From the very beginning, the seed was planted.
It is comforting — almost narcotic — to believe that antisemitism is something imported, like a bad European habit that somehow stowed away on a ship to the New World.
But, as Pamela Nadell reminds us in her vital and unsettling new book, Antisemitism, an American Tradition, “Colonists not only carried rucksacks to America. They carried ideas about Jewish enmity and degeneracy that dwell at the core of Western civilization.”
Those settlers arrived with dreams of liberty in one hand and a theology of contempt in the other. “Christians saw Jews as ‘hateful enemies,’” Nadell writes, “their evil established by Jesus who told the Jews: ‘Ye are of your father, the devil’ (John 8:44).”
Nadell’s point is devastatingly simple: From the start, freedom in America came with fine print. For some, liberty was inalienable. For others — Jews among them — it was conditional.
So, from the start, the promise of freedom in the New World came with fine print. “Across much of American history,” Nadell observes, “Protestants, claiming pride of place for themselves among the nation’s many faiths, compelled others to bow to the primacy of their religion.” The notion of America as a “Christian nation” was not simply rhetoric. It was a framework for belonging, written into laws, hiring practices, holidays, even the architecture of small-town life. For Jews, “freedom of religion” often came with an asterisk.
There have been many books about antisemitism in America. This one wounds more deeply than most. Its very title — An American Tradition — forces us to face an unbearable truth: that antisemitism is not an imported toxin, but a native growth, woven into the national DNA.
If you believed that antisemitism in America was a matter of murmured slurs or private prejudice, Nadell offers a corrective that is both chilling and necessary. American antisemitism was not genteel; it was public, performative, sometimes lethal. “Unsurprisingly,” she writes, “so much animosity sometimes sparked violence.” There were riots, bombings, lynchings. The poison was never purely theoretical.
But the deeper wound came in quieter form — the sandpaper of daily exclusion. “More frequently than any of these experiences,” Nadell writes, “American Jews encountered antisemitism up close and personal — from teachers, shopkeepers, neighbors, acquaintances, and people they thought were friends.” That is how hate embeds itself: not through manifestos, but through microaggressions that accumulate into a life of being “other.”
Nadell dismantles the nostalgic myth of the postwar “Golden Age” of American Jewry — the suburban dream with its manicured lawns and new synagogues, where belonging seemed at last attainable. The truth, she shows, is harsher: The hatred did not end; it evolved. “Character” became code for “Christian.” University admissions offices, allergic to Jewish surnames, invented euphemisms — “well-roundedness,” “geographic diversity.” Even as Jewish GIs returned from defeating fascism, America’s gates stayed half-closed. The brownshirts had traded uniforms for blazers.
Then came 2016 — the year that Nadell calls a turning point. The alt-right slithered from the shadows of the internet, and its rhetoric metastasized. Charlottesville became the new Selma, except this time the torches were carried by young men chanting “Jews will not replace us.” These were not medieval Crusaders or European brownshirts. These were Americans in polo shirts, khakis and Dockers.
And then came Oct. 7. The day Israel changed — and so did we. Nadell charts how antisemitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israel rhetoric fused into a single volatile compound. “The battle lines … on campus were drawn,” she writes. “They would widen into deep trenches.” And widen they did — to boardrooms, to dinner tables, to social feeds. The slogans of liberation have been repurposed, their noble vocabulary used to disguise the world’s oldest hatred. Nadell’s tone is calm, academic, but that calm only sharpens the dread.
Yet she refuses to let the story end in victimhood. She reminds us that resistance is its own Jewish tradition. Enter Rebecca Gratz, who built Jewish education brick by brick. Emma Lazarus, whose poetry was both protest and prophecy. And Gussie Herbert, the Brooklyn eighth-grader who, in 1905, stood in class and declared, “Preaching Jesus belongs in church, not in a public school.” That one sentence of teenage defiance helped change American law.
This is the subtext of Nadell’s history: Jewish survival has never been about hiding. It has been about building. Every time the door was slammed, Jews opened a new one. Schools. Charities. Community centers. Magazines. The architecture of resilience. It wasn’t assimilation that saved us — it was creation.
Nadell’s moral clarity also cuts across the partisan lines that divide us. Antisemitism, she reminds us, is ecumenical in its reach. The far right flirts with fascism; the far left romanticizes revolution. One blames Jews for running the world; the other blames us for defending it. Both manage to make us villains in stories we didn’t write. Even Sen. Ted Cruz — hardly a leftist — had to tell a Christian Zionist crowd that Nazism is not an acceptable accessory.
Nadell also draws an essential moral line between legitimate criticism of Israel and the demonization of Israel. The first is fair discourse. The second is bigotry in new clothes. “Singling out the only Jewish state for obsessive opprobrium,” she writes, “is antisemitism, plain and simple.” It is not politics; it is pathology. And lately, that pathology knows no party. The right has discovered its own convenient anti-Israel rhetoric, proving that when it comes to Jewish targets, extremism is bipartisan.
The book ends with a sentence that refuses to let us look away: “To be an American Jew meant to live with the memory of Jew hate in the past, the possibility that it might erupt anywhere and at any time in the present, and the knowledge that it would likely persist into the future.”
That sounds grim, but it is not despair. It is lucidity. It is a reminder that Jewish time has never been linear — we live with the past as our roommate, the future as our restless child. Nadell’s work is not a lament; it is a map. It tells us where we stand, so that we can choose where to go.
Perhaps that is the most Jewish response of all — to look unflinchingly at history, name the darkness, and then light the menorah anyway.
Because even in America — especially in America — the ancient story continues: We live, we build, we bless, we argue, we remember. And through all of it, we refuse to surrender our visibility, our voice or our hope.
That is not resignation. That is faith. That is Jewish. And it may be the most radical American tradition of them all.
