Our new neighbors, who had moved to Squirrel Hill from Paris, came to our house for Sabbath lunch in October 2018. During the course of the meal, we learned that the move was precipitated by a shooting at their local kosher market. The Hyper Cachet shooting in January 2015 was one that almost ensnared this family. The mother had two errands she had to do: picking up her kids at school and getting hallah and last-minute groceries from the kosher market. She decided that she would get her kids first, a decision that led to her not being in the store when an attacker, with allegiance to the Islamic State, killed four Jewish men. I remember thinking to myself, as Aurelia narrated her tale of a close call, how awful this was, and pitying the Jews of France and the antisemitism that had been facing them for so many years. I wondered, “Would I leave the US if there were a shooting at Murray Avenue Kosher?” It seemed like an absurd hypothetical – how could that possibly happen? It wouldn’t – never. I was being absurd even posing the question. And then, exactly two weeks later, there was. Except it was at a synagogue, not a store, and it was the largest antisemitic shooting ever on American soil.
Had I read Pamela Nadell’s new history of American antisemitism, written in the aftermath of that shooting, I wouldn’t have been so shocked at its occurrence. Or so naïve to believe that Jews in America had some kind of exemption from the garden-variety antisemitism that had plagued Europe since Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and France in 1306. And then Spain and Portugal, where 100,000 Jews were murdered, 100,000 hid their identities, and 100,000 converted between 1391 and their expulsion in 1492, according to Nadell’s sources. But in Nadell’s accounting, whose title Antisemitism and subtitle An American tradition throws down the gauntlet, the European settlers of the New World brought with them every bit of prejudice Jews had experienced in the Old. Over the years of Jewish presence in what is now the United States, Nadell emphasizes in her thesis that “the hatred displayed against American Jews today is not new. It sits atop a long history of antisemitism that made its way to this land centuries ago and that flourishes today.” Nadell included the most recent killings of Jews, in May 2025 at the Capital Museum in DC, including Sarah Milgrim, an alumna of American University , where she has spent her career, in the volume.
From the moment Jews touched down on American soil in New Amsterdam, the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, objected to their presence. He wrote to the Dutch West India Company with the complaint that “for the benefit of this weak and newly developing place and the land in general,” it would be “useful to require them in a friendly way to depart.” I had not realized that the first Jews came to America because the European Inquisition came too; when Portugal took over Brazil from the Netherlands, the Jews in Recife had to flee if they did not want to be caught in the inquisitor’s nets like their co-religionists in Spain and Portugal. So, a small band of Jews came from Brazil to New Amsterdam under the assumption that the tolerance of the European Amsterdam, where the Jewish community at the time was flourishing would exist in their new city as well. The intervention of their co-religionists in Amsterdam, many among them Jews who invested in the Dutch West India Company, made their stay in the New Amsterdam possible. Jews were initially not allowed to purchase land for their own burial ground and were not permitted to build a synagogue in this country until 1730, many years later. This pattern of persecution – needing to appeal to a larger Jewish community and economics, resolving certain issues of prejudice – continued. However, as Nadell writes, “viewing Jews as Christendom’s enemies, denouncing their nefarious economic activities, and entrenching Jewish discrimination against Jews in colonial law opened the long history of American antisemitism.” Nadell’s recounting of the research that has been discussed in other contexts is enlivened by her analysis of the connections over time, indicating patterns that persist over the course of Jewish settlement in the New World.
After the initial disagreement over whether they should remain in New Amsterdam, Jews were criticized for murdering Jesus by such central figures as Increase Mather, the Puritan clergyman and Harvard president in the 1660’s. President John Quincy Adams wrote in 1780 that Jews would “steal your eyes out of your head if they possibly could” to make money. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Jews “still form… one nation, foreign to the land they live in.” These ideological positions led to the physical attacks against Jews and to the cemetery desecrations that continue to this day—the book ends with an account of cemetery desecration in 2 Cincinnati cemeteries, which toppled more than 175 tombstones. In 1743, a mob attacked a Jewish funeral; in 1746, the Manhattan Jewish cemetery was desecrated, and in 1751, the Philadelphia one sustained damage when used for shooting practice. Synagogues in Newport had windows broken in 1773 and in Charleston in 1787.
Though this seems like just a listing of events, Nadell, as a careful historian, connects her narrative to a larger story. The attacks on funerals continued; in New York in July of 1902, the funeral of Lithuanian-born Rabbi Jacob Joseph passed through the streets of the Lower East Side with “a crowd of about twenty thousand mourners,” Nadell writes. When the crowd passed by a printing press factory, “the young workers went berserk. They began pelting the crowd with melon rinds, scraps of steel, blocks of wood, iron bolts and bricks.” Because of the crowd, there was no way to flee the scene; Nadell ends this section saying that, in terms of the number of Jews attacked and injured in this incident, “likely still stands as the single largest antisemitic attack in US history.” What is the difference between Old and New World antisemitism? Nadell responds “Unlike in Europe, in America violence was not state-sponsored.” Is that a comfort?
Besides the attacks on funerals, there were the destruction of businesses and spaces of worship. Nadell catalogs riots in Richmond, VA, Thomasville and Talbotton, Georgia, during the Civil War, as well as the expulsion of Jews from Paducah, Kentucky, at the direction of General, and later President Ulysses S. Grant. At the time, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise called these persecutions comparable to the “holy office of the Inquisition.” Old World persecution meets New yet again, in Nadell’s recounting. Seriousness of these attacks not withstanding, the most calamitous event of Jewish persecution was the lynching of Leo Frank, who was falsely accused of murdering a young Christian woman at the pencil factory they both worked at in Atlanta. Called “America’s Dreyfus Case,” the case had become a media spectacle in 1913, after Frank was killed by a mob shortly after the Georgia governor demoted his capital punishment to life in prison. Frank’s rabbi, from the Atlanta synagogue The Temple( subsequently bombed in October 1958 as part of the 10 percent of bombs aimed at Jews by racists in the years 1954-59 according to Nadell) “spent the next two years speaking across the state to churches and civic organizations to let Georgians see that Jews did not have horns and that Jewish clergymen were as American as they were.” However, his congregants did not want to investigate who had been behind the killing of Frank, as they thought “any attempt to bring the mob to justice would be disastrous for themselves.” Nadell quotes a letter from an Atlanta woman, a cousin of the New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, pleading for the case to be left alone, another example of her use of social history to make her case.
The playbook Nadell describes for fighting antisemitism that Jews “objected to infamy in the press, enlisted allies in their protests, and held rallies around the country” continued to be the modus operandi for coping. Henry Ford of Ford Motor, who had printed the fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion and distributed it so widely that Adolf Hitler, told a Chicago Tribune reporter when he was running for president in March 1923 that “he wished he could send some of his ‘shock troops’ to America to help the Ford campaign.” Yet in June 1927, Ford signed a letter asking “forgiveness for the harm that I have unintentionally committed.” The letter was penned by Louis Marshall, who worked for the American Jewish Committee, because the negative publicity was becoming a public relations nightmare for the company, according to Nadell.
The book is stocked with fascinating anecdotes: Nobel Laureates – Isidor Rabi and Saul Bellow – being discouraged from their chosen professions in science and literature because of their religion. In addition, the discrimination experienced by an applicant to Radcliffe, who was asked at her interview, “Where do you go to church, dear?” and an anecdote from the actress Tovah Feldshuh about a person with a Jewish father being barred from the Scarsdale Golf Club in 1960. The use of literature to bring texture to the facts – quotes from Elinor Lipman’s novel The Inn at Lake Devine, as well as from Philip Roth – adds to the reader’s interest.
The most shameful piece of the book is the chapter about American involvement – and lack thereof – in World War II and allowing Jews to immigrate to these shores. The restrictions put on immigration in the 1924 Act created barriers. Nadell recounts that diplomat James Mc Donald went to Germany as chair of the Foreign Policy Association and met Hitler. McDonald recounted that Hitler told him in the early 1930s, “I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them.” Though knowledge of the plan in America preceded its implementation, no action was taken. The chapter ends with another Frank, father of diarist Anne Frank, who was unable to obtain the US visas he had applied for; Nadell writes that this family was “among the hundreds of thousands who never got US visas.” This well-documented chapter is a full account of how antisemitism, particularly in the US State Department, ensured that Jewish refugees had little chance of being saved by the United States.
Though Nadell’s work highlights the seriousness of antisemitism in America, its permeation through the centuries never went away, no matter how much we tried to ignore it. I wish to add a few bits. All she recounts is correct. Hearing my grandparents recount the jobs they were ineligible for, or the neighborhoods they weren’t permitted to live in, I never thought that I would experience this ancient affliction. None of us were prepared for the shooting here at my husband’s synagogue. When he returned home that October 27 morning, I couldn’t even understand what he meant when he said to me, “There’s been a shooting at the shul.” It just didn’t make any logical sense to me, as I have written elsewhere. Yet, my French neighbors left France, and I stayed – and still stay– in Squirrel Hill. Not just me – unlike in France where all four victims of the Hyper Cachet shooting were buried in Israel not the country where they were killed for the crime of being Jews in a kosher supermarket – all eleven of the victims here in Pittsburgh were interred in a Jewish cemetery in Pittsburgh. Despite the traditions of antisemitism there is a feeling from the majority of being welcome. When I gave blood at a Squirrel Hill synagogue on a recent Sunday the technician told me she lived in Kittanning and hadn’t been to Squirrel Hill before. She asked me if the synagogue she passed on Wilkins Avenue was where the shooting occurred. I answered in the affirmative and she said, “why can’t people just be kind to each other?” Though Nadell does an excellent job reporting all the unkindness Jews have been on the receiving end of, and not to minimize it, there are still a majority of citizens who believe as my technician did, or so I would like to hope. America remains the largest diaspora Jewish community, at least at the current moment.
