“It should not require bravery to come to a Shabbat, but here we are,”
Those were the words of Pamela Nadall, a professor at American University and author of the new book Antisemitism, An American Tradition. It was a recent Friday night in March, and Professor Nadall was speaking at a Jewish Shabbat in Maryland.
I was also there. A Catholic journalist, I wanted to witness how a local Jewish community near me was reacting to the epidemic of anti-semitism that is raging in America and the rest of the world. It’s also part of a bigger project I am working on about how Jews have enriched American culture, from literature to movies to Mad magazine.
I have also witnessed the absolute collapse of journalistic standards in recent decades, which has fueled the new war against the Jews. The leftists in the media have been propagandists for over a century, but the right in recent years has not been much better. People like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Megyn Kelly do not employ fact checkers. They do not have editors to answer to, editors who ask them about sources and accuracy. (To be fair, Ben Shapiro, whose arguments about the War in Iran and anti-semitism I generally agree with, also has refused to acknowledge or correct mistakes about stories.)
I have given up trying to get the Stasi media to tell the truth, but the conservatives have almost been as bad, and completely gone off the rails when it comes to Jewish people. So I came to a lovely synagogue on a Friday night to attend Shabbat. It was a beautiful service, with songs, fellowship, and Professor Nadall giving a talk on anti-Semitism. I could see the similarities between Shabbat and the Catholic Mass. I was reminded of something the great priest Father Richard John Neuhaus once said – Christians and Jews are not people in two separate houses, but people in different rooms of the same house.
Antisemitism, An American Tradition traces anti-semitism from Colonial America to the modern day. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, one administrator tried but failed to deport them. “Year-in and year-out,”Nadall writes, [Christians] heard the Gospels recount how the Pharisees, whose heirs would become the Jews’ rabbis, displayed enmity to Jesus and how, when the Roman imperial governor Pontius Pilate gave the Jews the chance to save a prisoner, the crowd freed the bandit Barabbas and clamored to crucify Jesus.” Ministers frequently preached on of the Jews’ guilt. In the 1660s, in Boston’s Second Church, the Puritan clergyman and Harvard president Increase Mather vilified them in sermons published as The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.”
In colonial Maryland, “denying that Jesus was the Son of God was a capital crime.”
There were some bright spots. In 1790, George Washington visited a Hebrew congregation and then sent a letter thanking them. He wrote: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” Nadall observes that many Jews could live their lives with a level of peace that was unknown in the old world.
Historically, the first calumny against Jews was that they are Christ-killers. Then came the “Shylock” stereotype that painted them as money-grubbers. That was followed by accusations of “dual loyalties” to America and to Israel. There was also the truly insane legend of Jews using the blood of babies for satanic rituals. These absurd stories have resurfaced in recent years. Once again, I bring up the issue of fact-checking and vetting, things that were once standard in the media. Why doesn’t Tucker or Megyn have Professor Nadall on as a guest for an hour? What’s stopping them? I think I know the answer.
“In the two centuries before the Civil War,” Nadall said in her talk, “America’s Jewish community comprised about half of one percent of the nation’s population. Nevertheless, Jews had come to occupy a considerable place in the American imagination both as the people who were Christ’s murderers and as those striving to undermine the country with their crooked business practices.”
Nadall observes that there have been times in history when Jews anticipated a “golden age” when they would truly be accepted or at least left alone. One was after World War II, when the raw evil of the Holocaust was too evident to be denied. Jews integrated into the universities and into American life. I’m not sure enough Americans appreciate how much Jews enriched American cultural life during this time, from publishing to music to movies, medicine, law, and comedy. Imagine America without Saul Bellow, Steven Spielberg, Don Rickles, Marvel Comics, Knopf, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Philip Glass, and punk rock. I don’t love Jewish people because I am enmeshed in the politics and history of the Middle East. I love them because they have helped make America great.
Professor Nadall also spoke about the leftist embrace of anti-semitism, which began in the 1960s. It was nothing new when, in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attacks, when there were armed incursions from the Gaza Strip into Israel, and over one thousand Jews were killed and thousands more kidnapped, raped, and tortured, the reaction amongst many was to blame the victims. As Nadall notes, “Nowhere has this been more evident in the US than on college and university campuses. When a Jewish reporter for Columbia University’s Daily Spectator covered an assault on an Israeli student, the student journalist was so harassed that she left campus.” At Harvard, rooms housing Jewish student organizations were vandalized and urinated on, and dorm room windows were plastered with “F—— Jews.” A Stanford University task force published almost 150 pages showing how antisemitism at this storied institution was “widespread and pernicious.”
Nadall reports that “Antisemitism came from peers, teaching assistants, resident advisors, faculty, administrators, and staff.” Jews on campus were taunted, “Go back to Brooklyn!” and threatened: “We know your names, we know where you work, and soon we are going to find out where you live.”
Professor Nadall wanted to end her talk “with some hope.” She quoted Psalm 126: “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy.”
“Although we are sowing tears,” she said, “I hope my children and grandchildren will reap with song of joy.”
Editor’s note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.
Help us maintain that fight! Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
