Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History

Identifying trends in the study of antisemitism in American history is a complicated task because historians have mostly focused their attention on other aspects of the American Jewish experience.² Further, by and large, those works that examine antisemitism in the United States posit that anti-Jewish animus has been relatively fleeting and generally marginal to United States history and the American Jewish experience. Indeed, antisemitism in the United States has most often been framed as an outlier and premodern relic. According to this argument, America's commitment to religious freedom, democracy, and pluralism has deterred the state from perpetuating anti-Jewish discrimination or bigoty. Thus, understanding antisemitism in America requires studying social spaces and parsing personal interactions between Jews and non-Jews.³ Systemic forms of discrimination such as university quotas, violent incidents such as the lynching of Leo Frank, and the dissemination of anti-Jewish propaganda by influential Americans such as Henry Ford appear as outliers. Simply stated, to the extent that American Jewish historians have examined antisemitism, it has been largely to dismiss it as a serious, lasting problem woven into the fabric of US history. The tendency to present antisemitism in the United States as atypical, momentary, and confined to private realms is especially noteworthy in several important surveys of American Jewish history.⁴ Trends in scholarship on antisemitism in the United States must be understood in the context of how American Jewish historians have promoted the idea that antisemitism in the United States has been a relatively insignificant aberration.⁵

As this article shows, conceptualizations of antisemitism as irregular, relatively harmless, and primarily social originated in the 1950s, when academic historians first took an interest in studying American antisemitism in the context of a larger debate about populism, exceptionalism, and objectivity. The essential voices to emerge from this discussion were those of immigration historians Oscar Handlin (1915–2011) and John Higham (1920–2003). Their conceptualizations of anti-Jewish animus became touchstones for discussion of antisemitism in subsequent decades. Though Handlin and Higham disagreed on certain details, they agreed on antisemitism's limited significance and short-lived nature, seeing in it a vestige rather than a manifestation of modernity. Since the 1970s, some historians have advanced an understanding of anti-Jewish animus that recognizes it as both a persistent force, which existed beyond social realms. Still, Handlin and Higham's ideas (especially Higham's) remain influential, and many American Jewish historians continue to present antisemitism as largely insignificant, momentary, primarily social.

Recognizing the weight of Handlin and Higham's claims in American Jewish historical scholarship from the past seventy years renders the state of the field and its attendant trends understandable. Because most historians who have published on the history of antisemitism in American history have done so either as dissenters within the field of American Jewish history or as historians from other fields interested in examining anti-Jewish animus in passing, collectively, existing scholarship presents antisemitism as episodic. Periodic surges in interest have proved short-lived and thus pertinent research has appeared haphazardly. Research exploring given incidents or themes have materialized here and there yet the dynamics and nature of antisemitism in the United States have yet to be sufficiently theorized or explained. At the same time, despite the diffuse nature of relevant scholarship, collectively it suggests that anti-Jewish animus constitutes an integral feature of American history, rather than a momentary and relatively innocuous phenomenon that is unrelated to the state.⁶ Accordingly, this article concludes by offering some suggestions for future researchers.

FORMATIVE SCHOLARSHIP ON ANTISEMITISM IN THE UNITED STATES

Academic historians first took interest in antisemitism in the United States in the 1950s just as American Jewry came to the discipline's attention.⁷ American historians considered anti-Jewish animus in the United States as they engaged in contemporaneous debates about populism, the late nineteenth-century political movement of farmers and laborers, and reassessed 1930s scholarship.⁸ As they developed their narratives of American history, scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, and others articulated divergent views on...