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.