Antisemitism in the United States has existed for centuries. In the United States,
most Jewish community relations agencies distinguish between
antisemitism, measured in terms of attitudes and behaviors; and the
security and status of American Jews, measured by specific incidents.
Antisemitic incidents have been on a generally decreasing trend in the
last century consistent with a general reduction of socially sanctioned racism in the United States, especially since World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.
Cultural changes from the 1960s onward into the 21st century have
caused a large shift in general attitudes such that, in recent years,
most Americans surveyed express positive viewpoints regarding Jews. An ABC News report in 2007 recounted that about 6% of Americans reported some feelings of prejudice against Jews. According to surveys by the Anti-Defamation League
in 2011, antisemitism is rejected by clear majorities of Americans,
with 64% of them lauding Jews' cultural contributions to the nation in
2011, but still a minority holding hateful views of Jews remain, with
19% of Americans supporting the antisemitic canard that Jews co-control Wall Street. Holocaust denial has also only been a fringe phenomenon in recent years, as of April 2018, 96% of Americans are aware of the facts of the Holocaust.
American viewpoints on Jews and antisemitism
Roots of American attitudes towards Jews and Jewish history in America
Krefetz (1985) asserts that antisemitism in the 1980s seems "rooted
less in religion or contempt and more rooted in envy, jealousy and fear"
of Jewish affluence, and the hidden power of "Jewish money".
Historically, antisemitic attitudes and rhetoric tend to increase when
the United States is faced with a serious economic crisis. Academic David Greenberg has written in Slate,
"Extreme anti-communism always contained an anti-Semitic component:
Radical, alien Jews, in their demonology, orchestrated the Communist
conspiracy." He also has argued that, in the years following World War II,
some groups of "the American right remained closely tied to the
unvarnished anti-Semites of the '30s who railed against the 'Jew Deal'",
a bigoted term used against the New Deal measures under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. American anti-Semites have viewed the fraudulent text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real reference to a supposed Jewish cabal out to subvert and ultimately destroy the U.S.
Stereotypes
The most persistent form of antisemitism has been a series of widely circulating stereotypes
that construct Jews as socially, religiously, and economically
unacceptable to American life. They were made to feel marginal and
menacing.
Martin Marger writes "A set of distinct and consistent negative
stereotypes, some of which can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages
in Europe, has been applied to Jews."
David Schneder writes "Three large clusters of traits are part of the
Jewish stereotype (Wuthnow, 1982). First, [American] Jews are seen as
being powerful and manipulative. Second, they are accused of dividing
their loyalties between the United States and Israel. A third set of
traits concerns Jewish materialistic values, aggressiveness,
clannishness."
Some of the antisemitic canards cited by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
(ADL) in their studies of U.S. social trends include the claims that
"Jews have too much power in the business world", "Jews are more willing
to use shady practices to get what they want", and "Jews always like to
be at the head of things". Other issues that garner attention is the
assertion of excessive Jewish influence in American cinema and news media.
Statistics of American viewpoints and analysis
Polls and studies point to a steady decrease in antisemitic attitudes, beliefs, and manifestations among the American public. A 1992 survey by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith
(ADL) showed that about 20% of Americans — between 30 and 40 million
adults — held antisemitic views, a considerable decline from the total
of 29% found in 1964. However, another survey by the same organization
concerning antisemitic incidents showed that the curve has risen without
interruption since 1986.
2005 survey
The
number of Americans holding antisemitic views declined markedly six
years later when another ADL study classified only 12 percent of the
population—between 20 and 25 million adults—as "most antisemitic."
Confirming the findings of previous surveys, both studies also found
that African Americans were significantly more likely than whites to
hold antisemitic views, with 34 percent of blacks classified as "most
antisemitic," compared to 9 percent of whites in 1998.
The 2005 Survey of American Attitudes Towards Jews in America, a
national poll of 1,600 American adults conducted in March 2005, found
that 14% of Americans—or nearly 35 million adults—hold views about Jews
that are "unquestionably antisemitic," compared to 17% in 2002, Previous
ADL surveys over the last decade had indicated that antisemitism was in
decline. In 1998, the number of Americans with hardcore antisemitic
beliefs had dropped to 12% from 20% in 1992.
The 2005 survey found "35 percent of foreign-born Hispanics" and 36 percent of African-Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, four times more than the 9 percent for whites". The 2005 Anti-Defamation League survey includes data on Hispanic
attitudes, with 29% being most antisemitic (vs. 9% for whites and 36%
for blacks); being born in the United States helped alleviate this
attitude: 35% of foreign-born Hispanics, but only 19% of those born in
the US.
The survey findings come at a time of increased antisemitic
activity in America. The 2004 ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents
reported that antisemitic incidents reached their highest level in nine
years. A total of 1,821 antisemitic incidents were reported in 2004, an
increase of 17 percent over the 1,557 incidents reported during 2003.
"What concerns us is that many of the gains we had seen in building a
more tolerant and accepting America seem not to have taken hold as
firmly as we had hoped," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
"While there are many factors at play, the findings suggest that
antisemitic beliefs endure and resonate with a substantial segment of
the population, nearly 35 million people."
After 2005
An ABC News
report in 2007 recounted that past ABC polls across several years have
tended to find that about 6% of Americans self-report prejudice against
Jews as compared to about 25% being against Arab Americans and about 10% against Hispanic Americans. The report also remarked that a full 34% of Americans reported "some racist feelings" in general as a self-description.
A 2009 study entitled "Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes", published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
in 2009, tested new theoretical model of anti-Semitism among Americans
in the Greater New York area with 3 experiments. The research team's
theoretical model proposed that mortality salience
(reminding people that they will someday die) increases anti-Semitism
and that anti-Semitism is often expressed as anti-Israel attitudes. The
first experiment showed that mortality salience led to higher levels of
anti-Semitism and lower levels of support for Israel. The study's
methodology was designed to tease out anti-Semitic attitudes that are
concealed by polite people. The second experiment showed that mortality
salience caused people to perceive Israel as very important, but did not
cause them to perceive any other country this way. The third experiment
showed that mortality salience led to a desire to punish Israel for
human rights violations but not to a desire to punish Russia or India
for identical human rights violations. According to the researchers,
their results "suggest that Jews constitute a unique cultural threat to
many people's worldviews, that anti-Semitism causes hostility to Israel,
and that hostility to Israel may feed back to increase anti-Semitism."
Furthermore, "those claiming that there is no connection between
antisemitism and hostility toward Israel are wrong."
The 2011 Survey of American Attitudes Toward Jews in America released by the ADL found that the recent world economic recession increased some antisemitic viewpoints among Americans. Abraham H. Foxman,
the organization's national director, argued, "It is disturbing that
with all of the strides we have made in becoming a more tolerant
society, anti-Semitic beliefs continue to hold a vice-grip on a small
but not insubstantial segment of the American public." Specifically, the
polling found that 19% of Americans answered "probably true" to the
assertion that "Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street"
while 15% concurred with the related statement that Jews seem "more
willing to use shady practices" in business. Nonetheless, the survey
generally reported positive attitudes for most Americans, the majority
of those surveyed expressed philo-Semitic sentiments such as 64% agreeing that Jews have contributed much to U.S. social culture.
A 2019 survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 73% of American Jews feel less secure since the election of Donald Trump
to the presidency. Antisemitic attacks against synagogues since 2016
have contributed to this fear. The survey found that combatting
antisemitism is a priority issue in domestic politics among American
Jews, including millennials.
Antisemitism within the African-American community
Surveys conducted by the ADL in 2007, 2009, 2011, and 2013 all found that the large majority of African-Americans
questioned or rejected antisemitism and expressed the same kind of
generally tolerant viewpoints as the rest of the Americans who were
surveyed. For example, their 2009 study reported that 28% of
African-Americans surveyed displayed antisemitic views while a 72%
majority did not. However, those three surveys all found that negative
attitudes towards Jews were stronger among African-Americans than among
the general population at large.
According to earlier ADL research, going back to 1964, the trend
that African-Americans are significantly more likely than white
Americans to hold antisemitic beliefs across all education levels has
remained over the years. Nonetheless, the percentage of the population
holding negative beliefs against Jews has waned considerably in the
black community during this period as well. In a 1967 New York Times Magazine article entitled "Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White," the African-American author James Baldwin sought to explain the prevalence of black antisemitism. An ADL poll from 1992 stated that 37% of African-Americans surveyed displayed antisemitism; in contrast, a poll from 2011 found that only 29% did so.
Personal backgrounds play a huge role in terms of holding
prejudiced versus tolerant views. Among black Americans with no college
education, 43% fell into the most antisemitic group (versus 18% for the
general population) compared to that being only 27% among blacks with
some college education and just 18% among blacks with a four-year
college degree (versus 5% for those in the general population with a
four-year college degree). That data from the ADL's 1998 polling
research showed a clear pattern.
Although the 1998 ADL survey found a strong correlation between
education level and antisemitism among African Americans, blacks at all
educational levels were still more likely than whites to accept
anti-Jewish stereotypes.
Holocaust denial
Austin App, a German-American La Salle University professor of medieval English literature, is considered the first major American Holocaust denier. App wrote extensively in newspapers, periodicals, and wrote a couple books detailing his defense of Nazi Germany and Holocaust denial. App's work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, a California center founded in 1978 whose sole task is the denial of the Holocaust.
One of the newer forms of antisemitism is the denial of the Holocaust by revisionist historians and neo-Nazis.
A survey done in 1994 by the American Jewish Committee
(AJC) found that denial was only a tiny fringe position, with 91% of
respondents agreeing with the validity of the Holocaust and only 1%
saying it was possible that the holocaust had never happened.
In March 2019 hundreds of Polish nationalists protested in Foley Square in New York against the Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act of 2017. Some of the protesters carried antisemitic signs, and engaged in Holocaust denial rhetoric.
Antisemitic organizations
White supremacists
The flag of the Knights Party, the political branch of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
There are a number of antisemitic organizations in the United States, some of them violent, that emphasize white supremacy. These include Christian Identity Churches, White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party, among others. Several fundamentalist churches, such as the Westboro Baptist Church,
also preach antisemitic messages. The largest neo-Nazi organizations
are the National Nazi Party and the National Socialist Movement. Many of
these antisemitic groups shave their heads and tattoo themselves with Nazi symbolism such as swastikas, SS, and "Heil Hitler". Antisemitic groups march and preach antisemitic messages throughout America.
Nation of Islam
A number of Jewish organizations, Christian organizations, Muslim organizations, and academics consider the Nation of Islam
to be antisemitic. Specifically, they claim that the Nation of Islam
has engaged in revisionist and antisemitic interpretations of the
Holocaust and exaggerates the role of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) alleges that NOI Health Minister, Abdul Alim Muhammad, has accused Jewish doctors of injecting blacks with the AIDS virus.
In December 2012, the Simon Wiesenthal Center put the NOI leader Louis Farrakhan
on its list of the ten most prominent antisemites in the world. He was
the only American to make the list. The organization cited statements
that he had made in October of that year claiming that "Jews control the
media" and "Jews are the most violent of people".
The Nation of Islam has repeatedly denied charges of antisemitism,
and leader Minister Louis Farrakhan has stated, "The ADL ... uses the
term 'anti-Semitism' to stifle all criticism of Zionism and the Zionist
policies of the State of Israel and also to stifle all legitimate
criticism of the errant behavior of some Jewish people toward the
non-Jewish population of the earth."
New antisemitism
Poster held by a protester at an anti-war rally in San Francisco on February 16, 2003
In recent years some scholars have advanced the concept of New antisemitism, coming simultaneously from the Far Left, the far right, and radical Islam, which tends to focus on opposition to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel, and argue that the language of Anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel
are used to attack the Jews more broadly. In this view, the proponents
of the new concept believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and attribute this to antisemitism.
In the context of the "Global War on Terrorism" there have been statements by both the Democrat Ernest Hollings and the Republican Pat Buchanan that suggest that the George W. Bush
administration went to war in order to win Israel supporters. During
2004, a number of prominent public figures accused Jewish members of the
Bush administration of tricking America into war against Saddam Hussein
to help Israel. U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina)
claimed that the US action against Saddam was undertaken 'to secure
Israel.' Television talk show host Pat Buchanan said a 'cabal' had
managed 'to snare our country in a series of wars that are not in
America's interests.' Hollings wrote an editorial in the May 6, 2004 Charleston Post and Courier,
where he argued that Bush invaded Iraq possibly because "spreading
democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote
from the Democrats."
Noted critics of Israel, such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, question the extent of new antisemitism in the United States. Chomsky has written in his work Necessary Illusions
that the Anti-Defamation League casts any question of pro-Israeli
policy as antisemitism, conflating and muddling issues as even Zionists
receive the allegation.
Finkelstein has stated that supposed "new antisemitism" is a
preposterous concept advanced by the ADL to combat critics of Israeli
policy.
Antisemitism on college campuses
Many Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s after the
rise of Hitler to power arrived in the United States. There, they
hoped to continue their academic careers, but barring a scant few, they
found little acceptance in elite institutions in Depression-era America with its undercurrent of antisemitism, and instead found work in historically black colleges and universities in the American South.
On April 3, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
announced its finding that incidents of antisemitism are a "serious
problem" on college campuses throughout the United States. The
Commission recommended that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights protect college students from antisemitism through vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further recommended that Congress clarify that Title VI applies to discrimination against Jewish students.
In February 2015, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law and Trinity College
presenting results from a national survey of American Jewish college
students. The survey had a 10-12% response rate and does not claim to be
representative. The report showed that 54% of the 1,157 self-identified
Jewish students at 55 campuses nationwide who took part in the online
survey reported having experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism on their
campuses during the Spring semester of the last academic year.
The National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College
Students provided a snapshot of the types, context, and location of
anti-Semitism as experienced by a large national sample of Jewish
students at university and four-year college campuses.
Inside Higher Ed focused on the more surprising findings of the report,
like the fact high rates of anti-Semitism also were reported at
institutions regardless of location or type of institution, that the
data from the survey suggest that discrimination occurs in low-level,
everyday interpersonal activities, and that Jewish students feel their
reports of anti-Semitism are largely ignored by the administration. However, not all reception was positive, with The Forward
arguing that the study documented only a snapshot in time rather than a
trend, that it did not have a representative sample of Jewish college
students and that it was flawed because it allowed students to define
anti-Semitism (leaving the term open to interpretation).
Hate crimes
Private residence (22%)
College Campus (7%)
Jewish Institution / School (11%)
Non-Jewish School (12%)
Public area (35%)
Private Building / Area (12%)
Cemetery (1%)
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published in April 2014 an audit of
antisemitic incidents occurring the previous year, with the results
finding a decline of 19% for 2013 as part of an about a decade-long
slide in attacks. 751 incidents were reported across the U.S., made up
of 31 physical assaults, 315 incidents of vandalism, and 405 cases of
harassment.
In April 2015, ADL published its 2014 audit of antisemitic
incidents. According to it, 912 such incidents took place across the
U.S. during 2014. This represented a 21% rise from the year before. 513
incidents were classified as "[h]arassments, threats and events". 35% of
the vandalism incidents occurred in public areas. A review of the
results showed that during operation Protective Edge
there was a significant increase in the number of antisemitic
incidents, compared to the rest of the year. As usual, the highest
totals of antisemitic incidents were found in states where there is a
large Jewish population: New York State – 231 incidents, California –
184 incidents, New Jersey – 107 incidents, Florida – 70 incidents. In
all these states, more antisemitic incidents were counted in 2014 than
in the previous year.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) organizes Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) designed to collect and evaluate statistics of offenses committed in the U.S. For 2014, 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes
were listed, of which 56.8% were motivated by offenders' anti-Jewish
biases. 15,494 law enforcement agencies contributed to the UCR analysis.
On Saturday, October 27, 2018, an antisemitic shooter murdered 11 Jewish people in an attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during Shabbat services. It was the deadliest antisemitic act committed in US history. Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City rose sharply in 2018.
NYPD reported a 75% increase in swastika graffiti between 2016 and 2018, with an uptick observed after the Pittsburgh shooting. Out of 189 hate crimes in New York City in 2018, 150 featured swastikas. On February 1 2019 graffiti that read "fucking Jews" was found on the wall of a synagogue in LA.
