, "the committee has disregarded all statements that might give a religious bias of any kind to the matter under consideration," even as it explains that most of the new arrivals are "of the Semitic race," "of Jewish extraction," or "Jews." Reports provided by American consulates indicate, for instance, that the majority of migrants in Rotterdam were "of the usual ghetto type" and that those from Warsaw were "deficient" physically, mentally, economically and socially: "Eighty-five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit."¹⁰ Nadell's former colleague Ibram X. Kendi argues in his National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America that "hate and ignorance have not...