November 2025 Book Review

Review of  Pamela S. Nadell. Antisemitism, An American Tradition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.

By Rich Robinson

This timely book, hot off the press, concerns antisemitism in America. Why focus on America, when hatred of Jews rages worldwide (and readers of this review likely hail from many different countries)?

The answer is partly because American was long-considered the safe country for Jews. The goldene medina, the golden land where the pogroms and persecutions of Europe could be left far behind. Even when antisemitism was recognized as a reality in America, talk emerged of a “golden age of American Jewry” lasting from the end of World War II for several decades, a time when barriers fell, when Jews had finally arrived and were at last accepted as equals by non-Jews.

If only.

Pamela S. Nadell teaches Women’s and Gender history at American University (Washington, DC) and focuses on Jewish history. She has provided us with what in my opinion is the best and most readable overview of antisemitism in American history. And it’s up-to-date, having been published this very year in 2025.

In an online interview, the author mentioned that she specifically called her book Antisemitism, An American Tradition (with a comma) rather than Antisemitism: An American Tradition (with a colon). Subtitles, she explained, tend to get lost. But she wanted to be sure that the message was clear: there has always been antisemitic feeling and action in America.

In seven chronological chapters, Nadell covers the colonial period; the newly formed republic; the civil war era through the end of the 19th century; the years leading up to Hitler’s rise; the depression and the second World War; the remainder of the 20th century; and the “new litany” of places that have experienced virulent antisemitism in the new century.

It is, to say the least, a sobering account, rendered in a very accessible way. Frequent detailed accounts of individuals and what they experienced makes the presence of antisemitism real and tangible. Sometimes they make you want to look over your shoulder.

Land in any chapter and you will find the presence of prejudice, ill-will, and even physical violence against Jews. The colonial period? The governor of New Amsterdam (later New York) had no use for Jews arriving to his territory. They were, in his eyes, “crafty and generally treacherous.” (I attended Stuyvesant High School in New York, named after him, with many, many Jewish students. Ouch.)

In the new American republic, some Gentiles divided Jews into the better and the “inferior” classes. And in 1850, a ritual murder allegation was reported to have occurred on Erev Yom Kippur in New York City. Another blood libel accusation happened in upstate New York in 1920.

On and on it goes. At a later date, when Hitler came to power, Naziism emerged in America. One person, a teenager, wryly noted that “You can’t tell your Jew without a pogrom.” In the halls of Congress, Louis McFadden (a Pennsylvania Republican) blamed Jews for America’s abandonment of the gold standard. John Rankin, another congressman, blamed Jews for dragging America into World War II.

And these aren’t even the violent incidents.

In 1915, Leo Frank, the young superintendent at a pencil factory in Atlanta, was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl. Though cleared of the charge, he was nevertheless dragged out of jail and lynched by an antisemitic mob.

In the 18th century, “men in blackface assaulted an immigrant Jewish couple in their New York home. They smashed windows, broke down the door, burst into the house, tore everything to pieces, and threatened the terrified woman with rape.”

In 1902, what has been called a “pogrom” happened in New York at the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph; the funeral crowd was attacked by factory workers with food, steel, wood, bricks and a firehose. The police inspector told his officers to “club the life out of the [Jews].”

In 1887, outlaws in Louisiana shot up a Jewish-owned store, with the ultimatum to leave within two weeks or else all Jews would be killed.

As you see, I’m not even going in chronological order. Pick your years and throw them into a randomizer. Out comes antisemitism. Even the “golden age of American Jewry” turns out to be more nostalgia than reality, even though Jews had more opportunities than ever before. At its best, so to speak, antisemitism is still always waiting around the corner.

At one point, it’s worth pointing out, Nadell shows how even decades ago, “Zionism” was a codeword for antisemitism, the exact phenomenon we are seeing today.

I can’t convey the cumulative impact the book has as it wends its way incident by incident, person by person, through American history. Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel was titled, with obvious irony, It Can’t Happen Here, though it was more about fascism than antisemitism. In 2004, Philip Roth wrote The Plot Against America, a novel directly about antisemitism. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), penned It Could Happen Here in 2022, and it was not fiction. The upshot is that it can, it has, and it will.

As antisemitism ratchets up in the 21st century into incidents of murder, hostage-taking, and more, I can think of no better book to read at this moment than Antisemitism, An American Tradition.