Editor's Note
This is the last post in a series that draws together several U.S. historians to consider how anti-Semitism has been studied and theorized in the American past. The first three posts were by Victoria Saker Woeste, Kirsten Fermaglich, and Cheryl Greenberg, respectively.
Daniel Platt is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Legal Studies at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, State University of New York at Buffalo. He has authored articles in the Journal of American History and Book History and won the William Nelson Cromwell Early Career Fellowship from the American Legal History Society and the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award for Best Graduate Student Essay in U.S. History from the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Platt’s current project is The Debt Question in Modern America, “considers how a diverse galley of Americans, from freedpeople, farmers, and feminists to jurists, reformers, and social scientists, understood the risks of financial obligations… and how they used the law to address their ethical concerns” between the Civil War and the New Deal.
Courtesy of Slate
It is an honor to offer the final contribution to this discussion of antisemitism in American history and historiography, so thoughtfully advanced by the essays of Victoria Woeste, Kirsten Fermaglich, and Cheryl Greenberg. Together, these pieces encourage an important rethinking of the progressive narrative of American antisemitism—a provocation that opens onto compelling issues of law and state power, race and social movements, and words and deeds. It is this last dyad that I wish to consider in my post, as we count the days from two critical moments in the history of American anti-Jewishness: the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue on October 27, 2018, and the debate over Representative Ilhan Omar’s criticism of U.S.-Israeli policy, culminating in the passage of a House resolution condemning “hateful expressions of intolerance” on March 7, 2019.
At a distance, this sequence of events, stretching a few short months from fall to spring, could suggest a tale that nests comfortably within the exceptionalist framework offered by progressive scholarship. The Pittsburgh gunman could be cast as a lone wolf in this telling and Rep. Omar as a freshman congresswoman uninitiated in the civilities of public office. The shooting is an aberration; sensitivity to antisemitism is heightened; and the House of Representatives quickly affirms its commitment to social liberalism when one of its members veers from consensus. Morality is restored, and anti-Jewishness is returned to its ever-shrinking corner of national culture.
A few pieces of this history fit, and perhaps one day scholars will write it as such. For those who have lived through these events, however, it is a narrative incongruous with the facts and feel of the contemporary moment. The Pittsburgh gunman, while acting alone, expressed a hatefulness that is increasingly common—a contempt for the global, racial, religious, and gendered Other that runs through the Dar Al-Farooq mosque bombing, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the Trump administration’s demands for a border wall. Antisemitism is a constituent part of a powerful and thoroughly national antimodernism, it seems, which cannot be trusted to organically fade from existence. The censure of Rep. Omar, on the other hand, may represent a sincere stand against an elected official’s traffic in objectionable language, yet it also has the appearance of instrumentalizing antisemitism in order to discipline a global, racial, religious, and gendered Other in Rep. Omar. The two episodes read as connected in this account, but along a very different axis.
Presence and absence, serious and suggestive, word and deed—these are the terms that have ordered appraisals of antisemitism often for U.S. historians. Atop such measurements have rested larger conclusions about the character of American politics, as paranoid and backwards-looking or as secular and cosmopolitan. What strikes me as more fruitful than filtering the past through these rigid categories—and what the previous contributions to this roundtable have modeled so well—is an analysis of the uses of Jewishness in public life and the relations of power that are organized, articulated, and naturalized through the invocation of Jewish difference. Rather than summing the column of antisemitic data in an essentially comparative framework, as many midcentury scholars were once drawn to do, we might ask how and why Jewish difference has been made to matter in the American past, and by whom.[1]
I am inspired, for example, by European scholarship that has explored how the Jewish body became invested with meaning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way of negotiating the dilemmas of urbanization and nation-state formation.[2] In my own work, on the moral experience of credit and indebtedness in the United States, I consider how competing understandings of Jewish difference informed debates about the character of financial markets and the role of the law in governing them. I trace a tension between populist uses of Jewishness, as a language for aspersing finance capital writ large, and a narrower, more ‘progressive’ construction of Jewish capital, as a device for creating a category of ethical finance as distinct from an unseemly, ethnic alternative. What matters in this framework is not so much the quantity of antisemitism discovered or even, exclusively, its proximity to material violence, but more the politics that have been produced and shaped by the mobilization of Jewish difference. This kind of approach might help scholars to better theorize the significance of Jewishness and anti-Jewishness in the American past, in the fields of immigration and ethnic history and in the study of capitalism; globalization; the welfare state; and the many midcentury movements for social, civil, and human rights.
I also think of the scholarship in Asian American history, particularly Ellen Wu’s The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (2014), which highlight how out-group difference has been used to curb or resist other out-group rights claims, especially in the post-1960s era.[3] One might follow this lead and ask, In what web of meaning does the prohibition on antisemitic speech, unevenly enforced, reside? Who has insisted on the special status of Jewish Americans—as a privileged minority, as an avatar for globalism or for separatism or for any other deeply rooted cultural association—and for what reasons? How has the world history of anti-Jewish law and violence been used to define the content of citizenship and the category of illicit discrimination in the modern United States?
What the previous contributions to this roundtable offer, and what the present moment invites, is a sustained, complex, and nuanced investigation of the myriad roles of antisemitism in American history—an assertion of presence but also, and more so, an account of how anti-Jewishness has served to make a range of people, Jewish and non-Jewish, more vulnerable to injustice.
Notes
[1] See, for example, Oscar Handlin, “American Views of the Jew at the Opening of the Twentieth Century,” American Jewish Historical Society 40 (June 1951), 323-344; John Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March 1957), 559-578.
[2] See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); Elana Shapira, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2016); Kerry Wallach, Passing Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).
[3] Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Minority Became the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
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