Historians usually emphasize the antisemitism of Populist farmers and demagogues. That reflects historians’ left-wing bias and the post-Holocaust view characterizing Jew-hatred as a right-wing pathology. But from the 1880s through the 1920s – while restricting big business, boosting workers, improving factory conditions, rationalizing American government, and seeking order – urban reformers also championed “Americanization.” These upper-class crusaders feared that immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews, were undermining America’s way of life.
John R. Commons, who founded the American Economic Association, warned in 1907 about “the immigration of races and classes incompetent to share in our democratic opportunities.” Progressives like Commons considered Jews religiously misguided and a problematic “race.”
Proving that antisemitism is the longest and most plastic hatred – moldable, adaptable, and frequently toxic – they considered Jews too radical and too capitalist, too Marxist and too Rothschild. Madison Grant’s 1916 blockbuster, The Passing of the Great Race, called the Jews a “race of the urban type, with high intellectual and legal ability,” yet threatening the Nordic stock.
Then like now, waves of immigration triggered a nativist backlash. From 1871 to 1924, 28 million immigrants arrived, making one of every seven Americans foreign-born. Alarmed, the Immigration Restriction League joined other Brahmin activists in demanding entry quotas favoring immigrants from Protestant countries like England and Germany over predominantly-Catholic countries like Italy, and the main source of Jews, Russia and Poland.
The 1924 Immigration Act shut America’s doors just years before Hitler’s rise. Tragically, the restrictive, quota-laden law blocked a life-saving escape route for millions of European Jews.
The Holocaust shocked the Jew-hatred out of most progressives. Even before most Americans read about the Nazi mass murders, leading progressives like 1940 Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, and the liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, supported suspending immigration quotas to save Jewish lives. After 1945, many lobbied the new president, Harry Truman, to support what became the Jewish state of Israel.
Back then, scholars and activists deemed antisemitism a right-wing phenomenon. In 1950, the German-born social psychologist Theodor Adorno insisted in The Authoritarian Personality that “neither ethnocentrism nor antisemitism ever showed a tendency to go with leftist liberal views.” Such pronouncements ignored Soviet Communism’s Jew-hating dictatorship.
Fixing America’s legacy of discrimination
Enthusiastically pro-Israel, presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson regretted America’s legacy of discrimination. In 1965, Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, lifting ethnically-driven restrictions, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. He condemned the 1924 Act, bolstering the “twin barriers of prejudice and privilege,” as “un-American.”
Unfortunately, the post-1960s zeal for identity politics turned some progressives against American Jews. As Ronald Reagan and William Buckley marginalized antisemitic conservatives, illiberal liberals increasingly defined people solely based on their race, gender, privilege, and alleged role as oppressors. Those prisms undermined the traditional liberal legacy of equality and color blindness advanced by president Lyndon Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.
By 2020, demanding a “racial reckoning,” Black Lives Matter activists somehow linked George Floyd’s racist Minneapolis with Gaza, deciding both were “oppressed” by American and Israeli “oppressors.” They blocked Jews at the intersection, condemned for their “white privilege,” and for supporting Zionism’s “settler-colonialists” in Israel.
Without this ideological derailment, New York wouldn’t have elected progressive Ugandan immigrant Zohran Mamdani, whose anti-Zionism seems antisemitic. Claiming “that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” as he did, is Jew-hatred. Blaming an incident of police brutality reflecting America’s racist past on Israeli soldiers 6,000 miles away falls into the “blame Jews for any random evil” trap.
Still, there’s good news embedded in this tale of regressive progressives betraying liberal expansiveness. If their predecessors could grow out of their antisemitic, anti-immigrant positions, they and their right-wing counterparts can, too. Hopefully, returning to decency won’t require a Holocaust-sized reset.
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