Concise History of American Antisemitism

Robert Michael is professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and Visiting Professor at Ringling School of Art and Design and Florida Gulf Coast University. His other books include: Dictionary of Anti-Semitism, An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, and The Holocaust: A Chronology and Documentary. He is working on a poetry collection and a novel.

• Chapter 1 ForewordChapter 2 PrefaceChapter 3 Introduction: "The United States Is Above All Things a Christian Nation"Chapter 4 "We Never Do Evil So Completely and Cheerfully as When We Do It Out of Religious Conviction:" European Antisemitism before the Founding of AmericaChapter 5 "The Preservation of Christianity Is One of the Great and Leading Ends of Government:" The Jews in the American Colonies and Early State HistoryChapter 6 "Chock Full of Lies, Wickedness, and Blasphemy:" American Attitudes toward Jews before the Civil WarChapter 7 "A People Whose Feet Run to Evil:" American Antisemitism from the Civil War to the Turn of the CenturyChapter 8 "The Jews Reap More and More Dislike as They Better Themselves:" American Responses to Jews from World War One to the Start of World War TwoChapter 9 "The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews:" America, the Jews, and the Holocaust from 1938 to 1945Chapter 10 "Dangerous People:" A New Beginning? America and the Jews since 1945Chapter 11 Appendix: Postwar Film

This is an excellent, very important, revisionist study of the long history of American antisemitism. . . In the contemporary whiteness school of historical scholarship, antisemitism almost disappears from view. To these scholars, there is only one bigotry in American history, white racism against blacks or people of color. By contrast, Robert Michael convincingly shows that antisemitism-not just white racism-was at the core of the American historical experience. A measure of the success of the manuscript is that by the time the reader arrives at the Holocaust, he/she is not at all surprised by America's failure to do anything to aid the European Jews during the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.