Antisemitism in the United States


 * See also History of antisemitism in the United States

Jewish Americans have flourished since colonial times in what became the United States, which before the second world war had a general history of racism directed to non-christian, non-northwest European groups. Antisemitism in the United States has however lacked the extent and severity of its counterpart in Europe. While today half of the worlds Jews are in the United States, before the late 19th and early 20th century they were a much smaller minority. Moreover, its occurrence has been on a generally decreasing trend in the last century consistent with a general reduction of sanctioned racism in the United States, especially since World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.

As racism in general persists, so does antisemitism, although institutional anti-semitism, common before the 1960s, has essentially disappeared. In the United States, most Jewish community relations agencies draw a distinction between antisemitism which is measured in terms of attitudes and behaviors and the security and status of American Jews which is measured by specific incidents.

American attitudes towards Jews
Polls and studies over the past two decades point to a steady decrease in antisemitic attitudes, beliefs, and manifestations among the American public. A 1992 survey by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith showed that 20 percent of Americans—between 30 to 40 million adults—held antisemitic views, as against 29 percent in 1964. However, another survey by the same organization concerning antisemitic incidents shows that the curve has risen without interruption since 1986.

The number of Americans holding antisemitic views declined markedly six years later when another ADL study classified only 12 percent of the population—between 20 to 25 million adults—as "most anti-Semitic." Confirming the findings of previous surveys, both studies also found that African Americans were significantly more likely than whites to hold anti-Semitic views, with 34 percent of blacks classified as "most anti-Semitic," compared to 9 percent of whites in 1998.

The 2005 Survey of American Attitudes Towards Jews in America, a national poll of 1,600 American adults conducted in March 2005, found that 14% of Americans - or nearly 35 million adults - hold views about Jews that are "unquestionably anti-Semitic," compared to 17% in 2002, Previous ADL surveys over the last decade had indicated that anti-Semitism was in decline. In 1998, the number of Americans with hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs had dropped to 12% from 20 % in 1992.

"What concerns us is that many of the gains we had seen in building a more tolerant and accepting America seem not to have taken hold as firmly as we had hoped," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "While there are many factors at play, the findings suggest that anti-Semitic beliefs endure and resonate with a substantial segment of the population, nearly 35 million people."

The 2005 survey found "35 percent of foreign-born Hispanics"36 percent of African-Americans hold strong antisemitic beliefs, four times more than the 9 percent for whites".

The 2005 Anti-Defamation League survey includes data on Hispanic attitudes, with 29% being most antisemitic (vs. 9% for whites and 36% for blacks); being born in the United States helped alleviate this attitude: 35% of foreign-born Hispanics, but only 19% of those born in the US.

The survey findings come at a time of increased anti-Semitic activity in America. The 2004 ADL Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents reported that anti-Semitic incidents reached their highest level in nine years. A total of 1,821 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in 2004, an increase of 17 percent over the 1,557 incidents reported during 2003.

A 2009 study entitled "Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes", published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009, tested new theoretical model of anti-Semitism among Americans in the Greater New York area with 3 experiments. The research team's theoretical model proposed that mortality salience (reminding people that they will someday die) increases anti-Semitism and that anti-Semitism is often expressed as anti-Israel attitudes. The first experiment showed that mortality salience led to higher levels of anti-Semitism and lower levels of support for Israel. The study’s methodology was designed to tease out anti-Semitic attitudes that are concealed by polite people. The second experiment showed that mortality salience caused people to perceive Israel as very important, but did not cause them to perceive any other country this way. The third experiment showed that mortality salience led to a desire to punish Israel for human rights violations but not to a desire to punish Russia or India for identical human rights violations. According to the researchers, their results “suggest that Jews constitute a unique cultural threat to many people’s worldviews, that anti-Semitism causes hostility to Israel, and that hostility to Israel may feed back to increase anti-Semitism.” Furthermore, "those claiming that there is no connection between antisemitism and hostility toward Israel are wrong."

Antisemitic incidents
However, another survey by the Anti-Defamation League showed that the number of antisemitic incidents has risen continuously since 1986 with only one decline in 1992. One explanation for the seeming contradiction between the two sets of data is, on the one hand, an increase in the rate of general violence in the United States and the emergence of groups such as the skinheads, and, on the other hand, an intensification of anti-Jewish hostility among African Americans.

Escalating hate crimes targeting Jews and other minority groups prompted passage of the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990 and spurred 41 state legislatures, as of 1998, to enact a patchwork of laws providing for police training about bias crimes, stiffer jail terms for perpetrators, and mandatory hate-crimes data collection by law enforcement. From 1979 to 1989 the ADL recorded more than 9,617 anti-Semitic incidents, including 6,400 cases of vandalism, bombings and attempted bombings, arsons and attempted arsons, and cemetery desecrations. The tally peaked at 2,066 in 1994, but declined over the next three years, consistent with the downward trend in national crime statistics. According to 1996 Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, of 8,759 hate crimes recorded that year, 13 percent were anti-Semitic.

Holocaust denial
One of the new forms of anti-Semitism is the denial of the facts of the Holocaust by revisionist historians and neo-Nazis. Holocaust denial serves as a powerful conspiracy theory uniting otherwise disparate fringe groups (e.g., Liberty Lobby, various Klan factions, neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nations and other Identity groups, racist skinheads, etc.).

Antisemitic organizations
There are a number of antisemitic organizations in the United States, some of them violent, that emphasize Aryan white supremacy. These include the Christian Identity Churches, the Aryan-White Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazis, and gangs of skinheads. Several fundamentalist churches, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, also preach antisemitic messages.

The 1998 ADL survey also found a correlation between anti-Semitism and sympathy for right-wing antigovernment groups. Although anti-Semitism has declined over the past 35 years, the activities of some anti-Semitic groups have intensified. From 1974 to 1979, membership in the Ku Klux Klan rose from a historic all-time low of 1,500 to 11,500, and throughout the 1980s various Klan factions allied themselves with more explicitly neo-Nazi groups like the Aryan Nations (see neo-Nazi movements).

The founding (1979) of the California-based Institute for Holocaust Review helped popularize the anti-Semitic notion that the Holocaust was a hoax. During the mid-1980s, groups like the Posse Comitatus (organization) espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric. From 1986 to 1991 the numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads grew tenfold, reaching approximately 3,500 distributed among more than 35 cities. And the mid-1990s saw the formation of paramilitary citizens' "militias" (see militia movement), many of which were accused of circulating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and preaching religious bigotry.

Organized hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi organizations remain unremitting sources of anti-Jewish hostility and significant factors in assessing the intensity of anti-Semitism in America today.

There are instances in which hate group members and associates engage in violence or vandalism to fulfill the aims of the hate groups themselves. Relative to the total number of incidents committed in America, such examples are rare. In addition, there is the potential for hate group propaganda-particularly the most vicious and incendiary examples-to inspire unaffiliated individuals to commit acts of terror in pursuit of their own aims. Such acts are also relatively rare. However, the propaganda produced by the myriad of American hate groups can potentially affect the impressionable young, the disaffected, and those looking for a scapegoat to explain away their problems. Thus, a culture of hate, shielded by First Amendment protections, exists on the fringes of American society.

African-American community
In spite of the strong Jewish participation in the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the Black power movement introduced considerable friction into African American-Jewish relations, especially when a native form of Islam attracted African Americans in search of an identity, while part of the Muslim world was at war with the Jewish state.

In a 1967 New York Times Magazine article entitled "Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White," the famous African-American author James Baldwin sought to explain the prevalence of black antisemitism. Recent data, however, suggest that the phenomenon is more complex and not necessarily that well understood. As with the broader public, the overall level of antisemitism among blacks has declined over the last three decades, but the decline has been slower among blacks than among whites. And, although the 1998 ADL survey found a strong correlation between education level and antisemitism among African Americans, blacks at all education levels were still more likely than whites to accept anti-Jewish stereotypes. These have figured prominently in the rhetoric of some black leaders, most notably the influential Louis Farrakhan.

According to Anti-Defamation League surveys begun in 1964, African Americans are significantly more likely than white Americans to hold antisemitic beliefs, although there is a strong correlation between education level and the rejection of antisemitic stereotypes for all races. However, black Americans of all education levels are nevertheless significantly more likely than whites of the same education level to be antisemitic. In the 1998 survey, blacks (34%) were nearly four times as likely as whites (9%) to fall into the most antisemitic category (those agreeing with at least 6 of 11 statements that were potentially or clearly antisemitic). Among blacks with no college education, 43% fell into the most antisemitic group (vs. 18% for the general population), which fell to 27% among blacks with some college education, and 18% among blacks with a four-year college degree (vs. 5% for the general population).

Nation of Islam
A number of Jewish organizations, Christian organizations, Muslim organizations, and academics consider the Nation of Islam to be antisemitic. Specifically, they claim that the Nation Of Islam has engaged in revisionist and antisemitic interpretations of the Holocaust and exaggerates the role of Jews in the African slave trade. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) alleges that NOI Health Minister, Abdul Alim Muhammad, has accused Jewish doctors of injecting Blacks with the AIDS virus, an allegation that Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad has denied.

The Nation of Islam has repeatedly denied charges of antisemitism, and NOI leader Minister Louis Farrakhan has stated, "The ADL... uses the term 'anti-Semitism' to stifle all criticism of Zionism and the Zionist policies of the State of Israel and also to stifle all legitimate criticism of the errant behavior of some Jewish people toward the non-Jewish population of the earth."

Avowed Racists
One politician who has promoted himself by pandering to the antisemitic feelings of the public is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member who was elected to the Louisiana state legislature in 1989 and, in 1992, offered his candidacy for the governorship of Louisiana and the Presidency of the United States. In the gubernatorial elections, Duke obtained a majority of the white vote in Louisiana but a minority of the total vote. In the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, he performed poorly and quickly dropped out of the race.

Although his prejudices may be more explicit than most, Duke is not the only American politician to display antisemitic sentiments. Former President Richard Nixon believed that "[m]ost Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.” Nixon told his advisor Charles Colson that "[t]he Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.” He also suggested that Jews as a group were unwilling to serve in the military and more likely to desert: “I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.” "He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews."

College campuses
On April 3, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced its finding that incidents of antisemitism are a "serious problem" on college campuses throughout the United States. The Commission recommended that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights protect college students from antisemitism through vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further recommended that Congress clarify that Title VI applies to discrimination against Jewish students. According to Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, political activity focused on the Middle East on American college campuses "is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state."

New antisemitism
In recent years some scholars have advanced the concept of New antisemitism, coming simultaneously from the Far Left, the far right, and radical Islam, which tends to focus on opposition to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel, and argue that the language of Anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are used to attack the Jews more broadly. In this view, the proponents of the new concept believe that criticisms of Israel and Zionism are often disproportionate in degree and unique in kind, and attribute this to antisemitism.

In the context of the "Global War on Terrorism" there have been statements by both the Democrat Ernest Hollings and the Republican Pat Buchanan that suggest that the George W. Bush administration went to war in order to win Jewish supporters. Some note these statements echo Lindberg’s 1941 claim before the US entered World War II that a Jewish minority was pushing America into a war against its interests. During 2004, a number of prominent public figures accused Jewish members of the Bush administration of tricking America into war against Saddam Hussein to help Israel. U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina) claimed that the US action against Saddam was undertaken 'to secure Israel.' Television talk show host Pat Buchanan said a 'cabal' had managed 'to snare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests.'" Hollings wrote an editorial in the May 6, 2004 Charleston Post and Courier, where he argued that Bush invaded Iraq possibly because "spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats."

Hate crimes
Escalating hate crimes targeting Jews and other minority groups prompted passage of the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act in 1990 and spurred 41 state legislatures, as of 1998, to enact a patchwork of laws providing for police training about bias crimes, stiffer jail terms for perpetrators, and mandatory hate-crimes data collection by law enforcement. From 1979 to 1989 the ADL recorded more than 9,617 anti-Semitic incidents, including 6,400 cases of vandalism, bombings and attempted bombings, arsons and attempted arsons, and cemetery desecrations. The tally peaked at 2,066 in 1994, but declined over the next three years, consistent with the downward trend in national crime statistics. According to 1996 Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, of 8,759 hate crimes recorded that year, 13 percent were antisemitic.

Criticism of Anti-Semitic Findings in the United States
Noted scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein question the extent of new antisemitism in the United States. Chomsky has stated that the Anti-Defamation League casts any question of pro-Israeli policy as antisemitism ; Finkelstein stated supposed "new antisemitism" is a preposterous concept advanced by the ADL to combat critics of Israeli policy.