Nadell, who directs the Jewish Studies Program at American University, writes that hatred of Jews in the United States “sits atop a long history of antisemitism that made its way to this land centuries ago and that flourishes today.” That hatred was manifest in numerous ways, from ghettoization to political restrictions, such as New Hampshire’s erstwhile requirement, until 1877, that the governor and legislators be Protestant. In the 17th century, Increase Mather, the Puritan clergyman and president of Harvard, fulminated against Jews from his Boston pulpit for “the most prodigious Murther that ever the Sun beheld,” meaning, of course, the killing of Christ. That charge was layered with other now-familiar tropes: drinking Christian babies’ blood, spreading the plague, poisoning wells. Economic hostility, Nadell writes, mounted in the 1830s, when thousands of young Jewish men arrived from Europe and found that little work was open to them, save as peddlers. Some Jews became prominent in business, finance, and politics, as with Judah P. Benjamin, secretary of state of the Confederacy. But other Jews were broadly persecuted, as when Ulysses S. Grant expelled those peddlers from his military jurisdiction. One of Grant’s postwar friends, and one of the wealthiest men in the country, was barred from a resort hotel in New York on the grounds that it was not open to “Israelites,” while, over the decades, Jews suffered indignities such as being banned from professional schools and, in the case of Saul Bellow, discouraged from studying English by a professor who said, “You weren’t born to it.” Bellow, of course, went on to earn the Nobel Prize in literature, and countless other Jewish Americans have excelled in every field of endeavor—yet antisemitism persists, encouraged now, in Nadell’s view, by a president who holds a “racist vision of how to make American great again.”

An urgent and provocative work on the history of hostility to American Jews.

‍