The end of the anomalous period of Jew-hatred in the interwar years came about for several reasons.

1. The draft included everyone from all socio-economic groups and the military ceased its earlier practice of segregating people into units by state. This had the positive effect of creating unity among all Americans rather than as New Yorkers or Texans. People from diverse backgrounds got to meet each other on an equal footing and found their similarities as Americans outweighed their regional, religious or ethnic differences.

2. The GI Bill sent people to school all across the country. Iowa State had a large number of Jewish students and Juilliard got a large number of Midwestern Christians. The effect of integrating people of diverse backgrounds but similar interests and talents worked to end the malodorous atmosphere of the interwar years.

3. As the old segregationist Senator from Mississippi, James Eastland, said,'Hitler took the good name away from White Supremacy.'

4. The interwar period was unusual in that America has generally been welcoming to Jews and other immigrants. There has always been some nativism and some envy but immigrants from weird groups always found success on the frontier like Michael Goldwater in Prescott, Arizona, or the four Irishmen who found the Comstock Lode, or the Italian communities along the Union Pacific railway in Wyoming.

Bart: There was no "anomalous period of Jew-hatred in the interwar years".

David,

Let me refer you to Howard Sachar's 'History of the Jews in America' and to 'Anti-Semitism in American History' a series of essays which includes an excellent summary of how things were much worse for Jews in the interwar years than they had been either before or after, in a whole raft of areas like university admission or housing restrictions or employment discrimination.

I refute it thus.

Your reference is to an exceptional event which was quickly righted by Lincoln, upon his notice of it from his longtime friend Abraham Jonas, in a rather disdainful communication with Grant. You would do well to read Bertram Korn's American Jewry and the Civil War, which goes into great detail about the treatment of Jews both North and South, their role in society etc.

Each word is its own link.

David,

I started plumbing through your links and I guess it's whether you see the glass as half full or half empty.

We have a presence in this nation that dates to at least the 17th century, and archaeology in New Mexico indicates it may even be earlier. Have there been episodes of Jew-hatred? Of course. Three idiot kids drove a bulldozer through a wall of a synagogue in the town next to where I lived when I went to high school. Does that make Monmouth County NJ a hotbed of anti-semitism? Of course not.

Your reference to the Judge Hilton escapade shows how rare real anti-semitism was in that period. If you read Stephen Birmingham's Our Crowd, you'll get a better feel for how weird the Judge's actions were.

I prefer to think of people like David Levy Yulee who was elected a Senator from Florida in the 1840s, or the fact that one out of the 4 members of the first graduating class of West Point was Jewish, or that the Continental Navy was essentially founded by Commodore Uriah Levy. The civic prominence of Jews on the American frontier is also self-evident, including the first non-Mormon mayor of Salt Lake City, Simon Bamberger, in the 1890s, the first governor of Idaho, Moses Alexander and countless other lesser notables. My goodness, man, the Mayor who hired Wyatt Earp as Marshal in Tombstone was Jewish.

Our story here is a positive one, like it is in Australia and New Zealand, not one of strife as in Europe, Argentina or Canada. The non-Jewish population has for the most part understood our struggles and welcomed us as fellow Americans and friends. Have there been episodes when things were rotten? Of course. But except for the period between the two wars, anti-semitism was anecdotal or occasional, not a serious problem. The confluence of the economic distress of the Great Depression, fears of Communism, the rise of Hitler, and the pseudo-science of people like Madison Grant and Ulrich Philips created a hostile environment for us.

Now you have started along the path to wisdom, Grasshopper. If you go on to consider what the Jewish experience in the United States tells us about foolishness of racial and religious prejudice and the foolishness of insisting on seeing oneself as a perpetual victim, you will be well on the road to enlightenment.

The reason I disagree with your description of an "anomalous period of Jew-hatred in the interwar years" is the one you voice in your last post. Being kept out of Harvard and Yale, or the local country club, is not oppression, nor does it say anything about the nation or the government. The nation is not defined by its ugliest inhabitants. The point about Lindbergh and Father Coughlin is that they were rejected.

For what it's worth, my father grew up in depression era Holyoke, Mass, a poor, working class city that was predominently Irish Catholic. He had a blast, had many life-long Irish Catholic friends from childhood (more than he had Jewish friends, actually) and went on to attend both Yale and Harvard. His father, on the other hand, grew up in a small village in the Pale, left home alone at 12, never wanted to go back and lost contact with his entire family who didn't leave in the late '30s. They were never heard from again. That is interwar Jew hatred, though it wasn't anomolous.

I view history as a process, not as static. What was occuring in the interwar years was anomalous because things were getting worse. There were no quotas against Jews in American universities before WWI, for example. In all other times in US history, our situation improved. Robert E Lee even provided for Jewish Confederates to attend High Holy Day services. At no time did I intend to compare it with even the relatively mild Jew-hatred of Horthy's interwar Hungary, with its education and occupation restrictions.

My dad's family is from Alsace, and my mother's is from what is now Belarus. A visit to the Natzwiller-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace will show a large number of people with my father's last name and my paternal grandmother's maiden name ending up extra crispy. We also have a family photo album which has images of many victims of the Shoah. The Alsatian town we were from, Barr(pop.5500), had 200 Jews in 1940. Today, it has five, all of whom are my relatives and one of whom is the mayor. Through YIVO, we have been able to contact some of my mother's relatives who survived and made it to Israel, but to the best of our knowledge nobody is left in Mogilev.

My father's experience is different. He grew up in a section of Brooklyn(Bensonhurst) which was evenly divided between Italians and Jews, where relations were more than amicable. However, it was well-known that the Irish behaved despicably in the City, and in fact when my uncle was getting ready to attend high school, my grandparents gave a false address so he wouldn't have to go to school with the Irish(New Utrecht High School), but would instead be in a more Jewish/Italian environment(James Madison HS). When my dad was old enough to go to high school, he went to a new school(Lafayette HS) that had been built in their area which was entirely Jewish and Italian.

So, in fact, your father's experience was the same, he just feared the unknown Irish.

Actually they weren't so unknown. When there was a particularly vomitous sermon at the Catholic Church, the Italians would have the decency to warn the Jews that the Irish would be looking for Jews to assault. For most Italians, those sentiments and behavior were loopy and irrational. The father of my best friend from college has a similar story about his Bronx neighborhood.

My mother's experience in Protestant Wisconsin is quite different, and she never saw noteworthy anti-semitism till she came to NYC to study at Juilliard. The net result of her experience is that most of her family are now various kinds of Protestant.

>When there was a particularly vomitous sermon
>at the Catholic Church, the Italians would have
>the decency to warn the Jews that the Irish
>would be looking for Jews to assault. For most
>Italians, those sentiments and behavior were
>loopy and irrational.

Check out Italian behavior towards their Jews in World War Two sometime. When the other partner of the Axis alliance squeezed Italy to crack down on their Jews, a lot of Italian political/military types paid lip service to their German allies, claiming they were "dealing with the Jewish problem" while not progressing much beyond simple civilian internment. (And when Italy switched sides after Mussolini's death, most Italian "concentration camps" released their internees before the Germans could take over and turn them into real KZs.)

Roth belongs to a species and generation that wants to mythologize and live in a world that has long since ceased to exist, if it ever did.

I do not know if it did. I once got into a fight with a rabbi at the local JCC who insisted that the in the 1950's Jews faced terrible discrimination. I knew that was not true here in Central Ohio, and I told him so, but he was so invested in his mythology that he would not listen to me. I stompted out. They fired him.

The truth is that Central Ohio is and was a fairly benign enviroment. My family has been here since the late 19th century, my father grew up here and went to the same high school that I did and to which my kids went. The community we live in very diverse and always has been.

My father never told me tales of anti-Semitism in Ohio. He said he encountered some unkind remarks in the Army in the 1940s from ethnic kids from Chicago.

My mother was born in Ukraine after Soviet revolution. She never experienced pogroms, but we grew-up as liberal anti-Communists. We never thought the Russians were any good.

My point is that everyone has their own experiences. I did not grow up on the east coast or in the 1940s. Maybe I would be different if I had, but if I had wings . . .

"I view history as a process, not as static."

Over a long period of time, a lot of people have done a lot of things. History is the narrative we tell ourselves to make sense of it. Seeing a process in history is a lot like seeing a movie of a ball being tossed across the room. What you are actually seeing is a series of discrete pictures of a ball in the air, in slightly different positions. Historical process, like the arc of the ball, is an illusion.

Ken,

That is absolutely true. The only round-ups of Jews came after Mussolini was toppled and installed by the Nazis as the figurehead ruler of the 'Republic of Salo.'

One rather funny story. The Italians were given most of Provence and Savoie to occupy. When Darquier de Pellepoix, the head of the Vichy government's agency for sending Jews to the concentration camps came to the Italian prefect's office in Nice to complain that the Italian military was hindering his henchmen in their efforts to round up Jews, the Italian prefect, a general, had him thrown bodily into the street.

Robert,

I would imagine that after Shelley v Kraemer in 1948, that significant religious discrimination pretty much ended across America.

As a factual matter, in NJ, there were restrictive covenants which operated to bar Jews from many areas prior to that time. Only 3 out of 66 communities in Bergen County allowed us, and only 2 of the 24 communities in Morris County did. Along the Jersey Shore, Asbury Park and Bradley Beach permitted us but Avon, Ocean Grove, Spring Lake, Sea Girt, Manasquan did not.