Roundtable on Antisemitism: Schlepping the State Back In

I’d like to thank Victoria Saker Woeste for this thought-provoking blog post, and to build on her concerns about the progressive narrative of American Jewish history constructed by generations of scholars, and the ways that that narrative has dismissed American antisemitism.

First, I think that this progressive narrative has been undergirded by a set of political and intellectual comparisons, and it’s important to make those comparisons visible.  On the one hand, American antisemitism has been far less virulent or violent than the racism directed against people of color in the United States, a racism that was baked into the founding laws and principles of the nation.  On the other hand, American antisemitism has been far less virulent or violent than the murderous genocide experienced by European Jews, a genocide that was perpetrated by a state animated and directed by racial hatred.  Hemmed in by these comparisons, I think that American Jewish historians have felt almost obligated to construct a progressive narrative of American Jewish history that has highlighted the low levels of violence and the lack of state involvement or interest in antisemitic ideologies or campaigns.

My own research into the history of Jewish name changing suggests we should reconsider this image of an antisemitism that is entirely private, with no state involvement or interest.  The private system of antisemitic discrimination that flourished in the United States in the first half of the 20^th century was in fact grounded by a decentralized state that not only permitted discrimination to flourish unimpeded, but that also sometimes encouraged and worked alongside that system.

The middle decades of the twentieth century (from the 1920s through the 1950s) saw a tremendous growth in official Jewish name changing in New York City, exploding in the 1940s with the advent of World War II.  This timing might surprise many who assume that name changing was predominantly the act of immigrants.  These years, of course, were the years of immigrant quotas, when relatively miniscule numbers of Jews were immigrating.  And in fact, only a minority of people who changed their names in City Court were immigrants.

But this timing makes perfect sense for historians who think about both antisemitism and about the rise of the welfare state and the military-industrial complex.  Official name changing was tied to (and intertwined with) the rise of both of these phenomena.  Jews decided to change their names both officially and unofficially because of the rise in the late 1910s and 1920s of an antisemitic regime in education and employment that identified Jews on application forms in order to deny them entrance. That regime may have begun as a private one, but my sources suggest that by the 1930s, city government agencies like the Emergency Relief Bureau similarly discriminated against Jewish applicants for jobs (as we know the Federal Housing Authority treated Jewish neighborhoods as unstable and “redlined” them).

Perhaps even more crucially, as the state began to penetrate daily life—requiring men to sign up for the draft, employing both men and women in the defense industry, accepting both men and women as volunteers into the different branches of the armed forces—representatives of the decentralized state began to surveil names, and to insist upon official name changes for anyone who had perhaps chosen a new name unofficially as a way of smoothing life in an antisemitic world years before.  The decisions made by men and women to change their names officially in the 1940s were voluntary, but they were heavily “encouraged” and sometimes coerced by defense contractors, military recruitment agents, and Naval and Air Force officers all unsettled by Jews who had selected different names for themselves years earlier as a means of finding a job or getting into school.  The price of participation in World War II for many men and women was an expensive visit to City Court and the permanent loss of a name that might identify you as Jewish to coreligionists or to family members.

This was not the behavior of a murderous authoritarian regime, nor the behavior of a racist settler colonial regime.  But it was also not a harmless voluntary private behavior, worthy only of jokes and Hollywood legend.   The state’s increasing interest in the identities of its citizens—and its concomitant tolerance of a private system of antisemitic discrimination in education, employment, and professional life—had meaningful consequences for Jews’ personal, familial and communal lives.

My best understanding of how a decentralized state might aid and abet antisemitic discrimination manifests itself through systems of antisemitic discrimination in employment and education, but Victoria’s work on group libel offers us a similar understanding of how the decentralized US state has aided in the production and dissemination of hatred.  Even as Jews and African Americans pushed at state and local levels to rein in hate speech, private actors’ willingness to push the barriers of acceptable speech have frequently been ignored or even encouraged and abetted by state actors at local, state and federal levels, including legislators and judges.

If our only understanding of meaningful antisemitism is a violent racist national state system, then antisemitism in the United States will indeed appear meaningless, and we will continue to downplay not only its significance, but even its fundamental existence.  But if we understand antisemitism—like state activity—existing within a spectrum that has employed both private and state actors together, then we can reconsider a host of activities, events, and behaviors, including group libel law and name change petitions, along that spectrum.  And we can think more effectively about what it means, for example, that the president of the United States, like members of his party in the House and Senate, has used antisemitic tropes to talk about immigration, encouraging private actors like Robert Gregory Brown to act upon those tropes with murderous violence, as in the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooting  (a violence aided and abetted by the unwillingness of national and state legislatures to address any form of meaningful gun control).

Rethinking the relationship between the state and the private, and understanding more clearly the interpenetration between the two in the United States is an important step for understanding the frightening modern world we live in.