Michael Hoberman, Imagining Early American Jews, Oxford University Press, 2025.
Pamela S. Nadell, Antisemitism, An American Tradition. W. W. Norton, 2025.
In the Routledge History of Antisemitism (2023), Jonathan Sarna divides the historiography of American antisemitism into two opposing camps: the “minimalist interpretation,” which tends to downplay its prevalence and assert American Jewish exceptionalism, and the “maximalist interpretation,” which finds pervasive prejudice and emphasizes similarities with European forms of Jew-hatred. The two books reviewed in this essay shed much new light on the American Jewish experience, but they also appear to perpetuate this binary.
In Imagining Early American Jews, Michael Hoberman studies popular representations of the Jewish experience in colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum America. Analyzing diverse practices such as the curation of physical sites, historical fiction in novels and films, and amateur genealogy, Hoberman demonstrates that the way we remember the past is invariably shaped by the present moment. These forms of remembrance often illuminate more about their own context than the history itself.
Hoberman highlights profound tensions in popular portrayals of early American Jews. Firstly, he argues, “claims of antiquity” by three surviving early American synagogues—Shearith Israel in New York City, Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—“embrace a notion of Americanness that runs counter to the republican ideal, which holds that lineage is, or ought to be, irrelevant to belonging” (17–18). This same critique extends to the living descendants of Revolutionary-era Jews, whose ancestry serves to legitimize contemporary American Jewry (181). Secondly, suggests Hoberman, by purportedly achieving whiteness through cultural integration and economic prosperity, American Jews consequently grappled with the shame of inheriting white America’s original sins of slavery and colonialism.
Historians who delight in the role of professional myth-buster will appreciate Hoberman’s opening chapter, which critiques the way early American synagogues commemorate their connections to pivotal historical moments. None of the fabled twenty-three who sailed on “the Jewish Mayflower” to New Amsterdam in 1654 remained in the city longer than a year (23–24). Jews did not use a trapdoor in the Touro Synagogue to aid the escape of runaway slaves via the Underground Railroad (40–41). And George Washington did not interrupt High Holiday services at Mikveh Israel to fundraise from Haym Salomon for the Revolution (43). Despite their obviously apocryphal nature, such stories richly illustrate the American Jewish anxiety of belonging.
According to Hoberman, the Holocaust marked a key turning point in perceptions of American Jewry, a transformation that anchors his analysis of fictive encounters between Jews and Native Americans. Until the mid-twentieth century, “When global anti-Semitism still posed the most obvious threat to Jewish continuity and survival… American Jews understood themselves to be proud adjuncts and beneficiaries, if not direct agents of, settler colonialism” (58–59). By contrast, in the postwar period, “a growing awareness of how Jews, as racial whites, have benefited from the colonization of the New World has adjusted the terms of the relationship between Jews and America” (63).
Similar racial tensions highlight a profound irony in the curation of two antebellum Southern house museums formerly inhabited by Jews: the Mordecai House in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Moses Myers House in Norfolk, Virginia. “A lack of overtly Jewish markers drives both house museums’ attention to the radically assimilative path that their ostensibly Jewish owners followed” (94). Tragically, achieving American identity came at the cost of their Jewish identity: “The price of belonging was near-complete assimilation to the white Protestant Southern way of life” (96). By contrast, Hoberman notes, the enslaved people who labored at these houses did not have the ability to achieve this cultural integration.
Whereas Hoberman emphasizes how Jews have imagined and integrated themselves into the American story, Pamela Nadell’s Antisemitism, An American Tradition argues that anti-Jewish prejudice was not merely a relic of the Old World but rather deeply rooted in American culture from the beginning. The attempt by New Netherland’s governor to expel the Jews who arrived in 1654 “launched the American tradition of antisemitism” (1).
Nadell’s narrative arguably overstates the case, at least in the early periods. As she notes regarding early American Jews, “Only occasionally, possibly rarely, perhaps, for some, never, did they bump up against antisemitism” (19). The first purported “blood libel…on American soil” was only reported in a Jewish newspaper in Leipzig in 1850, and it may have been “pure fiction” (35). She notes that Alexander Hamilton once “smeared an opponent as ‘Shylock the Jew’” (36) but fails to mention that Hamilton also ardently fought against antisemitism as a lawyer representing Jewish clients.
Nadell stands on firmer, albeit familiar ground in her account of the period between the American Civil War and the Holocaust. On five different occasions, she cites a phrase from Leonard Dinnerstein’s seminal work Anti-Semitism in America (1995), which describes the United States during the period from 1865–1900 as a “full-fledged antisemitic society” (45, 47, 49, 72, 80). Nadell is unquestionably correct that in the period from 1900–1945, “antisemitism was institutionalized across broad swaths of American society” (89). Even so, she concedes, “Unlike in Europe, in America violence was not state-sponsored nor did it come in cascading waves like the pogroms” (124). Indeed, the one instance of an American “pogrom” that Nadell identifies comes in quotation marks and did not result in a single death (126).
The conventional narrative of American Jewry characterizes the postwar period as a “golden age” (179). Dinnerstein described the decades after the Holocaust as an ebbing tide of antisemitism, an assumption that similarly undergirds Hoberman’s account. Nevertheless, Nadell insists that after 1945, “antisemitism continued without pause” (180). Ironically, this period also marked Jews’ putative transformation into racial whiteness, exemplified by James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” (217). Today, as David Baddiel argues in Jews Don’t Count (2021), the refusal among many left-wing progressives to acknowledge Jews as an ethnic minority has blinded them to antisemitism.
In her final chapter, which brings the story to the present, Nadell identifies three turning points in the new millennium: firstly, in 2001, the Durban Conference and 9/11 “unleashed an international torrent of the new antisemitism” (237); secondly, the 2016 presidential election season sparked a significant increase in domestic antisemitic incidents (247); and finally, in the post-10/7 eruption of antisemitism, “the majority demonstrating for Palestine no longer blur the line between Israel and Jews, between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They have erased it” (254). Nadell concludes her book with a grim prognostication: “Antisemitism remains now and for the foreseeable future an American tradition” (257).
By emphasizing the severity of antisemitism, especially on college campuses, Nadell departs from her own testimony in 2017 to the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, where she denied the existence of pervasive hostility toward Jews and criticized the proposed legislation known as the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act. In fairness, Dinnerstein himself had concluded in Antisemitism in North America: New World, Old Hate (2016) that antisemitism is a minor issue in the contemporary United States. Sadly, as the aftermath of 10/7 revealed, these diagnoses missed the mark.
On the other hand, even amid rising antisemitism, American Jews still enjoy more safety, security, and liberty than many other Diaspora Jews. The systemic inequities toward Jews in the early twentieth century no longer exist—a testament to Jewish resilience. As Deborah Lipstadt argues in Antisemitism: Here and Now (2018), we must not only document instances of antisemitism but also the responses and reactions. The ability to transcend prejudice through institution-building, community, and philanthropy is a hallmark of the American Jewish experience.
In his essay cited in the beginning of this review, Sarna proposes a third path forward beyond the minimalist-maximalist binary: a “centrist approach” that neither denies the existence of American antisemitism nor unduly exaggerates it. Instead of highlighting victimhood, perhaps the next chapter of American Jewish historiography should tell the story of our agency in the face of an enduring hatred.
Yisroel Benporat, PhD serves as the Senior Associate for Faculty Engagement in New York at the Academic Engagement Network.