Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History

According to this argument, America's commitment to religious freedom, democracy, and pluralism has deterred the state from perpetuating anti-Jewish discrimination or bigoty. [...]understanding antisemitism in America requires studying social spaces and parsing personal interactions between Jew...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American Jewish history 2021, Vol.105 (1), p.255-284
Main Author: Tevis, Britt P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
American history
Antisemitism
Discrimination
Freedom of religion
Historians
Immigration
Jewish Americans
Jewish people
Lynchings
Modernity
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Nationalism
Noncitizens
Parsing
Politics
Populism
Propaganda
Quotas
Stereotypes
Trends
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:According to this argument, America's commitment to religious freedom, democracy, and pluralism has deterred the state from perpetuating anti-Jewish discrimination or bigoty. [...]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. 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. 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. According to Lila Corwin Berman, he was at the forefront of "sculpting a sociological language of Jewishness that fit into post-war nationalistic aims and answered prevailing Jewish concerns.
ISSN:0164-0178
1086-3141
1086-3141
DOI:10.1353/AJH.2021.0018