Guest scholar Pamela Nadell talks about antisemitism in America. She looks at how the definition of antisemitism has changed over time, how antisemitism has been always threaded throughout the American Jewish experience, and how this current moment is an explosion of something that had been lying fairly dormant.
This episode is the third in a special four-part mini series of short episodes on antisemitism. This series has been produced in response to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents and attacks around the world.
Each episode draws on the expertise of AJS members, providing scholarly and informed insights into antisemitism from its origins and history to its complexities today around the war in Israel/Gaza.
Upcoming & previous episodes include:
AVISHAY ARTSY: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Avishay Artsy.
This episode is part of a special four-part mini series of short episodes on antisemitism that the AJS has produced in response to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents and attacks around the world. Drawing on the expertise of AJS members, each episode
provides scholarly and informed insights into antisemitism from its origins and history to its complexities today around the war in Israel/Gaza. We’ll be releasing a new episode every week for the next four weeks and you can listen to the episodes
in any order. In this episode we will discuss American antisemitism. Our guest is Pamela Nadell, a professor of Jewish history at American University in Washington, D.C. I asked her to start with the definition of antisemitism that she subscribes
to.
PAMELA NADELL: My answer is probably going to surprise you. I don't subscribe to any of the existing definitions of antisemitism. As you know, I am publishing a book called “Antisemitism, an American Tradition” and when I shared it with a
colleague in the Association for Jewish Studies, he said ‘you did something really smart, you did not embrace any of the existing definition, the IHRA definition, the Jerusalem definition, the Nexus definition. But it's clear that every single
example that you have in the book is clearly antisemitic.’ And the reason I did not embrace a particular definition is because the definitions of the components of antisemitism morph and change over time. And back in 2017, when I testified before
House Judiciary in the Congress, the hearing was about whether or not the House should legislate the IHRA definition. And the chairman of that committee understood that the problem with fixing a definition into law as opposed to using it to understand
something as a guide, he understood that that was a problem because for example, I'm not sure that we would have included Holocaust denial, Holocaust inversion, Holocaust distortion if you were asking me to define this in 1970. So I don't subscribe
to any of the existing definitions. I think they all have merits. My favorite definition, frankly, is potentially attributed to Isaiah Berlin: “An antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than absolutely necessary.”
AVISHAY ARTSY: So we know that antisemitism has been on the rise for years, including in Charlottesville and with the Tree of Life attack in Pittsburgh, but we've seen a definite spike following the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7th, 2023. Some incidents seem like cut and dry hatred of Jews. In other cases, criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza and the West Bank have been interpreted by some as antisemitic and by others as legitimate. Where do you draw the line?
PAMELA NADELL: I draw the line when it calls for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world. I draw a line when it celebrates the violence of October 7th and blames Israel as a way to justify the violence. I am very sympathetic to Natan Sharansky's 3 D’s definition for understanding when antisemitism or anti-Zionism crosses the line. When Israel is delegitimized, when it is demonized and when double standards are applied, I think it has crossed the line to antisemitism.
AVISHAY ARTSY: So we've certainly been here before. American Jews, many of us have memories of being taunted or attacked for being Jewish, and we thought that those days were behind us. So is what we're seeing now a “new antisemitism” as it's being called by some, or is it a continuation of what we've seen before?
PAMELA NADELL: It's not a new antisemitism, but the term, just to kind of historicize this, the term “new antisemitism” really emerges in the early 1970s. And it's a response to the antisemitism that begins to arise from the left in the wake of Israel's victories in the Six Day War. And so new antisemitism, if you wanna refer to it that way, new antisemitism is now half a century old.
AVISHAY ARTSY: I'm curious to see how antisemitism has changed. And you've taught at American University in some capacity for four decades now. Does being on campus feel different now than it has in the past?
PAMELA NADELL: It certainly feels different than it did across the earlier decades of my university career. What I would say is that it's been brewing for a long time and we didn't really understand it, or we just didn't pay sufficient attention to it. So let me give you an example. In the spring of 2020, I began teaching for the first time a seminar for our first year students called “Antisemitism: Enduring Hatred.” And the great thing about being a professor is if you wanna write a book on something, you start to teach it to think if you can really figure out how to write the book. And I remember in that class, a student commenting after we talked about anti-Zionism already, and she said that she finally understood why her psychology club, which was supposed to be inviting speakers to talk about psychology, it was for majors and minors in psychology. And she said, almost every meeting ended up talking about Israel. And this is the spring of 2020, we're talking about five years ago. And what I also remember is the way that in the same time period on my campus, the university administration and our public safety support spent a great deal of time trying to find out who had scrawled a swastika in a desk in the library. And the social repercussions of antisemitism have also really ratcheted up, especially after October 7th, but they were there before. Jewish students who were excluded from clubs, clubs posting signs saying, “I stand with Palestine.” And I think the biggest change for me is my understanding of what we can do something about and what we cannot. So years ago, I had a student in class. His mezuzah had been ripped off of his dorm door. And I remember strategizing with him who to report it to, how to handle it, what we should do. And last fall, when a student came three weeks into the beginning of the semester. He said that his mezuzah had been ripped off of his door. I just looked at him and I said, there is nothing we can do about that. And that's really, that's real sad. It's a sign of the shift.
AVISHAY ARTSY: So in talking to students and hearing about antisemitic attacks and speech in preparation for writing this book, did you come across tropes of antisemitism that are new or does it feel like it's just a recycling of long-standing, maybe centuries old antisemitic tropes?
PAMELA NADELL: What I see is that the old tropes are still there, and then the elevation of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism, which is 50 years old, but it never was voiced to the extent that it's been voiced since October 7th. So just to give you an example, one of the problems about being a scholar is, you read the newspaper and every time you see another example. So recently Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had posted that she was opposed to the Antisemitic Awareness Act, adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to define antisemitism. And she said, and I'm gonna quote, “antisemitism is wrong, but I will not be voting for the Antisemitism Awareness Act today because it could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the gospel that Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.” So for me, one of the major themes of writing “Antisemitism, an American Tradition” was the persistence of traditional Christian anti-Judaism. And people don't tend to focus on that as much, but it's so powerful. And of course, what else is persistent? The conspiracy theories about Jews and power and money, that Jews control the media, that they control the government. What has changed is the way these things are acted on and expressed. So the encampments, for example. They were new. The weaponization by the Trump administration of antisemitism to attack the universities, the idea that you can cancel cancer research and that will somehow solve the problem of antisemitism. And what it does is it exacerbates antisemitism. All those researchers are getting their grants canceled and it's being blamed on how they treat Jews.
AVISHAY ARTSY: I'm glad you brought up the weaponization of antisemitism. What I've been interested by in the last few months is looking at Project Esther from the Heritage Foundation. This was a document that was created to go after antisemitism, but no Jews were involved in the writing of Project Esther, it was all Christian nationalist groups. And now I'm seeing that most of the outcry over antisemitism that you're seeing in the Trump administration's policies is coming from Christian nationalists. Why is that? And how does that complicate the challenge of getting people aware and wanting to act on antisemitism?
PAMELA NADELL: It complicates it because what's unique in terms of American history is that right now antisemitism comes from the left and it comes from the right and neither side is willing to acknowledge the antisemitism that's embedded within their own political position. I cannot think of a period in American history when antisemitism came from both sides with such vengeance and vehemence and with such danger, because we have crossed a line. It used to be that antisemitic violence primarily came from the right, not exclusively. I've got examples of it coming from the left twenty five years ago, it was primarily coming from white nationalists, white supremacists, and now in the most recent incidents where it's come from those who are shouting literally as they commit violent crimes “free Palestine,” they have also crossed the line to violence. So it's a very, very frightening moment for the American Jewish people.
AVISHAY ARTSY: I'd love to get into the history here because your book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition,” lays out a sweeping timeline of antisemitism in America, going all the way from colonial times to the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and then up to the present. Even as a scholar of American Jewish history, were there stories that were new and surprising to you?
PAMELA NADELL: The answer is yes, and it's how I got into the book. So my last book was called “America's Jewish Women.” And before COVID shut us down, I went around the country speaking to audiences in person and then did scores of talks as well on Zoom. And that book came out in 2019. It was two years after Charlottesville, one year after the murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue. And I was thinking, like so many of my colleagues, like, how had we missed the dangers of antisemitism in American history? Because like so many people, we’re products of our own time. As historians, we had been writing books that celebrated the vitality and the success of Jews in America. And we had assumed that antisemitism was really different in America because we didn't have expulsions, we didn't have the Inquisition, and we didn't have pogroms and the Holocaust. And I decided one of my favorite things to do in talks about that last book was, as I began thinking about antisemitism, when I would get to the Q&A, I would ask my audiences, “did you ever experience antisemitism?” And as you can imagine, many of my audiences were, especially before COVID, were primarily people who'd been around for a good half century. And the stories poured out with such pain, so much emotion, and a level of detail that showed me that one question, “did you ever experience antisemitism,” could elicit such a powerful response, that I realized that antisemitism is actually a defining and constitutive element of what it means to be a Jew, whether it's in America where there was no Holocaust or anywhere else where Jews have ever lived.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Are there specific moments in American history that you can point to where you feel like antisemitism – we might have forgotten this history – but where antisemitism was a defining feature of that period of time?
PAMELA NADELL: The high tide of American antisemitism is really the period between World War I and World War II. And I think because we're so focused on knowing the history of the Holocaust and the horrors of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Nazi occupied Europe, and the murders, we ignored the fact that antisemitism was a very real problem in the United States in those years and was a problem that also led to violence also in the United States. But that's a history that we've ignored, we've forgotten, and one which I try to recapture in the book.
AVISHAY ARTSY: So the history of antisemitism in America might seem jarring to people who prefer to think about the Jewish American story as one of immigration, assimilation, and accomplishment, right? It's a pretty positive picture, the golden age of American Jews, you know? How does understanding the continuity of antisemitism in American history, calling it an American tradition, help us better understand antisemitism today?
PAMELA NADELL: It helps us understand antisemitism today because, as I told Frank Foer, who wrote that terrific article on “The Golden Age of American Jewry is Ending” in The Atlantic, I said to him, and I ended up using it as the title of one of the chapters, no age is entirely golden. No age was ever entirely golden, and I think knowing that antisemitism has threaded throughout the American Jewish experience helps us understand that what we're sitting on is an explosion of something that had lain dormant, not completely dormant but was quiet and that we are in that moment now. Hopefully it can also give us some encouragement because antisemitism, the structural antisemitism that kept Jews out of jobs and out of universities, ended in the 1960s and the 1970s by and large. And so hopefully we can take some lessons from the past to figure out how to ameliorate the situation that we're in today.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Yeah. What are those lessons? You mentioned passing laws. Is that how in the past we've been able to address antisemitism, is by passing laws that force institutions to include Jews?
PAMELA NADELL: What I see is that there's a broad playbook of different ways of responding to antisemitism. Some of it is legislation, no question. For example, there used to be restrictive covenants that prevented not only where Jews could live, but where African Americans could live and Asian Americans, so many different people. And then the Supreme Court ruled those restrictive covenants unenforceable. And eventually fair housing legislation was passed. So legislation certainly is one mechanism, it's not the only mechanism. And at this moment in time, I'm not sure it would necessarily be the most useful mechanism. What we need at this movement in time is we need allies to stand up and to recognize that antisemitism is an urgent problem and that antisemitism is in a sense telling us that we have a broader problem in our society and that if we don't solve the problem of antisemitism we're not going to be able to solve the societal problems that we have at this moment in time.
AVISHAY ARTSY: One of the quotes that you open your book with is from Taffy Brodesser-Akner's review of Joshua Cohen's book “The Netanyahus” in the New York Times in 2021. And the quote that you have here is: “The unique sadness and terror of antisemitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn't even exist.” And that really stuck with me because I feel like when I try to talk about antisemitism, I’m met with either denial or whataboutism or some other form of gaslighting. And so I wonder how do you talk to people about antisemitism when they don't want to hear it and they don't want to engage in that dialogue?
PAMELA NADELL: I think I'm trying to talk to them by writing a book. I think that's what I was trying to do, but you're absolutely right. I was so struck by that quotation. Unlike other forms of hate, when the members of the community say what you are saying about me or about my community is racist, is hateful, we believe them. But when Jews say that what you're saying about us is racist, is hateful, is antisemitic, we're often gaslighted. And so maybe exposing the long history will help. I think we're in a moment where everyone who is concerned about the situation for Jews, not only in America, but around the world, we're all trying to do our little bit to contribute to resolving the problem. My way of contributing was to write a book.
AVISHAY ARTSY: Adventures in Jewish Studies is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.
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Pamela S. Nadell
Pamela S. Nadell holds the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History and directs the Jewish Studies Program at American University. Her works include America’s Jewish Women, winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award’s Jewish Book of the Year, and Women Who Would Be Rabbis. Past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, she lives in North Bethesda, Maryland.
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Avishay Artsy
Avishay Artsy is an audio and print journalist based in Los Angeles and a senior producer of Vox's daily news explainer podcast Today, Explained. He also hosted and produced the podcast Works In Progress at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and produced Design and Architecture at KCRW. His writing has appeared in the Jewish Journal, The Forward, Tablet, JTA, and other publications and news outlets. His audio stories have appeared on NPR's Marketplace, KQED's The California Report, WHYY's The Pulse, PRI's The World, Studio 360 and other outlets. He is also an adjunct professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Executive Producer: Warren Hoffman, PhD
Producers: Avishay Artsy and Erin Phillips
