Leonard Dinnerstein (1934–2019): The Historian and His Subject

The death early in 2019 of Leonard Dinnerstein marks the passing of the premier historian of American antisemitism.¹ Others might have plumbed greater depths of complexity or been more interpretively venturesome. No one, however, has so completely made the subject their own, written with greater confidence, or discovered and made extensive use of a wider range of sources than Dinnerstein did in multiple essays and reviews, two significant monographs, and the crowning work of his career, Anti-Semitism in America (1994).² That work remains one of only two one-volume surveys on the subject.³ Yet Anti-Semitism in America exposes unresolved tensions in Dinnerstein's thought, and in our understanding of American Jewish history, and by extension, our understanding of America itself.

The son of a working-class immigrant father from Belarus and a mother born of immigrant parents from Austria-Hungary, Dinnerstein grew up in the Bronx, and like many of his male Jewish contemporaries in the neighborhood in the early postwar years used higher education to leave the working class and challenge the formidable barriers to Jewish advancement. He obtained his BA from CUNY in 1955, and went on to receive a PhD in 1966 from Columbia, where he did his doctoral work under the distinguished Americanist William Leuchtenburg. It seemed logical that Dinnerstein would do a dissertation in political history, because Leuchtenburg was a large presence in that area. Besides, there was little else to American history in graduate programs at the time. But Dinnerstein found another topic quite by accident. A friend who had recently been doing research on the American Jewish Committee at the American Jewish Archives told Dinnerstein that there were boxes of unexplored manuscript materials there about the Leo Frank murder trial and its aftermath. Dinnerstein's response—"Who's Leo Frank?"—as he later remembered, reflected neither feigned ignorance nor, given how completely he became associated with Leo Frank, retrospectively-evoked irony.⁴ The Frank affair, which culminated in Frank's lynching by a small-town mob in Georgia after his death sentence was commuted by the governor, was a Jewish nightmare. It was mostly not spoken of by Jews in public. But it nonetheless was remembered for its painful lesson not to be too trusting of even the seemingly most benign diaspora spaces, such as early-twentieth-century Atlanta, where many Jews were prosperous and apparently esteemed by their respectable gentile neighbors. Besides, what Dinnerstein knew of the gentile world and Americans' attitudes toward Jews was filtered through his experiences in the Bronx and in New York City, where he was largely encapsulated in Jewishness. Dinnerstein recalled that the more he investigated the Frank trial and the precarious position of Jews in the American South, the more he became aware of the extent of antisemitism, in the South and beyond, which he had neither experienced nor imagined. Leo Frank's fate seemed no mere exceptional artifact in an otherwise glorious era of Progressive reform, as he had initially thought it to be, but a window into a much more complicated and sinister American reality.

At the time, only a handful of historians, principally Oscar Handlin and John Higham, had addressed American antisemitism directly, while others, such as Richard Hofstadter, approached it obliquely when debating the nature of agrarian Populism. Even Higham, whose work on the subject was the most advanced in terms of theorization, never did a full-length interpretive study, only a handful of essays. In contrast to American behavioral scientists, who understood antisemitism as evidence of psychopathology, American historians did not take it seriously. ⁵ Only a handful of books and notable essays marked its historical existence. John Higham's 1966 observation that "no decisive event, no deep crisis, no powerful social movement, no great individual is associated primarily with anti-Semitism" in America, probably passed for the consensus at the time.⁶ Where antisemitism was found here and there in the historical record, it was thought greatly limited in time and space, and to marginal classes of the population, such as small farmers trying to resist...