Episode 10: Between Hate and Hope

Mark Oppenheimer 

Support for Antisemitism, U.S.A. comes from the Henry Luce Foundation and the David Bruce Smith Foundation.

Crowd 

(crowd noises)

Mark Oppenheimer 

In August 2017, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for what they called the Unite the Right rally. They were there to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee. The major rally is not going to take place until August 11. But the night before, about 200 men and women, many of them carrying tiki torches march onto the University of Virginia campus. And as they march, they chant.

Crowd 

You will not replace us. You will not replace us. (ongoing beneath narration)

Mark Oppenheimer 

They march onto the lawn and approach the campus Rotunda. And their chant becomes more specific. They holler, "Jews will not replace us." And they shout a Nazi chant about purifying white soil from Jewish and other polluting blood. There's also a smaller group of counter protesters, and the two groups shout at each other. In a menacing, terrifying way. The white nationalists surround the counter protesters. Police have to step in. The next day, the main rally takes place at Emancipation Park, formerly known as Robert E. Lee Park, and a lot of unsavory folks show up. There's the Ku Klux Klan, the League of the South, far right TV host Nick Fuentes. Neo Nazi Richard Spencer is there as is former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. The Unite the Right rally was ostensibly about a statue of a Confederate General, but the marchers were equal opportunity haters. They spewed venom against black people, Jews, gays, and anyone who they felt was opposing them. One of the Neo Nazis at the rally held up a sign that declared "Jews are Satan's children." It listed a few New Testament verses and then concluded with a reference to the Jewish scripture that said, "Talmud is a child molester's Bible." Tragically, these weren't just words. When a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of anti racists, Heather Heyer was hit and killed. What happened in Charlottesville was shocking to many Americans. But the ideas are not surprising. The Christian bigotry, the racist fear of Jewish blood weakening white American stock, the conspiracy theories, all of them have a history

Mark Oppenheimer 

I'm Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Antisemitism, U.S.A., a podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. Episode 10 Between Hate and Hope. On this final episode, we'll explore some of these recent trends and ask how we might better understand them in light of the longer history of antisemitism in this country. It's a history that gives us well grounded reasons for both concern and optimism. Racial antisemitism had mostly faded from public view by the 1960s. But if the 2017 Charlottesville riots taught us anything, anti blackness and anti Judaism often appear side by side. Since the early 1900s, white supremacy and antisemitism had been closely connected. The lynching of Leo Frank, a Jew, in Georgia in 1915, was one of the inspirations for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. The anti immigration laws of the 1920s were passed, in part, because Nativists argued that Jewish blood would weaken the country's racial stock. In the 1930s, the silver shirts, followers of William Pelley, armed themselves and trained for an anticipated race war. Other groups persisted after World War Two and from time to time, Nazis in uniform would parade through American towns.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In 1970, Frank Collin formed the National Socialist Party of America, and he planned to march in Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago, where one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor. Collin and his Nazis got a lot of media attention, and the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that they had the right to peacefully march. President Jimmy Carter released a statement about the Skokie March which read, "I must respect the decision of the Supreme Court allowing this group to express their views, even when those views are despicable and ugly as they are in this case. But if such views must be expressed, I am pleased that they will not go unanswered. That is why I want to voice my complete solidarity with those citizens of Skokie in Chicago, who will gather Sunday in a peaceful demonstration of their abhorrence of Nazism." Carter had no trouble upholding free speech and denouncing Nazis at the same time. Now, after the Charlottesville rally in 2017, this is what President Donald Trump had to say.

Donald Trump 

Yes, I think there's blame on both sides. You look at, you look at both sides. I think there's blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either. And, and, and if you reported it accurately, you would say.

Mark Oppenheimer 

When a reporter objected that the Neo Nazis started the whole problem by coming to Charlottesville, Trump continued.

Donald Trump 

And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group? Excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.

Crowd 

(crowd noises)

Mark Oppenheimer 

It would seem there's a big difference between these two presidential responses. Carter was unequivocal in condemning Nazis. By contrast, Trump vacillated back and forth between condemning racism and hatred, and blaming both or many sides for the violence in Charlottesville. Along with their Democratic colleagues, many national Republican leaders forthrightly condemned the Unite the Right rally. But the President did not.

Mark Oppenheimer 

You can think of Trump as being a kind of philosemite, not somebody who hates Jews, but someone who believes all the stereotypes about them. Here's Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers politics and religion, and writes a lot about contemporary antisemitism.

Yair Rosenberg 

The other form of philosemitism is actually the inverse of anti semitism, which is to say, people accept the same stereotypes about Jews that antisemites do, but they understand them positively. So instead of Jews being very clever and scheming and manipulating others, negatively, Jews are very clever. They're very smart, and you want them running your banks, right? They're very good with money. I want a Jewish lawyer, and all of these sorts of ideas. An example of someone who thinks this way about Jewish people, former President Donald Trump. He speaks about Jews in what seemed like antisemitic terms, but he's not intending those things as a tax. He invited, as president, Jews to the White House and talked to them about Israel, would talk about it as your country. And he would talk about Benjamin Netanyahu as your Prime Minister, this idea that Jews are actually really cutouts for Israelis, possessing dual loyalties, and so forth. But again, he wasn't doing this with the intent to insult, right, or attack. And people are very confused by this. They're like, how is Trump saying these antisemitic things, but yet he has a Jewish son in law, and he conceives of himself as a friend of the Jews. But it actually makes sense because Trump is a philosemite of the second mould. He believes all these antisemitic stereotypes, but he admires those stereotypes because Trump is the ultimate self interested actor. He thinks that you should always look out for yourself before anybody else. So where others would look at that and say that's an antisemitic attack, Trump sees this as a compliment.

Mark Oppenheimer 

While Trump didn't record his private conversations, he has said plenty in public. He has commented on Jewish money, Jewish power, Jewish ingratitude toward him, and how there are good Jews and bad Jews. In another respect, though, Trump's equivocation was a watershed moment.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For much of the last century, national conservative leaders have wanted to keep far right antisemites and white supremacists not just at arm's length, but even farther away. Being associated with the John Birch Society, let alone Neo Nazis, was considered political poison. Sure, politicians might find a way to appeal to white supremacists, but they tried to be sneaky about it.

Yair Rosenberg 

Trump brought a lot of fringe people closer to the center of the discourse. And of course, some of those people were going to be antisemites and give that seven years to marinate. And a lot of people are now like, they're second tier conservative influencers. They haven't yet made it to the inner circle. But they're honing in. And there's a surprising amount of this and people do not realize it. You can see it on social media based on who's retweeting who, who's reading who and what they're sharing. You know, these people are part of the conversation. They're at events with Trump's kids, and stuff like that. It's why Trump ends up at dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye and things like that. It's not a coincidence. This is going on.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It's not a coincidence. Let's step back and take a broader look at the recent trajectory of American antisemitism. Here's Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti Defamation League, which has been tracking antisemitic attitudes for decades,

Jonathan Greenblatt 

We've been tracking antisemitic attitudes since the 1960s. So longer than any other, as far as I'm aware, of any other entity in society, we've been doing the kind of longitudinal research that gives us the benefit of a broad set of information. First, in 1962, or 63, ADL started working with sociologists at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop kind of a questionnaire and a means by which you could assess antisemitic attitudes among the general population. So this is sort of classic market research. And in the span of a set of questions are 14 different stereotypes about Jewish people. Do you think the Jews responsible for the World Wars? If you say yes to that, but no to say the 13 other myths or tropes, then you're not considered someone with deep antisemitism. But responding positively to six or more of the question constitutes what the sociologist defined as, quote, extensive antisemitic attitudes. That's where we become concerned. So when the ADL talks about measuring antisemitic attitudes, we're looking for what percent of the general population respond positively to six or more of these myths.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For most of the last 60 years, the results of this survey were at least two somewhat comforting. Things were headed in the right direction.

Jonathan Greenblatt 

When ADL issued our first survey, in 1964, roughly 30% held classic antisemitic attitudes, meaning responding affirmatively to six or more of the questions. Now, since that first study, the numbers basically have ticked downward over the ensuing decades. And they kind of have bounced between like 8 and 12%, over a number of decades. So what does that mean? It means that between eight and 12%, of the general population, non Jewish, affirmed antisemitic attitudes. So when we ran the survey in 2019, it was roughly 11%.

Mark Oppenheimer 

That would suggest that about 38 and a half million Americans give or take, have extensive antisemitic attitudes.

Jonathan Greenblatt 

That's a lot of people. I just want to say that out loud. It's not a small number. But nonetheless, it's within the range that we have come to expect.

Mark Oppenheimer 

If you're guessing that the news has gotten worse, you are correct.

Jonathan Greenblatt 

When we read the survey, 2022, it came back 20%. So from 11%, in 2019, to 20%, in 2022. Now, by the way, for what it's worth, this was pre Kanye West. This was pre Kyrie Irving, some very big moments in like the public conversation about antisemitism. So this was pretty alarming to us. In fact, that number of 20% was the highest we'd seen in the last 30 years of doing the survey.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And if you drill down into the data even more, the news gets worse.

Jonathan Greenblatt 

3% of the respondents responded affirmatively to all 14 of the questions. 3% out of 100 seems like a small number

Mark Oppenheimer 

3% of the country, that's about 10 million people,

Jonathan Greenblatt 

That 3% is more than the total population of Jews in the country. To think that there's more of them than there are of Jews is, is, I think, at a minimum, that's a little bit sobering.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Even more sobering, there's been a corresponding increase in antisemitic incidents.

Jonathan Greenblatt 

So last year, we tracked and this is all public information, 3697 anti semitic incidents. That's the highest number we've ever tracked. That number is 36% higher than the previous year. That all time high, again, was preceded by 2021, which itself was an all time high. And prior to that the previous all time high was 2019. So three times the past five years, we've reached new, all time highs. The data shows us that antisemitic incidents are increasing. The harass splinters increasing, that was up 26%, and acts of violence are up another 26%.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Out of the more than 100 assaults documented by the ADL, more than half targeted visibly Orthodox Jews. The ADL also includes in its count a large number of what it terms anti Zionist and anti Israel incidents. For this category, the ADL differentiates between what it terms legitimate political protest, or expressions of opposition to Israeli policies, and anti Zionist antisemitism. What would be anti Zionist antisemitism according to the ADL? Well, they would say a boycott, divestments, and sanctions resolution, BDS, or an Israeli Apartheid week. Not everyone agrees with how the ADL categorizes these incidents. But whatever your definition, if you look at the data, you'll see that public antisemitism has ticked up in the United States. And in the wake of the October 7, Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, anti Zionist and anti Israel incidents skyrocketed, as did other forms of antisemitic incidents.

Mark Oppenheimer 

If you've been listening to the show, you probably don't need to be convinced that there's a problem. It may not be a huge problem. Numerically speaking, the odds that any Jew is going to be a target of antisemitic violence, whether walking down the street or studying on a university campus, is very, very small. But still, there's Charlottesville in 2017. There are the Tree of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018. There were the three people shot and killed at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City in 2019. There was the hostage taking at a temple in Colleyville, Texas in 2022. And surveys do show that anti Jewish attitudes are going up. All of this leaves us with some tough questions. How do we make sense of antisemitism in the United States today? Why have things gotten worse? How bad is it? Can we do anything about it? We will return to these questions after the break.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In May 2023, President Joe Biden launched a national strategy to counter antisemitism. Here he is speaking at the event.

Joe Biden 

Six years ago, Neo Nazis marched out of a field in Charlottesville, Virginia, literally carrying torches and neo Nazi flags, and spewing the same antisemitic bile that was heard across Europe in the 30s. In the process, a young woman was killed. What did you hear? There are very fine people on both sides. Come on. A reminder that hate never goes away. It only hides. Give it just a little bit of oxygen. It comes out from under those rocks with a vengeance. In the past several years hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling a record rise in antisemitism. It's simply wrong. It's not only, it's immoral, it's unacceptable. It's on all of us. It's on all of us to stop it. We must say clearly and forcefully that antisemitism and all forms of hate and violence have no place in America. And silence. Silence is complicity and you cannot remain silent. I will not remain silent. You should not either. That's why today I'm releasing the first ever national strategy to counter antisemitism.

Mark Oppenheimer 

His four pronged plan includes initiatives focused on education, safety and security, online antisemitism, and building multifaith partnerships. And the fact that the US has a national plan for combating antisemitism is a historical landmark. Also, the US now has a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Deborah Lipstadt was confirmed for the job in 2022. Here she is speaking at the same event as Biden.

Deborah Lipstadt 

This is a historic moment in the modern fight against what's known as the world's oldest hatred. For the first time, the United States government is not only acknowledging that antisemitism is a serious problem in this country, but laying out a clear plan to counter it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Before holding her current role, Lipstadt was a professor of history at Emory University and the author of many books. Despite the rise in antisemitic incidents, when she looks to the past, she finds reasons for optimism.

Deborah Lipstadt 

This moment is historic for another reason. Just consider where we are. We gather in a building that was once the home of the state and war departments. We come together to release a plan for combatting Jew hatred in a place where just over four decades ago, a form of Jew hatred took shape as official policy, as State Department officials erected so called paper walls around this country to prevent Jews from entering our borders. We assemble with memories of a dark time, when a White House staff counseled the president to stand firm against letting Jews in, when members of Congress sought to halt any liberalization of American, of immigration laws, even after Kristallnacht. When an intense bipartisan effort to allow the entry of Jewish children whose parents were in concentration camps was met with rejection and inhumanity. Even though a year later, when London was being bombed, Congress rushed to make room for British children to enter this country. You don't need my historical expertise to recognize the sole difference between these two sets of children. That was then. Today is very different.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In other words, antisemitism remains a serious and heightened threat. But at least the United States government is contending against it rather than abetting it.

Deborah Lipstadt 

This could not be more essential, because this scourge threatens not just the safety of Jews, but the strength of our democracy. Here again, history is instructive, telling us that where anti semitism persists. Democracy suffers Where Jews are at risks, so too, are the rights of everyone, from every race, religion, ethnicity, or creed. Yet, where communities and nations step forward to combat antisemitism, they tend to emerge more secure, more free, and more fair for all.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Anti Jewish hatred and prejudice clearly have not disappeared. Far from it. Why? One way to make sense of the present moment is to look at what got us here. I don't mean the past 10 years or the past 20 or even the past 50. I mean, looking at the very deep and complex roots in American culture throughout our history, the anti Jewishness of Christian theology, the tropes about Jewish merchants, the racialization of Jews, all the conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers, communists, media moguls, politicians. Because the pervasive antisemitism of the 19th and early 20th centuries had faded by the 1960s, many Americans thought it was just gone, it was a thing of the past. That has not proven to be the case. Given that antisemitism had such deep roots, not just here, but around the world, we probably shouldn't be surprised that it remains a problem today. Experts sometimes compare antisemitism to a virus that mutates and shapeshifts. It's a problem that fades from view, but inevitably resurfaces. Why does it seem to be getting worse or at least more visible today?

Mark Oppenheimer 

We've pointed to a few factors. There's the ability of antisemites to spread their views through social media. There's the toleration or even encouragement of antisemitism by certain politicians on both the right and the left. There's the fact that anti Zionist and anti Israel activism can stoke antisemitism, especially within certain communities, recently on college campuses, there are also other pockets of anti Jewish hatred. There is specifically Muslim antisemitism in some communities and the black Israelite movement. And of course, there's the white supremacism of the far right.

Mark Oppenheimer 

But if American history helps us make sense of our current problems, it also gives us grounds for hope, because we also have deeply rooted democratic and inter cultural traditions that can help us fight bigotry. We talked with one woman who exemplifies these traditions.

Mehnaz Afridi 

I'm Dr. Mehnaz Afridi. I teach Islam and the Holocaust at Manhattan College in the religious studies department. And I'm also the director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center here at Manhattan. My job as a Muslim, and I take this seriously, and a scholar, is to inform my Muslim community of the facts of the Holocaust. The encounters that I've had, and what I've read is always relativizing this idea of 6 million to 2 million, 6 million to 1 million, the denial you get even from Holocaust deniers that will say, Oh, well, you know, there weren't really ovens, there weren't really Einsatzgruppen, all these things. That I don't think Muslims are really concerned with, what they're concerned with is they must have done something to be killed.

Mark Oppenheimer 

There is a long and complicated 1400 years of history between Muslims and Jews. Muslims develop their own traditions of anti Judaism. And then Arab and other Muslim countries imported European antisemitism over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion remain readily accessible and they're popular in many Muslim countries today. Mehnaz Afridi was born in Pakistan. And here's some of her thoughts about anti Judaism there.

Mehnaz Afridi 

I remember going to the butcher, and it was a bird flu time. And uh, basically a sign an order that basically said, you know, the Jews have poisoned the birds. Where does that come from? And this is in Karachi marketplace, right. And then, I remember I was in Karachi. And I was going to LA, I think, and there was a bomb in Karachi. And this is like, during the height of like, 9/11. And it was funny, none of my family said this, because I was there, I think. But after I left, you know, my mom got on the phone. She goes, you know, the Jews were bombing the city. And I was like, why would the Jews be bombing Karachi? These things are always there.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In other words, antisemitism is pervasive in much of the Muslim world, whether in Pakistan or Egypt or elsewhere. And the Israeli Palestinian conflict has exacerbated tensions between Jews and Muslims. But Mehnaz Afridi sees a critical difference in the United States.

Mehnaz Afridi 

I argue all the time in my work, that there is a really strong Muslim Jewish American alliance in the United States that I have not seen or experienced anywhere else. There are more interfaith initiatives, there are more groups, more nonprofit groups that are doing this kind of work. I'm part of a lot of those groups. I think it's very strong. I think there's also conversations now about Israel and Palestine, that are painful. But people are pushing the envelope and they're pushing it hard because Jews and Muslims are the religious minorities in America that are most attacked. You know, the highest number of incidences in the United States is against Jews. And second, right around the corner is what Muslims, especially women in hijab.

Mehnaz Afridi 

Now, why is it better here? We have religious freedom. It's in our Constitution, we could not put on the Muslim ban, because it's anti constitutional, religious discrimination. That is huge.

Mark Oppenheimer 

As religious minorities in a predominantly Christian country, Jews and Muslims have stood up for each other.

Mehnaz Afridi 

Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans do better here, because they are freer, and they understand each other's challenges and they can do things together, that will not be condemned by their government or in the public sector, that they fight together. When the Muslim ban was put on by our former President Trump, my daughter and I went to the demonstration. My daughter was petrified that her mother was going to be kicked out of the country. But I took her specially so she could witness it. There were more Jews standing up for Muslims than there were Muslims at that demonstration in New York City. I cannot tell you how amazing that feeling was. And there was the No Hate No Fear March that I was part of walking from over the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to Brooklyn. I was asked to speak. They asked Muslims to speak up for Jews and I did, in front of 7000 people at a rally. This you will not see anywhere else. There are places that are desecrated, whether it's mosques or graveyards and Muslims and Jews health. We here in Riverdale fixed all the windows of the synagogues when someone desecrated them. I'm at a Catholic College, I'm Muslim. You don't hear these stories anywhere else.

Mehnaz Afridi 

The point is not that American Muslims are immune from the antisemitism that's present in Pakistan or Egypt. The US isn't exceptional in that sense, just as it wasn't immune to various strains of European antisemitism. The point is just that there are durable traditions of joint activism and inter religious dialogue. And these traditions make it possible for Jews and Muslims and for Jews and other groups to work together against Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry. And this happens all over the United States. There are interfaith councils in every city. There are national interfaith networks. It's not just Muslims and Jews. It's African Americans and Jews, evangelicals and Jews. These partnerships are not panaceas. They're difficult and hard to maintain. But we do have these interfaith interethnic partnerships and alliances. These dialogues have a long history in the US. Their roots don't go as deep as the roots of antisemitism, but they are solid roots, they're not easy to pull out.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Despite the very real history of antisemitism, American Jews have usually chosen to focus on the many ways that this country differed from the countries their ancestors left behind. Historians too have sometimes made antisemitism a relatively minor theme in the history of American Judaism. From this perspective, the US can seem exceptional. But throughout this series, we've tried to complicate that narrative. Here's historian David Sorkin, author of the book Jewish Emancipation

David Sorkin 

America as the place of promise and freedom, which is part of the notion of American exceptionalism, that America itself is a democracy that includes all peoples in citizenship. And of course, then there's the Jewish version of that, American Jewish exceptionalism, that America is different from Europe, in the sense that American Jews were, especially as white men, equal citizens under federal law from the start, so that there was no emancipation process.

Mark Oppenheimer 

By contrast, Sorkin understands American Jews as having worked for many decades to achieve their full and equal citizenship. The results paralleled the way that European Jews achieved their citizenship.

David Sorkin 

So then I would argue that instead, an alternative way of seeing American Jewish history, is that American Jews from the start, had to mobilize to become full citizens, and that they had to mobilize to maintain that equality as well. So the first time they have to mobilize in the early 19th century, in Maryland, and North Carolina and elsewhere, Jews had to mobilize to gain in political rights in the States. They have to mobilize is in the post World War Two period from 1945 to 1968, or 1970, during the Civil Rights era. Now, it's often the case that when Jews think about their relationship to the civil rights era, they see it in terms of altruism. You know, the Jews went to the south to register African American voters, that there were these voter rights activists who were murdered in the South. Or they point to the fact of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, march arm in arm with Martin Luther King in the South and in the north. But that's only a very small part of the story. What the civil rights movement was about, was for Jews, white ethnic Americans, and African Americans to gain the civil rights of which they were being deprived. The beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, were in part, African Americans and an African American middle class grew as a result of that. But the real beneficiaries of the Civil Rights Acts, equal opportunity employment, Fair Housing Act, end to quotas and discrimination in educational institutions were white Americans, Italians, Irish, and Jews.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The Civil Rights Movement achieved some but not all of its goals for African Americans, and many other groups from Native Americans to the disabled found that the objectives of the Civil Rights Movement pertained to their own struggles for full inclusion and opportunity. What Sorkin is saying is that for Jews, the Civil Rights Movement was about more than altruism. It took that common cause for Jews to achieve what today we call full and equal citizenship, to make it illegal for employers, universities, hotels, and landlords to discriminate against Jews.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The United States has never been immune to the antisemitism that exists elsewhere. Jews here have had to fight for their citizenship. At the same time, the particulars of American history are different. In Europe, Jews were the most salient minority in Christian societies. In the US, the fundamental division has been the color line. And because of this, Jews have not featured as significantly in US history as they have in European or modern Middle Eastern countries. In the 20th century, at least, the American Jewish fight for citizenship and against discrimination took place in the broader context of the American Civil Rights Movement. And it was relatively easier, not easy but easier for American Jews to secure their citizenship than it was for European Jews, or for African Americans. Many Americans understand Jews as white, privileged, and wealthy, a group at the top. And perhaps because of that, there's been a hesitancy on the part of many Americans to understand the dangers of antisemitism, not only to Jews, but to all of us.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The history presented in this podcast should discourage Americans from shrugging their shoulders at the ongoing challenge of antisemitism. Indeed, from shrugging their shoulders at any kind of hate. The white supremacists who came to Charlottesville in 2017 want an America in which only whites and Christians feel at home. And the good news is that the vast majority of Americans reject that future. Most Americans still think about antisemitism or anti Jewish hatred as a German problem from the 1930s and 1940s. Or they think of it as something that just sprang up in the last 10 years because of a particular politician or a particular geopolitical conflict. Neither of those theories is true. American antisemitism has a long history and our past is ever with us. But throughout that history, people of different backgrounds have joined together against hatred and bigotry. And today, we must approach this challenge with the same courage, conviction, and persistence as people did in the past. So that together, we can build a better future. One that, to quote President Washington, "gives to bigotry no sanction."

Mark Oppenheimer 

Thank you for listening to Antisemitism, U.S.A. it's a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Visit R2studios.org for a complete transcript of today's episode and for suggestions for further reading. I'm your host Mark Oppenheimer. Antisemitism, U.S.A. is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is our lead scholar, Jim Ambuske is our producer, Jeanette Patrick is our executive producer. We'd like to thank Zev Eleff for being our lead advisor and we'd like to thank our advisory board members, Laura Shaw Frank, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan Sonam. Our graduate assistants are Rachel Birch, Alexandra Miller, and Amber Pelham. Our thanks to Yair Rosenberg, Jonathan Greenblatt, Mehnaz Afridi, and David Sorkin for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. Archival audio material courtesy of the White House, C-SPAN, and Getty Images. We're able to bring you this show through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, the David Bruce Smith Foundation, and many individual donors like you. Thank you for listening