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Vol. 70, No. 1 (Summer 2026) - Celebrating America’s Sestercentennial

Lee Levinger and the Fight Against Antisemitism

Jessica S. Cooperman

The ultimate world organization will be one in which, not merely anti-Semitism and every type of group prejudice will be impossible, but the interest in the many types of people in the world will be directed toward their contributions to the common welfare. The external foe which may then unite them will be none other than the conquest of the forces of nature; the inner unity will be a vast ethical and religious agreement that all men are in a literal sense brothers.1

Rabbi Lee Levinger closed his 1936 study, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, with the quote above in which he aspired not merely to conquer antisemitism once and for all, but to triumph over human prejudice and usher in a true sense of “brotherhood” among peoples. It was a bold aspiration at any time, but particularly in 1936, a little more than a decade since the United States had passed restrictive legislation designed to keep “undesirable” immigrants out of the country, the Ku Klux Klan marched openly through the streets of Washington DC, and only a year after Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. Levinger, however, understood fighting against antisemitism and promoting a belief in human unity as a profound part of his scholarly mission. He was keenly aware of these national and international events but continued to believe that victory over prejudice was possible. Throughout the interwar period, he worked to persuade his fellow Americans that antisemitism was a corrosive force that they could—and indeed must—root out to protect the future of democracy.

Levinger was not alone in this quest. As historian Lila Corwin Berman has shown, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish communal leaders and academics worked to promote “brotherhood” and build bridges between Jews and other Americans. Rabbis invoked the spiritual mission of Judaism, while social scientists deployed the language of sociology and group dynamics; both strove to situate Jews within the American mainstream and to protect Jewish communal religious and cultural particularism.2 Levinger is not often included within the ranks of rabbis and scholars who worked to change American perceptions of Jews during this period. He did not occupy a prominent pulpit; and while he earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1925, he did not manage to secure one of the few academic positions held by Jews in the early twentieth-century United States. But from the 1920s through the 1950s Lee Levinger wrote popular sociological studies and histories that advocated for Jewish belonging in American society.

Levinger is interesting, in part, because although his scholarship is not widely remembered, his work exemplified many early twentieth-century arguments against antisemitism and for Jewish inclusion in the United States. He spent most of his career working for Jewish communal organizations rather than in a university setting, but he had respectable academic credentials and, based on the number of reprints and editions offered, his books sold well. He offered readers solid accounts of Jewish history and of the contributions Jews made to American society. He crafted compelling analyses of the social dynamics, prejudices, and campaigns of misinformation that brought antisemitism to the United States. And throughout most of his career, he remained optimistic that if Christian Americans only knew more about their Jewish neighbors, and if only Jews could cast off some of their own insecurities and insularities, they could together uproot the underlying causes of antisemitism in America.

As we consider the 250th anniversary of the United States, it is clear that the position of Jews globally and within American society changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Yet despite the many differences in political and economic power, and social acceptance experienced by American Jews in the 1930s and today, there is a great deal of contemporary resonance in Levinger’s proposed cures for prejudice and in the blind spots within his analysis. Levinger believed in equality and in democracy but was willing to make political and ideological compromises in connection with immigration restriction to fight the spread of antisemitism in the United States. He wrestled with perceptions of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, he called for Christian support in the fight against antisemitism, and he argued that academic advocacy could change the course of public opinion. Lee Levinger’s successful career and surprising neglect within the historical record offers a useful touchpoint for thinking about the ways that American Jews, and scholars of American Jewish history, have thought about, worried over, and responded to antisemitism over the past century.

A Jewish Chaplain in France

Lee Joseph Levinger was born in Burke, Idaho in 1890. His parents had immigrated from Germany just prior to his birth. They later moved to South Dakota where they set up a store, and family histories describe them as shopkeepers of modest means.3 Lee excelled in school and earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago where he met and became engaged to Elma Ehrlich.4 After completing his BA, Lee pursued a rabbinical degree at Hebrew Union College and completed an MA in sociology from the University of Cincinnati.5 In 1916 after receiving ordination as a Reform rabbi, he took a pulpit in Paducah, Kentucky and saved enough money to marry Elma and start a family. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Levinger went to work as a field representative for the Jewish Welfare Board, providing social and religious services at a Naval Station just north of Chicago. On July 4, 1918, he received a commission as a US military chaplain and became one of only twelve rabbis to serve in the Chaplains Corps with the WWI American Expeditionary Forces in France.6

Levinger’s military service shaped his understanding of American society and provided him with a vision of the United States’ future that animated the rest of his career.7 As a chaplain, his position required him to provide spiritual support to all American servicemen, regardless of religion. But as one of very few rabbis to receive a military commission, Levinger understood that part of his job was also to serve as an “ambassador” of Jews and Judaism within the overwhelmingly Christian American military. He described his experiences in a 1921 memoir, A Jewish Chaplain in France, in which he made it clear that he took both of these roles very seriously.

Working with Christian soldiers and colleagues of all denominations, Levinger saw himself as promoting possibilities for mutual respect and cooperation, not only in the military, but in the country to which he and other servicemen would return after the Armistice was signed. His memoir gives sober account of the months he spent in France during and immediately following the war. He wrote movingly of sitting at the side of dying and wounded soldiers, conducting services before and after battle, and of assisting wherever necessary during the sometimes stressful, sometimes tedious hours spent waiting for the next assault. But alongside these stories, Levinger drew out the broader lessons he believed all Americans needed to learn from their soldiers’ sacrifices and their country’s experience of the war in Europe.

The most important lesson was that Europe had nothing to teach America. Levinger admitted that the British “Tommies” had done fine work holding the line against the Germans but reported that American men had little in common with the British and found them impossible to relate to. Americans, he claimed, preferred the Australians for their bold spirits and lack of “old world” pretensions. Aussies, Levinger reported, were “like our men, young, hardy, dashing…. They had a type of discipline of their own, which included saluting their own officers when they wanted and never saluting British officers under any circumstances.” He took particular pride “in hearing about their commanding officer, General Sir John Monash, who held the highest rank of any Jew in the war;” and noted that “it was no little honor to be the commander of those magnificent troops from Australia.”8

While he found the British to embody the priggish and uptight sensibilities of the “old world,” Levinger felt something akin to pity for the French. He noted the crass behavior of American soldiers who mangled French words and “appropriated” French property but argued that French culture was so rigid and ossified that it could not help but lead to corruption. He mocked the young French men who could be bought off for an American cigar and lamented the abundance of French women who turned to prostitution, but he blamed the situation not on the devastation created by the war, but on what he saw as the French’s outmoded ideas about social interaction. In the United States, he wrote, soldiers’ welfare organizations organized dances and parties where even “the daughters of rich and cultivated families tended canteen or danced with soldiers,” assuring that the men could find appropriate female companionship. But in France, old fashioned “conception[s] of good breeding and of marriage combined to forbid any contact” between “French girls of good family” and American soldiers—thus depriving the men of opportunities for what he saw as appropriate encounters with women of high standards, and making, in his words, the “conspicuousness of the loose element” all the more apparent.9

To Levinger, it seemed that the problem behind all of these outmoded and unproductive ideas and social divisions was a lack of liberty, particularly of religious liberty. “C’est la liberté,” Levinger quoted a French priest sighing wistfully upon hearing that in the American military, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish chaplains worked in cooperation to support the troops. In France, Levinger argued, “religious liberty is based on hostility and intolerance of religion” and that “religion there has meant historically the domination of one religion and the curtailment of liberty.” By positioning religion as the antithesis of personal freedom, the French were either tied to rigid and old-fashioned ideas or left unmoored from the grounding force of religion. In considering French Jews, he found those interested in Judaism to be somewhat backward in their world view, while those “interested in the world to-day,” he claimed, “have little interest in Judaism.”10

The “old world” of Europe thus held little appeal for Levinger. It seemed to him that its dogmatic conceptions of religion bred either secular contempt for the spiritual or small-minded adherence to traditionalism. Its social structures were archaic and ran contrary to the needs of the moment. Levinger saw a new world unfolding in the wake of the war—a world defined by the hardy, dashing, independent spirit of young Australians and Americans. It was a world which, despite the carnage of battle, he perceived to be full of vitality and potential that, he believed, could not come from a European society which kept men, women, and members of different social classes or religious groups divided by old and unproductive prejudices.

In the United States Levinger saw the possibility of renewal and revitalization, interfaith cooperation, and the overcoming of old prejudices. It seemed to him that the war allowed men to simplify creeds and commandments, and to distill their beliefs down to their most basic and essential level. To the soldier, Levinger claimed, the three worst vices were cowardice, selfishness, and pride. The most noble virtues: courage, self-sacrifice, and modesty.11 The soldier’s most deeply held conviction, Levinger wrote, was “first and foremost hope. He looked forward to better things both for himself and for the world. He had … the religious certainty that the future will witness the dawning of a better day.” The soldier, Levinger continued, “cared little for creeds of any kind…. The soldier needed religion,” Levinger wrote, “he wanted God; [but] he cared very little for churches, creeds or churchmen.”12

Far from feeling despair or frustration over the soldier’s disdain for the institutions of traditional religion, Levinger saw the soldier’s system of belief as holding out redemptive promise of a future in which the divisions of church and creed would be superseded by what the soldier demanded—deeds rather than words; authenticity instead of hypocrisy; respect for brave, modest, self-sacrificing men; and disdain for outdated social orders and conventions. Jews, Levinger argued, would fare well in this new world. In the army, he wrote:

…the Jewish soldier demands no defense and needs no tribute. His deeds are written large in the history of every unit in the AEF; they are preserved in the memory of his comrades of other races and faiths. He was one with all American soldiers, for in the service, men of every type and every previous standpoint were much alike… The Jew was an American soldier – that really covers the story.13

In Levinger’s assessment, the sacrifices of WWI had ushered in a new era of mutual respect and enhanced Jewish pride. The Jewish soldier’s comrades respected him; Jewish chaplains worked side by side with Christian chaplains; Judaism was integrated into the workings of the military; and so, the Jewish soldier came to respect himself. The war, Levinger believed, taught lessons about the value of mutual and self-respect, religious identity freed from overly punctilious attention to tradition, and a deeply held, shared commitment to democracy and the common good. These lessons served as the starting point for Levinger’s decades-long quest to stamp out antisemitism.

Antisemitism in America

In the years following the war, Levinger accepted a congregational position in Wilmington, Delaware, but scholarship remained his passion. He returned to school while serving his congregation and earned a PhD in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1925.14 In doing so, Levinger actively participated in what historian Lila Corwin Berman describes as the “social scientific turn” among American Jews. He joined other (predominantly Reform) rabbis and intellectuals who sought to promote understanding between Jews and other Americans by using social scientific principles “to craft a public language of Jewishness to communicate the relationship between Jews and the non-Jewish world in which they lived.”15 As a sociologist, Levinger returned to many of the ideas about the American character and future that animated his memoir but focused his attention on a problem that vexed him—the persistence of antisemitism in a modern American context that should, seemingly, have long left this old-world prejudice behind.

Levinger published his dissertation under the title Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes. He opened the book by describing the existence of antisemitism in the US as a paradox: How was it possible, he asked, that “the most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and tolerance?”16 How, even more pointedly, could it persist after the experiences of the world war? Levinger turned to the tools of early twentieth-century sociology to uncover answers. He engaged the relevant scholarly literature on group identity, discussing how it forms and how subgroups come to be perceived as threats to the dominant group; he laid out events in American history, including shifting patterns of migration, demographic and economic transitions, and the rise of nativist movements; and he turned in particular to the aftermath of WWI in search of both explanations and solutions.

Levinger argued that the experience of the war created both remarkable opportunities for overcoming prejudices, and unexpected pitfalls that led to their post-war resurgence. In the army, where contact between groups had depth and substance, he claimed that all forms of prejudice, including antisemitism, had been significantly reduced “simply because all the various elements in our people were acutely conscious of their common enemy. Old-time prejudices, left over from the Civil War, were forgotten. Religious and racial intolerance were minimized because there was a common purpose, and a common intolerance of a common enemy.”17

But on the homefront, he argued, prejudice had been only temporarily suppressed through a combination of patriotic sentiment and government policy which demanded unity and censored divisive voices. Levinger concluded that some of the many subgroups within American society resented this enforced consensus, while the contact created through coercion had failed to offer a sense of mutual understanding strong enough to last beyond the armistice. As a result, he argued, after the war, old hostilities resurfaced quickly, directing themselves with renewed force toward noticeable subgroups within American society: African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Jews.

This resurgence of prejudice and antisemitism was not, he argued, a necessary outcome of either the war or of government policy. While it derived in part from nativist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, whose anger against officially imposed claims of national unity burst forth in the postwar period and represented “a subgroup revolting against the voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war,”18 Levinger believed that postwar antisemitism and prejudice derived primarily from the continued importation of European ideas. Through publications like the Dearborn Independent, he claimed race science had made its way to the American public, introducing ideas from Gobineau in France, and Marr in Germany, to Russian émigrés fleeing the revolution, to American writers like Madison Grant and to Henry Ford’s popular newspaper.19 He acknowledged that the infiltration of European prejudices was not sufficient to explain American antisemitism, but noted that “(t)he form of the prejudice was its importation…”20 In Levinger’s analysis, Europe again emerged as an essential source of social corruption.

In his view, America remained full of redemptive potential. Rather than despairing of an apparent surge in anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and antisemitic sentiment following the war and particularly in post-war immigration restrictions, Levinger urged American Jews to embrace the sense of pride and confidence embodied by the Jewish soldier. He described the need for American Jews to resist the tendency to retreat into their own communities and accept the “inferiority complex” or “oppression psychosis” that, he claimed, often developed among members of threatened subgroups.21 And perhaps breaking with the American Jewish organizations that argued against the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act imposing immigration quotas, or perhaps bowing to the political reality of the moment, Levinger also argued that American Jews should consider embracing the benefits of immigration restriction.22 He noted that over the previous 25 years, the majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States had come from “a belated civilization,” and that given the limitations of the Jew’s experience in places like “Poland or Ukrainia, or Rumania,” it was unsurprising that “his adjustment [to American society] is not always a correct one, still less the same adjustment as that of the standardized typical American.”23 Writing in 1925, Levinger observed that it was too early to judge the full impact of the new immigration quotas, but argued that “it is obvious that [it] will alter the animus and nature of anti-Semitism… even though it will not… stop anti-Semitism completely.”24

Levinger believed that if Americans could stop the flow of antisemitic ideas into the country and encourage American Jews to embrace a healthier sense of identity, then scholars like himself could demonstrate how through the “accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of reason,” humans could eventually overcome all unnecessary divisions and see themselves as inherently united.25 He turned to the war for examples of how true contact with others could lead to moments of connection strong enough to overcome prejudices. He cited the examples of American soldiers who brought home German brides after the war and told a story about a “harmless peasant boy” named Hans who abandoned his machine gun and willingly surrendered to advancing American forces. Hans, Levinger claimed, quickly became seen as the person he truly was, a friendly presence at the first-aid post, rather than as the enemy soldier Americans would have perceived if he had stayed at his post.26 For this contact to be effective, however, it required depth. Surface-level encounters between groups could, he cautioned, be counterproductive as “[p]rejudice is always strongest on the frontier.”27 But while intolerance might, at times, seem like the natural condition of human society, tolerance, he argued, “is the typical virtue of the modern world because the modern world is becoming increasingly self-conscious, intelligent and individualistic, and especially because the modern world is beginning to afford opportunities for real acquaintance between members of different peoples.”28 The path to overcoming intolerance, therefore, lay in creating sustained contact and understanding between groups which “often opens the way to real acquaintance before which intolerance grows faint and may even vanish.”29

American Jews, he argued, thus needed to appreciate that they could not fight prejudice and antisemitism on their own. The only effective response was one that emphasized unity among all Americans: “[D]irect propaganda” against antisemitism by Jews, Levinger cautioned, “may have some influence, but only as propaganda, not as argument to refute arguments from the other side. The fact of difference is the primary fact on which anti-Semitism, like all other intolerances, is based. This can be transcended only by an inclusive loyalty and inclusive purpose in which both sub-groups lose their own purposes and consequently their opposition.”30

The fight against antisemitism required active support and engagement by Christians, and this Levinger claimed was a natural expression of American democracy and modernity. “Defense of Jews by non-Jews,” he wrote, “is a notable phenomenon of modern times, associated with the general growth of tolerance.”31 He cited protests against antisemitism issued by distinguished American Christians, including Presidents Wilson and Taft, and William Cardinal O’Connell, who attested that, “The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizen of Jewish faith is equal to that of any part of our people and requires no defense at our hands…” Levinger took heart from these expressions of solidarity, and remained confident that as the country closed its doors to European ideas and immigrants, Americans would reject outdated and imported prejudice. “The future,” he asserted, “will mark that growing unity in diversity of the American group mind; the mounting beauty of its many-colored canvas, the increasing harmony of its many-throated symphony.”32

A History of the Jews in the United States

Throughout the rest of his career, Levinger sought to build the sort of mutual understanding and connection that would encourage more Christian Americans to embrace the fight against antisemitism and prejudice. After completing his PhD, Levinger accepted a position as Hillel Director at Ohio State University, where he taught classes on Jewish philosophy, and he and Elma opened their home to students eager for conversation—and homemade dinners.33 But he also turned again to scholarship to help Jews fight “oppression psychosis,” develop a sense of pride and confidence in their status as Americans, and to advance the cause of mutual understanding between Christians and Jews.

In 1928 Lee and Elma together published The Story of the Jew for Young People, a book intended primarily for Jewish youth who, the Levingers believed, needed sources for the sort of pride and self-respect required to take their place in American society. As they wrote together in the book’s introduction, “this work is an attempt to summarize the great events of Jewish history for young people of confirmation and post confirmation age… it is vital that the young Jew shall have some sense of this great living drama of which he himself is part.”34 In 1930, Lee Levinger published another account of the Jewish past, this one entitled A History of the Jews in the United States.

Both books were well received accounts of Jewish experience. The Story of the Jew, published by Behrman’s Jewish Book House, went through seven printings between 1928 and 1933. A History of the Jews in the United States, published by the Department of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, went through two printings in 1930 and 1931; the publisher released a revised edition in 1935. The books were structured as textbooks intended for educational settings and included questions for discussion at the end of each chapter. While The Story of the Jew emphasized Jewish pride, A History of the Jews in the United States was meant to be used in non-Jewish settings, particularly in high schools. In it, Levinger attempted to avoid the sort of overt propaganda that he warned had little hope of changing minds and instead hoped that through their study of Jewish history in the United States, young Americans might learn to understand and find real connection with their Jewish neighbors and compatriots. The book was intended as an introduction to Jews and Jewish practices that could help facilitate the sort of relationships through which understanding would be built and prejudice vanquished. As Emanuel Gamoran, Educational Director of the Department of Synagogue and School Extension, explained in his series editor’s introduction to the book,

… it is well accepted in recent educational theory that one of the fundamental aims of education should be to bring about an intelligent, sympathetic, yet critical understanding of the immediate environment of the child. In America, one would expect this to be reflected in the publication of many texts for children and young people on American Jewish History. This should especially be done because of the unique and in many respects remarkable part which the Jew has played in the upbuilding of America.35

In his own introduction, Levinger states his goals in even stronger terms, writing:

When we read American history or study it in our schools, there is seldom much mention of the Jews. Thoughtless people might judge from this that the Jewish people have had little to do with the history of the United States, or that the Jews are newcomers who arrived after others had founded the nation and made it great. But this happens to be far from the fact. Jews have lived in the land that is now the United States of America long before it won its freedom; they have worked for it sacrificed for it and loved it at every period of its history.36

In A History of the Jews in the United States, Levinger attempted to detail the deep involvement of Jewish people in the history of the United States and to anticipate and answer the sorts of questions his readers might have about Jews, the things they did, and what they believed. Chapters thus included discussions of where Jews came from; how Jewish communities grew alongside the growth of the United States; different waves of Jewish immigration; Jewish lodges and charitable organizations; demographic statistics; Jewish education; types of Judaism and Jewish practice; Jewish contributions to American war efforts; and prominent Jews in American history and contemporary society.37 Levinger told readers about the role of the United States in protecting Jewish rights. In a chapter entitled “United States Champion of Jewish Rights,” Levinger argued that “From Washington to Roosevelt we have noticed official spokesmen of the American people giving voice to a friendly and just attitude toward the Jews…not only to Jewish citizens at home, but also to oppressed Jews abroad… [The United States] befriended the Jew in many instances because it was the friend and champion of the oppressed, because it stood for liberty of thought and speech in religious and civil affairs.”38 Defense of Jews and of their rights, Levinger argued, was a reflection of American values. Jews were part of the fabric of American society, and the United States stood behind Jewish communities in the United States and abroad as part of its broader commitment to religious and personal liberty.

Despite the inherent commitment to liberty that Levinger ascribed to the country and its citizens, he reluctantly admitted that antisemitism had appeared, and persisted, on American shores. In this book, as in his earlier ones, Levinger blamed this on foreign influence. After the world war, he argued, race theory and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were brought to the US by European immigrants, including exiled Russian aristocrats.39 Through these immigrants, dangerous and dishonest ideas about Jews spread through American society. But, he reassured readers,

…[a]s we might expect in a land of freedom and liberalism, the anti-Semitic movement was taken up…only by certain groups, largely the ignorant, bigoted people who lived in small towns… and those who hated any strangers….The great majority of Americans were too fair and too intelligent to believe these accusations or join these societies of opposition.40

Levinger’s disdain for small-town Americans might be surprising given his own origins, but perhaps even more surprising was his ongoing support for immigration restriction as a means of controlling the spread of antisemitism. While histories of Jewish life in this period often showcase the work of Jews who fought against the imposition of strict new quotas, Levinger argued that bringing in fewer foreigners would mean importing fewer corrupting foreign ideas.41 And perhaps more importantly, by slowing the pace of Jewish immigration, American Jews could assure that newer immigrants would more thoroughly adapt to their new circumstances, while those already established would be able to develop the communal foundations necessary to finally bring Jews entirely into the American mainstream. In a chapter entitled “What the Future Holds for the Jew in America,” Levinger defended the benefits of immigration restriction, arguing:

… foreign ideas, foreign scholarship, foreign ambitions will not be entering as they did with each successive wave of immigration… There will be more time for Jews to take stock of themselves, to solidify the progress made so far, to decide for themselves what the next step is to be. They will not be hurried into action, as they have been before, by the pressure of masses of needy immigrants or by the overwhelming need of their brothers in foreign lands… those in the United States particularly will have a breathing space for development of their own ideas from within.42

With no new immigrants coming in, Levinger claimed that the “antis” would have nothing to rail against, and Christian Americans would naturally come to embrace the causes of liberty, tolerance, and brotherhood. Without new immigrants arriving, Levinger assured his readers in 1930 and again in the second printing in 1931, “Anti-Semitism is rapidly declining again in America after its one serious outbreak. The American people as a whole will have none of it… anti-Semitism cannot be a permanent movement in the United States.”43

By the time the revised edition of the book was released in 1935, however, Levinger had become somewhat more somber about the influence of antisemitism in the United States. In an appendix to the new edition, Levinger wrestled with the ascendancy of Nazism in Germany and its appeal among Americans. In spite of his best efforts to help the country live up to the lessons of WWI, he wrote:

The revival of anti-Semitism so soon after the previous movement means that our opinion … that anti-Semitism cannot be a permanent movement in the United States, was much too optimistic… The Jews are not safe even in America so long as misery and ignorance prevail. Even in a land where equality is the law and the tradition, that equality can rest safely only on the happiness and comfort of the people as a whole. Depressions, wars, and the imported propaganda from foreign lands are a danger to America, and especially to the American Jew.44

Antisemitism, Yesterday and Tomorrow

Like many American Jews, Levinger watched the events unfolding in Nazi Germany with a sense of dread; but he did not abandon his conviction that through scholarship and careful explanation, he could overcome prejudice and help Jewish and Christian Americans live up to their true potential. In 1936 Levinger took up the fight again with a new study, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow. Levinger stuck with the themes and sociological approach that animated his earlier work on antisemitism but this book, published by Macmillan Press, was clearly intended for a wider audience. Accordingly, Levinger expanded his analysis of the history and causes of antisemitism into a study intended to edify the American public about the threat that antisemitism posed to the very foundations of democracy. Levinger traced the history of antisemitism from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, to what he saw as its peak in Nazi Germany. He warned his audience that “America is the last country in the world where we would look for anti-Semitism. It is, as a matter of fact, the latest if not the last, country where anti-Semitism has finally taken root.”45

Levinger argued that American society had long possessed an antipathy toward distinctive subgroups, insisting on the right to individual liberty but rejecting the persistence of “group life.”46 This tendency, he argued, had propelled earlier waves of anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly against Catholics who were subjected to violence, discrimination, and false claims that adherence to Catholicism was antithetical to being a good American. However, antisemitism in the 1930s, he argued, drew its strength from multiple forces:

The current anti-Jewish movement in the United States began about 1931, and now, in 1936, shows few signs of weakening. It contains three elements which deserve mention: the German propaganda in America, the nativist revival, and the growing economic difficulties of the American Jew. The German element in this movement is a direct and natural result of the Nazi regime in Germany.47

Levinger still blamed the importation of European racial theories for much antisemitism but highlighted the efforts of Nazi representatives and their American sympathizers for fomenting unrest in the United States. Drawing perhaps upon research done in his new position as Director of the Research Bureau of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, he described quota systems designed to keep Jews out of elite colleges, and restrictions on entrance to professional schools and organizations as a disruption to healthy Jewish integration into American society. He warned that “the normal distribution and normal income of the Jews, which was slowly developing, will be endangered,” leading to “an unhealthy crowding into a few types of work.”48

Levinger did, however, begin to back away from his earlier optimism that the immigration restriction might solve the problem of antisemitism. In this book he argued that, if immigration quotas worked to quash antisemitic sentiment, one might expect to see improvement in the attitudes of Americans. But instead, although the number of immigrants entering the United States had already been drastically reduced, anti-immigrant and antisemitic sentiment persisted.49

Levinger also expanded the scope of his study to include consideration of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. While recounting the history of anti-Jewish violence globally, Levinger paused to note that “One more incident of an anti-Jewish nature must be mentioned here,” although he argued that it was “entirely different in essence from anything else in this long and dreary tale of a people’s sorrows.”50 He gave a short account of 1923 and 1929 Arab violence against the growing numbers of Jews arriving in Palestine to build a Jewish national home, but invoked both orientalist visions of Arab culture and sympathy with their resistance to British colonialism, arguing that

… there is no anti-Semitism in Palestine. The real crux of the situation there is the British Mandatory and the attempts of the Arabs to win complete freedom. The Jews were attacked, partly because they are symbols and beneficiaries of British rule, but even more because they represent an alien civilization, the culture of the West come to invade an Oriental land…. The Jew is thus again the scapegoat, this time as a pioneer of Occidental culture in the half-awakened immemorial East.51

Most central to his argument and his quest to root out prejudice in the United States, Levinger warned his readers that all Americans should be concerned about the effects of antisemitism. For Jews, even in cases where antisemitism did not lead to violence, it was likely to create a sense of internal communal cohesion and insularity that might feel reassuring but would ultimately lead to “oppression psychosis.” The resulting inferiority complex, Levinger cautioned, “may lead to extreme doubting and fear…. Or it may lead to suspicion, aggressiveness, what the Freudian school calls ‘overcompensation….’” which would ultimately prove disastrous. As proof, he quoted early twentieth-century sociologist Herbert A. Miller, who opined, “The method by which the Jew has had to survive is the method which makes his survival so often offensive to those among whom he lives…. He is a manifestation of the psychological result of the kind of oppression which has become psychopathic.”52 And while the antisemite might escape this form of psychopathy, Levinger warned that the “fascist ideal of uniformity” was dangerous for the majority as well as the minority, for “oppression is itself immoral and introduces a principle of immorality into the national life…. People are turned into things, tools for the use of the ruler or the governing class. Instead of serving the people, the ruler makes the people serve him or serve some vague national ideal, such as expansion of war, which may even be immoral in itself.”53

Despite—or perhaps because of—the dangers Levinger saw in allowing antisemitism to persist, he remained convinced that in the United States, it could still be overcome. “As the causes of anti-Semitism, and of all race hatred, lie in environment rather than in heredity,” he insisted, “they can be cured.”54 He praised the work done by Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the B’nai B’rith to find this cure, particularly the ADL’s call to “eliminate horrible portrayals of the Jew” in school textbooks, in children’s books, and in popular media, and agreed that “ignorance concerning the Jew on the part of the public must be dispelled with true information.” But Levinger also reminded his readers that Jews alone could never “cure” antisemitism, as “The real causes are beyond the reach of the Jews themselves.”55 The remedy could only be found in brotherhood and the efforts of Christian supporters.

Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen

While Levinger’s aspirations remained consistent, the atmosphere in which he wrote began to change as the threat of Nazism grew larger. At the end of Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, Levinger noted with satisfaction that while Jews had found liberal-minded Christian defenders in earlier periods, several new books promoting better relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews had recently been published, and the National Conference of Jews and Christians was “conducting seminars, publishing literature, working through churches, synagogues and civic groups, in the effort to induce people to think clearly and fairly on problems of the relationship of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.”56 Scholar Alan M. Shore, writing about the history of Jewish-Christian relations in the mid-twentieth century, noted the same phenomenon, although with a more comprehensive explanation than Levinger was able to offer from his vantage point in 1936. “The rise of Hitler,” Shore argues, “triggered a response among elements of Jewish and Christian communities that broadened and reconfigured the scope of their relations, leading to a new foundation for mutual recognition.”57

In 1940 Levinger made another foray in his ongoing fight against antisemitism, publishing Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, which he co-wrote with James Waterman Wise, son of Rabbi Stephen Wise and an author who had long warned about the dangers of Nazism.58 The authors explained that they embarked on this book project in order to “clarify and correct” the “ugly coldness” that had appeared between Jews and their Christian neighbors in recent years. To do so, they set out to introduce “Mr. Smith,” the average American Christian, to the culture and religious practices of “Mr. Cohen,” the average American Jew.

The book retraces much of the ground that Levinger had covered in his History of the Jews in the United States, although with less detail and in a more approachable tone. The authors’ goal was to pave the way toward a future in which Christian and Jew rose above their differences and embraced each other as friends and fellow American citizens. Or, as they wrote, “We know American Jews and believe that we can make them better known to their gentile neighbors – better known, and perhaps better liked by these neighbors.”59 Ultimately however, as Alan Shore’s research suggests, the German threat and return of global war may have been more effective than scholarship at advancing the cause of brotherhood and making Americans interested in learning more about their Jewish neighbors.60

As the war drew close to an end in 1944, the publisher reissued A History of the Jews in the United States, and revised editions were released again in 1949 and 1959. In the chapters Levinger added since the first edition in 1930, he conceded that his earlier enthusiasm for immigration restrictions had been misplaced. Describing the interwar growth of nativism, he acknowledged that “More disastrous for the Jews than all the anti-Semitic organizations were the new laws enacted to limit immigration in 1921, 1924 and finally in 1929.”61 It was these laws, he lamented, that made it impossible for European Jews to escape Nazism by coming to the United States, and left American Jews powerless to rescue friends and family from the Holocaust.

But while Nazism spread unprecedented disaster in its wake, Levinger argued that this war had finally awakened Americans from the grip of imported antisemitic propaganda. Ever optimistic, he explained, “we have seen how the Nazi program included bitter attacks on the American Jews, as well as on all Jewry. When the United States declared war on Germany all such direct propaganda had to stop. The great majority of Americans then came to realize the real nature of this German anti-Semitism, that it had always been a part of the fascist attack on our democratic institutions.”62 Americans may have failed to remember the lessons of WWI, but Levinger seemed assured that the lessons of WWII would never fade: All Americans now knew that “Anti-Semitism does not really belong in America,”63 and American Jews, finally free of their sense of inferiority, had come to realize that “Only under a real democracy will the Jew have an equal chance …. So Jewish organizations have become more aggressive in fighting for democracy, for rights for the Negro, for the rights of labor and for expansion of immigration. To be a good Jew it is necessary also to be a good citizen.”64

Lee Levinger passed away in 1966, a few years after Elma. By the time of his death, the United States had, at least rhetorically, accepted many of the ideals to which he aspired. But while scholars continue to explore the post-war period’s fight against antisemitism and embrace of Judeo-Christian brotherhood, Levinger’s work has largely been ignored.65 As Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders wrestle with how to address fears of antisemitism today, it is therefore striking to hear new calls for the type of scholarship against antisemitism that Levinger wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. And it is equally striking to note how many of the issues that animated Levinger’s battle with antisemitism—government suppression of dissent, the relationship between antisemitism and prejudice and threats to democracy, Zionism, and immigration restrictions—resonate with our current moment. Why then has Levinger himself been forgotten? Perhaps it is because by the second half of the twentieth century, his work and his fight against antisemitism seemed outmoded. Or perhaps it was because he failed to appreciate the extent to which external forces, like wars and government policies, or Christian self-perception in the aftermath of Nazism, rather than scholarship on Jewish history, ultimately set the tone for American discussions of antisemitism. Certainly, reflecting on Levinger’s quest to root out antisemitism and push American society toward a better future forces us to think about the extent to which scholars, even successful ones, truly shape public opinion, and it reminds us of the blind spots and limits of scholarship as a tool of social change.

Jessica S. Cooperman, PhD is the Doris and Simon Konover Chair in Judaic Studies and Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life at the University of Connecticut.

  1. 1 Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow (The Macmillan Company, 1936), 322-323.

  2. 2 See Lila Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Jewish Public Identity (University of California Press, 2009).

  3. 3 Leah Levinger, “Family History,” Jewish History of Columbus and Franklin County, Archives-Library Ohio Historical Society, June 21, 1974; Bud Levinger, “Information about the Levinger Family Coming to the Country from Germany,” undated; and Charles and Leta Levinger, “Levinger Family Story,” undated. Collection of the author.

  4. 4 Elma became a well-known writer, editor, educator, and speaker in her own right. She and Lee published two books together, but she also published many plays, poems, histories, and curricula on her own. For more information on Elma’s career, see The Jewish Women’s Archive: Elma Ehrlich Levinger | Jewish Women’s Archive, and Leah Levinger, “Family History.”

  5. 5 Leah Levinger, “Family History,” 4.

  6. 6 Lee J. Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain in France (The Macmillan Company, 1921), 10.

  7. 7 Although it did not make him an enthusiastic supporter of military force. His daughter Leah described him as a committed pacifist later in life. See Leah Levinger, “Family History,” 22.

  8. 8 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 41-42.

  9. 9 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 176.

  10. 10 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 143.

  11. 11 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 146.

  12. 12 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 148-149.

  13. 13 Levinger, A Jewish Chaplain, 114.

  14. 14 Leah Levinger, 20-21.

  15. 15 Corwin Berman, Speaking of Jews, 8.

  16. 16 Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes (Bloch Publishing Co., 1925), 9.

  17. 17 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 53.

  18. 18 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 76.

  19. 19 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 85-95.

  20. 20 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 86.

  21. 21 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 102-104.

  22. 22 On the American Jewish Committee’s fight against immigration restriction, see for example, MM Silver, Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America (Syracuse University Press, 2013), 222-245.

  23. 23 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 94-95.

  24. 24 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 95.

  25. 25 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 32-44.

  26. 26 Levinger, it is worth noting, spoke German fluently, so his relationship with “Hans” may not have been the same as that of other American servicemen.

  27. 27 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 50.

  28. 28 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 53.

  29. 29 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 50.

  30. 30 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 101.

  31. 31 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 96.

  32. 32 Levinger, Anti-Semitism in the United States, 118.

  33. 33 Leah Levinger, 13.

  34. 34 Elma Ehrlich Levinger and Lee J. Levinger, The Story of the Jew for Young People (Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1933), ix. The Preface to the second edition notes that “the first edition was exhausted within a month. It was introduced in many schools throughout the country…”

  35. 35 Editor’s Introduction to Lee J. Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 2nd ed. (Department of Synagogue and School Extension of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1935), vii.

  36. 36 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 3.

  37. 37 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, xi-xvi.

  38. 38 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 322.

  39. 39 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 361-63.

  40. 40 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 367.

  41. 41 See for example, Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965 (Oxford University Press, 2014); Hannah Greene, “Stuck in the Middle With(out) You: How American Immigration Law Trapped ‘Defective’ Immigrants Between Two Worlds,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 14, no. 2 (2023); and Greene, “Defective Classifications,” American Jewish History 108, no. 1 (2024). For a history of immigration to the United States, see Hasia Diner and Carl Bon Tempo, Immigration: An American History (Yale University Press, 2022).

  42. 42 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 526.

  43. 43 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 372.

  44. 44 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States, 540.

  45. 45 Lee J. Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow (The Macmillan Company, 1936), xxx.

  46. 46 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 127.

  47. 47 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 138.

  48. 48 In 1937, under the auspices of the Research Bureau of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, Levinger published a study entitled “The Jewish Student in America.” In 1938 he published another on “Professional Opportunities for Jewish Youth.” The quote is from Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 142-143.

  49. 49 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 132.

  50. 50 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 106.

  51. 51 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 107.

  52. 52 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 291.

  53. 53 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 286-287.

  54. 54 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 300.

  55. 55 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 304-307.

  56. 56 Levinger, Anti-Semitism Yesterday and Tomorrow, 311-312.

  57. 57 Alan M. Shore, Uncommon Allies: American Jews and Christians Uniting Against Hitler, 1933-1945 (Syracuse University Press, 2024), 5.

  58. 58 For an obituary of Wise, see “James W. Wise, 81; Author and Lecturer Warned of the Nazis,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 1983.

  59. 59 James Waterman Wise and Lee J. Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940), ix.

  60. 60 Other scholars have also argued for the importance of WWII in advancing ideas about Jewish-Christian “brotherhood.” See for example, Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Belknap Press, 2006); Thomas Bruscino, A Nation Forged in War (University of Tennessee Press, 2010); and Ronit Stahl, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017).

  61. 61 Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States (1959), 363.

  62. 62 Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 395.

  63. 63 Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 397.

  64. 64 Wise and Levinger, Mr. Smith, Meet Mr. Cohen, 398.

  65. 65 On the fight against antisemitism and the embrace of Judeo-Christian brotherhood in the post-war period, see for example, K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago, 2019); Rachel Gordan, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford University Press, 2024); and Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice (Columbia University Press, 1997).