The Long Shadow

Antisemitism in America and Europe:

Theology, Discrimination, Suppression, and Resurgence

From the Teaching of Contempt to the Present Day

David Marshak

 

Preface: Why This History Matters Now

This document assembles in one place the research that underlies one of the central arguments about why the Princeton School for the Study of Humanity is necessary. The argument is this: the antisemitism that shaped European and American civilization for two millennia did not disappear. It went underground. When the social structures that suppressed it weakened — through the internet, through the normalization of extremist rhetoric, through the displacement of Jew-hatred from right to left as well — what re-emerged was recognizably the same set of ideas that had been driven underground, wearing new clothes.

Understanding that continuity requires understanding the full arc: the theological foundation that made antisemitism a structural feature of Christian civilization; the specific forms it took in American life through the 1960s; the period of formal repudiation and genuine social progress; the persistence underground during that period; and the multiple vectors of resurgence that converged in our own time. This document traces that arc in detail.

A secondary argument, equally important, concerns the Protestant churches that drove the most recent progressive campaigns against Israel and the Jewish community. Those campaigns — conducted by institutions that had formally repudiated their centuries of anti-Jewish theology — reproduced in progressive form the essential structure of the theology they claimed to have renounced. And they produced no improvement whatsoever in Palestinian living conditions. Over the exact years of most intense church BDS activism, the Palestinian situation deteriorated on every measurable dimension. Understanding why requires understanding what these campaigns actually did and did not do.

 

 

PART ONE

The Theological Foundation

I. The Christian Roots of Antisemitism

A. The Charge of Deicide — The Original Permission Structure

The charge of deicide — that the Jewish people collectively killed Jesus Christ, and that this guilt is inherited by all Jews in all generations — is the theological invention that made antisemitism a permanent structural feature of Christian civilization for sixteen centuries. It was not a marginal teaching. It was embedded in the central liturgy of the Church, preached from every pulpit, depicted in every passion play, and reproduced in every generation’s religious education.

The charge emerged from the earliest centuries of the Common Era. Justin Martyr in the second century and Melito of Sardis were among the first to articulate it systematically. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople and one of the most venerated Fathers of the Church, made it the cornerstone of his theology. Chrysostom’s Adversus Judaeos homilies, preached in Antioch in the late fourth century, described the synagogue as a haunt of demons, Jews as worse than pigs, and their souls as fit to be slaughtered. He was the first to use the term ‘deicide’ and to apply it to the Jewish people collectively.

The deicide charge functioned as what one scholar has called ‘a religious permission structure.’ It sanctified contempt and legitimized exclusion. It assigned collective and inherited guilt to an entire people — guilt that could not be expiated, guilt that attached to Jewish identity itself as a moral offense. Because it made Jewishness intrinsically criminal, it justified discrimination without requiring specific evidence of individual wrongdoing. Once a society framed guilt as collective and permanent, hostility no longer required evidence. It appeared morally justified.

This theological framework justified centuries of persecution: forced conversions across medieval Europe, the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, France in 1306, Spain in 1492, and Portugal in 1497; the Crusades’ massacres of Jewish communities along the Rhine; the blood libel accusations that produced hundreds of judicial murders; the torture of the Inquisition; the ghettos in which Jews were confined in virtually every major European city. All of it emerged from the same theological source: the conviction that Jews were cosmic criminals, enemies of God himself, whose continued existence outside the Church was a form of obstinate rejection of salvation.

B. Supersessionism — The Displacement Theology

Closely related to the deicide charge was supersessionism — the theological position that the Church had replaced Israel as God’s chosen people, that the covenant between God and the Jewish people had been voided by the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, and that Judaism was therefore a spiritually dead predecessor faith, preserved only as a living monument to error and obstinacy.

Under supersessionist theology, Jewish suffering carried theological meaning. The destruction of the Temple, the dispersion of the Jewish people, their statelessness and persecution — all of this was understood as divine punishment for the rejection of the Messiah. Jewish suffering was not a moral problem requiring a Christian response. It was evidence of divine judgment, a confirmation of Christian truth. This is why most European Christians could observe Jewish persecution with equanimity, and sometimes with approval. They had been taught that the suffering was deserved.

Supersessionism made a second move as well, one with profound political implications: it appropriated Jewish scripture while rejecting Jewish interpretation. The Hebrew Bible became the ‘Old Testament,’ a text whose meaning was accessible only through Christian reading, and whose authors — Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, the Psalmists — were retroactively claimed as proto-Christians. Judaism as actually practiced was dismissed as a corruption of the original tradition. The Jews’ claim to be the authentic inheritors of their own scripture was treated as a form of blindness or bad faith.

C. From Religious to Racial Antisemitism — The Nineteenth-Century Transformation

The critical transformation of the nineteenth century was the shift from religious to racial antisemitism. This shift was enormously consequential because it made the ‘Jewish problem’ insoluble by any individual Jewish person’s choices. Before the racial turn, a Jew who converted to Christianity could escape the category of ‘Jew.’ After the racial turn, conversion was irrelevant. Jewish blood, understood as a biological category, was indelible. This is what made genocide not merely possible but, within the internal logic of racial antisemitism, necessary.

Racial antisemitism drew on the pseudoscientific theories of the nineteenth century: the idea of distinct human races with inherent and heritable characteristics, the application of Darwinian concepts of competition and survival to human societies, the identification of Jews as a biologically distinct and dangerous race. Writers like Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term ‘Antisemitismus’ in 1879, and ideologues like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg in the twentieth century constructed elaborate pseudo-scientific frameworks for the racial hatred that medieval theology had already implanted.

The racial framework made antisemitism more dangerous in another way: it detached it from Christianity. An atheist or a secular nationalist could be antisemitic without any reference to the deicide charge. Jew-hatred no longer required a theological justification. It could present itself as science, as cultural criticism, as political economy, as racial hygiene. This meant that when the twentieth century’s catastrophe arrived, it could draw on centuries of religiously formed popular contempt while presenting itself as secular and modern.

D. Martin Luther’s Specific Legacy

Protestant Christianity inherited and in some respects amplified medieval Catholic anti-Judaism. Martin Luther’s early writings on the Jews expressed optimism that, freed from Catholic corruption, they would recognize the true Gospel and convert. When this did not happen, Luther’s reaction was violent. His 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies is one of the most virulently antisemitic documents in the history of Christian writing. Luther called for the burning of synagogues and Jewish homes, the confiscation of Jewish books, the prohibition of Jewish worship, the forced labor of Jews, and ultimately their expulsion.

Luther’s writings did not create German antisemitism, but they gave it theological authority and specific programmatic direction. When Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, was presented with a first edition of On the Jews and Their Lies as a birthday gift by the city of Nuremberg in 1937, he described it as ‘the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.’ On December 17, 1941, seven Lutheran regional confederations issued a statement agreeing with the Nazi policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow star, writing that ‘Luther had strongly suggested such preventive measures against the Jews.’ In 1933, the German Christian Faith Movement drew directly on Luther’s authority as it merged the Lutheran Church with Nazi ideology, barred Christians with ‘Jewish blood,’ banned the Hebrew Bible, and eventually replaced the cross with the swastika.

American Lutheranism carried this inheritance. The Missouri Synod ran Jewish mission programs well into the twentieth century, using Luther’s own writings as missionary tracts. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did not formally renounce Luther’s ‘anti-Judaic diatribes’ and reject ‘the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews’ until 1994 — nearly five centuries after they were written. The Lutheran Church in Germany issued its condemnation of Luther’s antisemitism only in 2016.

 

PART TWO

The American Experience Through 1970

II. American Antisemitism — The Peak Years

A. The 1930s and 1940s — Numbers and Organizations

Antisemitism in the United States reached its highest levels in the late 1930s and continued to rise through the 1940s. Gordon Allport’s review of polling data from the era estimated that five to ten percent of the American population was violently antisemitic, while another forty-five percent were more mildly bigoted. Researchers Flowerman and Jahoda calculated that in the 1940s approximately ten percent of the US mass public would give antisemitic responses even to questions that did not mention Jews directly, while thirty to sixty percent would give antisemitic responses to questions that did. A 1944 public opinion poll found that a quarter of Americans regarded Jews as ‘a menace.’

These attitudes were not merely private. They were organized and amplified. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein documented that more than one hundred new antisemitic organizations were founded in the United States between 1933 and 1941. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly radio program reached fifteen million listeners per week, spread Nazi propaganda, justified Nazi violence against Jews in Europe, and incited his American followers to vandalize Jewish businesses and attack Jews in the streets. William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America fashioned itself after the Nazi Stormtroopers. The German-American Bund openly celebrated Nazism, established Hitler Youth-style summer camps across the country, and declared its ambition to see fascism dawn in America.

The ideological content of American antisemitism in this period drew on a specific cluster of contradictory stereotypes that had been developing for decades. Jews were simultaneously portrayed as vulgar money-grubbing capitalists who controlled Wall Street and international finance, and as dangerous revolutionaries who funded Bolshevism and communist revolution. Roosevelt’s New Deal was derisively called the ‘Jew Deal.’ Jews were blamed for the Great Depression, for the threat of war in Europe, and for American involvement in international affairs. Henry Ford’s antisemitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent had been circulating since the early 1920s, and his tirades against the ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ were enthusiastically received by Hitler and reprinted in Nazi publications. Hitler later praised Ford by name in Mein Kampf.

B. The American Jewish Response — Paralysis by Fear

American Jewish leaders in the 1930s and 1940s faced a genuine dilemma, and their response to it shaped one of the most painful episodes in modern Jewish history. Antisemitism was not merely a social inconvenience — it was a tangible, material force that constrained what American Jews believed they could do, say, and demand. The fear was rational: visibility reliably produced cost, and the costs were real.

When Ben Hecht and Peter Bergson launched their campaign to publicize the Holocaust and demand rescue action, they were not simply opposed by indifferent bystanders. They were actively opposed by the leaders of the major American Jewish organizations, led by Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and virtually every other major Jewish institution. Wise’s strategy was to work quietly through his relationship with President Roosevelt, to avoid public agitation that might provoke antisemitic backlash, and to trust that Roosevelt would do what was necessary.

When Hecht assembled thirty of New York’s most prominent Jewish writers and gave an impassioned speech asking them to use their pens to attack Germany and publicize the Holocaust, most of the room turned on him. He was accused of idiocy and recklessness. At a time when American soldiers were dying in large numbers, he was told, drawing attention to Jewish suffering in Europe would only generate anger toward Jews in the United States. Edna Ferber asked Hecht on whose orders he was acting — Hitler’s or Goebbels’s?

When Hecht and Bergson assembled the heads of thirty-two national Jewish organizations to seek endorsement for the ‘We Will Never Die’ pageant at Madison Square Garden, the leaders refused. Hecht wrote: ‘Within five minutes a free-for-all, bitter as a Kentucky feud, was in full swing. The spectacle of Jews comically belaboring each other in the worst hour of their history sickened me.’ The American Jewish Congress then campaigned to ban the production in affiliate cities, sending letters to rebuke the Bergson Committee.

Rabbi Wise’s most consequential act was his response to the Riegner cable — the document received by the State Department and by Wise in September 1942 confirming that the Nazis were implementing a systematic plan to murder all European Jews. The State Department asked Wise not to release the information to the public until it could be confirmed. Wise complied, and waited more than two months while millions of people were being murdered. When he finally held a press conference in November 1942, the news was buried on page six of the Washington Post and page ten of the New York Times.

When Wise received word that Bergson had organized four hundred Orthodox rabbis to march on the White House on October 6, 1943 — the eve of Yom Kippur — demanding rescue action, he and Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s Jewish speechwriter, were so embarrassed by the prospect of ‘very Jewish-looking Jews’ marching through the streets of Washington that they persuaded Roosevelt to leave the White House by a back exit to avoid meeting the delegation. The rabbis arrived at the gates to find the President had slipped away. A columnist for a Jewish newspaper asked: ‘Would a similar delegation of five hundred Catholic priests have been thus treated?’

The historians David Wyman and Rafael Medoff, in their research on this period, have argued that Wise’s behavior was shaped by two interlocking forces: his consuming loyalty to Roosevelt, who consistently manipulated Wise by assuring him privately that rescue efforts were underway when they were not; and his terror of the antisemitic backlash that visible Jewish advocacy might trigger. Wise operated, as one scholar observed, ‘in the tradition of the medieval ghetto community leader who protects his people by virtue of his relationship with the goyische prince.’ The difference was that in this case the prince was presiding over the abandonment of six million people to annihilation.

C. Ben Hecht — What Courage Cost

Ben Hecht was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, a celebrity whose credits included Gone with the Wind, Notorious, Spellbound, and dozens of other films. He had no prior connection to Jewish causes — he joked that he ‘became a Jew’ only in 1939, when he met Peter Bergson. What he became, in the years that followed, was the most effective public advocate for Jewish rescue and Jewish statehood in American history.

Hecht’s New York Times advertisement of February 16, 1943 — ‘For Sale to Humanity: 70,000 Jews Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 Apiece’ — forced the Holocaust onto the front page of the newspaper. His pageant ‘We Will Never Die,’ staged at Madison Square Garden on March 9-10, 1943, and then in five other cities, was seen live by one hundred thousand people and by several million others on NBC broadcasts. The campaign helped generate enough political pressure that Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board in January 1944, which over its fifteen months of operation rescued an estimated two hundred thousand Jews.

The consequences for Hecht were severe. In 1947, he published a full-page advertisement addressed to the Irgun fighters of Palestine, telling them that every time they blew up a British arsenal, wrecked a British jail, or sent a railway train sky-high, ‘the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.’ The British government declared an official boycott of his films. He described it as ‘the best press notice I had ever received,’ but it made his income ‘a constantly precarious matter.’ He wrote screenplays under pseudonyms. The boycott lasted four years — and lasted longer for him than for anyone else who had battled the British. Long after Begin’s memoirs were published in London, Hecht was still being boycotted.

The deepest wound came from within. In June 1948, the Altalena — a ship named after Hecht’s pen name, carrying arms and survivors to the new State of Israel — was sunk by the Israeli government under Ben-Gurion’s orders. Ben-Gurion had declared that ‘Irgun is the enemy of the Jewish people.’ Hecht withdrew from Zionism. He died in 1964. Begin eulogized him: ‘Ben Hecht wielded his pen like a drawn sword.’ The ship named for him had been sunk by the state he helped create. For decades afterward, his name was omitted from official Zionist and American Jewish histories, because his politics were the wrong kind.

 

PART THREE

Institutional Discrimination in American Life

III. The Architecture of Exclusion

A. Universities — Quotas at the Pinnacle

In 1922, Harvard’s president Abbott Lawrence Lowell proposed a fifteen percent quota on the portion of Jewish students in each class. His stated rationale was that too many Jews at the university would cause more antisemitism — a formulation that made discrimination the cure for discrimination. Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and hundreds of other institutions followed suit. The quotas were rarely stated explicitly in official policy; they operated through admissions criteria specifically designed to reduce Jewish enrollment: character assessments that disadvantaged urban academically focused applicants, geographic diversity requirements that disadvantaged northeastern cities with large Jewish populations, and interviews conducted by alumni committees that functioned as social screening mechanisms.

The effect was substantial. Columbia, which had admitted Jewish students on merit in the early twentieth century and seen Jewish enrollment rise toward forty percent by 1920, reduced it to twenty percent through quota mechanisms within a few years. Yale maintained an informal target of approximately ten percent Jewish enrollment that lasted into the early 1960s. Stanford imposed its Jewish quota in 1949; between that year and 1952, enrollment from Beverly Hills High School dropped from sixty-seven to twenty, while Fairfax High — heavily Jewish — dropped from twenty to one. Stanford admitted this history in 2022 and described it as ‘appalling antisemitic behavior.’

The same exclusionary logic operated in medical schools. Some administrators claimed that Jews did not work well with their hands and could not participate in clinical work. Others proclaimed Jews were unethical, too interested in money, or too radical. Law schools imposed similar quotas. The effect was to channel the most academically talented Jewish students into a small number of schools that accepted them — and to close off entirely the careers of those who could not gain admission to the few available openings.

The Sputnik shock of 1957 did more to end university antisemitism than moral argument had. When Americans realized they were losing the space race, elite universities explicitly decided they needed to admit students for intellectual capacity rather than for social background, athletic ability, and the right family name. The postwar expansion of public universities provided a parallel track that absorbed Jewish students excluded from elite private institutions. By the early 1960s, the formal quota system had mostly collapsed — though informal preferences continued for years afterward, and Jewish faculty remained systematically underrepresented in tenure-track positions at elite institutions into the 1970s.

B. Law Firms, Banks, and Corporate America

The ‘white shoe’ law firm — a phrase whose origin most users of it have forgotten — was named for the shoes favored by WASP establishment lawyers at their restricted country clubs. The term was invented to describe firms at the pinnacle of the American legal establishment where Jews were explicitly not welcome. In 1950 there were no large Jewish law firms in the United States. The nation’s largest firms at the end of World War II were overwhelmingly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant institutions with what one legal scholar calls ‘a deeply rooted religious and cultural identity’ in which Catholics and Jews were simply not welcome.

The discrimination was so thoroughly enforced that it created the Jewish law firm as an institution. WASP firms had no competition for the top Jewish graduates of law schools; the Jewish firms absorbed them entirely. By the mid-1960s, six of the twenty largest firms in the country were Jewish. By 1980, four of the ten largest were Jewish. By the 1990s, the category had effectively disappeared — not because antisemitism ended, but because Jewish lawyers had been absorbed into formerly WASP firms once the barriers fell.

Commercial banking was similarly closed. No American banks would open branches in Israel — this reflected both the Arab boycott’s pressure and the culture of the American banking establishment. Corporate boardrooms in industries outside entertainment and finance remained thin on Jewish directors well into the 1960s. The insurance industry, the defense industry outside a few specialized firms, and much of corporate manufacturing all maintained informal ceilings on Jewish advancement. The exclusion moved from overt policy to unspoken preference — harder to document, harder to fight, but no less real in its effects.

C. Housing — Covenants and Zoning

Restrictive covenants — clauses written into property deeds that prohibited sale or rental to Jews, alongside Blacks, Asians, and other groups — were standard practice in American real estate from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. In Seattle, deeds from the Puget Mill Company specified that property could not be ‘occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or any Asiatic Race.’ Similar language appeared in residential developments across the country, in exclusive suburbs from Long Island to the Pacific Coast.

The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to stimulate the postwar housing boom, institutionalized residential discrimination through its underwriting guidelines. FHA appraisers rated neighborhoods in part on their racial and ethnic composition; properties in or near Jewish neighborhoods received lower ratings, making them ineligible for favorable loan terms. This was the mechanism by which the postwar suburban expansion — the greatest wealth-building opportunity in American history — was made available on differential terms to different groups.

The critical legal moment was Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that courts could not enforce racially restrictive covenants. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 went further. But legal prohibition did not immediately transform practice. ‘Gentleman’s agreements’ — informal understandings among sellers, buyers, and real estate agents — maintained the exclusions that covenants could no longer legally enforce. Florida did not void anti-Jewish restrictive covenants until 1959. Some exclusive suburbs were maintaining informal exclusion of Jews well into the 1960s.

The comparison with the Black American experience is essential and honest: the exclusions faced by Jews were real and consequential, but they operated within a system that was far more catastrophically exclusionary for Black Americans. Jews, by the postwar period, had somewhere to go — many suburbs excluded Black Americans entirely but admitted Jews in most areas. The difference in the postwar generation’s access to home ownership and the intergenerational wealth it generates has had permanent consequences for Black-Jewish income and wealth differentials that persist to the present day.

D. Hotels, Resorts, and Restaurants

The Seligman Affair of 1877 was the founding incident of social antisemitism in American public accommodation. Joseph Seligman — a leading Wall Street banker, founder of J. & W. Seligman & Co., adviser to Presidents Lincoln, Grant, and Hayes, a man who had turned down Grant’s offer of the Treasury Secretary post — arrived at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs to find himself excluded. The new owner, Judge Henry Hilton, had decreed that ‘no Israelites should be permitted to stop at this hotel.’ Seligman and his family had summered there for a decade alongside Andrew Carnegie and John Jacob Astor. The incident made the front page of the New York Times and created a national scandal.

The aftermath was not outrage but retrenchment. Hotels across New York and New Jersey adopted similar policies in the years that followed. The Manhattan Beach Corporation in Coney Island announced it would no longer accept Jewish guests; its president Austin Corbin explained that Jews ‘make themselves offensive’ and are ‘a detestable and vulgar people.’ Saratoga Springs did not welcome Jews in its hotels through the early 1950s — a full seventy-five years after the Seligman incident. One writer recalled that her uncle, traveling from Philadelphia to the Saratoga horse racing season in the 1950s, would stay in Montreal because it was easier than navigating the refusals in Saratoga.

Hotels and resorts across the country advertised their exclusionary policies through standard coded language: ‘Restricted Clientele,’ ‘Select Clientele,’ ‘Christian Clientele,’ ‘Positively No Jews,’ ‘No Hebrews,’ ‘Discriminating Clientele.’ A resort in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida used this language as late as 1968 — during the Vietnam War, when Jewish Americans were dying in Southeast Asia in proportional numbers. In Maine, a woman recalled seeing signs reading ‘No Dogs, No Niggers, No Jews Allowed’ on the coast as a teenager. Her mother would make hotel reservations as ‘Mrs. Howard Miller,’ then arrive and give her name as ‘Mrs. Howard Levine’ — and find that her reservation had mysteriously disappeared.

Jewish travelers had their own travel guide — The Jewish Vacation Guide: Hotels, Boarding and Rooming Houses Where Jews Are Welcome, published by the Federation of Jewish Farmers of America around 1915, a direct parallel to the Green Book that Black travelers relied on to navigate a hostile country. The Borscht Belt — the network of Jewish resorts in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and Berkshires — was not primarily about keeping kosher or speaking Yiddish. It was built to provide Jews with places to vacation in a country whose hospitality industry had systematically closed its doors to them. At its height, the Borscht Belt comprised as many as a thousand vacation establishments. It declined not because Jewish traditions changed but because the hotels and resorts of the surrounding country finally opened their doors.

E. Country Clubs and Social Exclusion

The American country club was the primary institution through which the WASP establishment maintained its social exclusivity and reproduced its networks of power, business, and marriage. Jews were excluded from the most prestigious clubs in virtually every city in America. This exclusion was not incidental — it was a feature, not a bug. The clubs served as the social infrastructure within which careers were advanced, deals were made, and the children of the right families were introduced to each other.

The exclusion operated at multiple levels. Jews were not admitted as members. In many clubs, Jews could not be brought as guests. In some communities, entire residential suburbs were organized around the social life of the club, meaning that Jewish families were excluded not merely from recreation but from the primary social networks through which professional advancement was organized. A partner in a white shoe law firm told a colleague at a cocktail party in the 1960s — said openly, without embarrassment — that he was happy to live in a suburb that did not allow Jews.

The pattern persisted. As late as the 1980s, a significant number of exclusive clubs in major American cities maintained informal Jewish exclusion that their official policies did not acknowledge. The issue entered public debate in 1990 when Shoal Creek Country Club in Alabama, host to a PGA Championship, acknowledged that it had no Black members — but the investigation that followed revealed that Jewish exclusion was similarly widespread across elite American clubs. The PGA and USGA’s response to this controversy accelerated the formal abandonment of exclusionary policies, but it did not eliminate the informal culture overnight.

 

PART FOUR

Protestant Churches and the Jews

IV. The Protestant Denominations — Theology and Practice

A. The Baseline Theology in American Protestant Life

Every major Protestant denomination in America inherited the same fundamental theological framework regarding Jews: that Judaism was a spiritually dead predecessor faith superseded by Christianity; that the Jewish covenant with God had been voided by the rejection of Jesus; that Jews bore collective and inherited responsibility for the death of the Son of God; that the continued existence of Jews as Jews was a form of theological obstinacy; and that the proper Christian response to Jews was missionary conversion.

This framework was not the teaching of fringe churches. It was the standard theology of the most prestigious and educated Protestant institutions in the country. It was taught in the Sunday schools of Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Baptist churches from childhood. It was embedded in Good Friday sermons delivered annually from thousands of pulpits. It appeared in passion plays performed across the country. It shaped the religious education of every American Christian child who attended Sunday school in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Good Friday liturgy was itself an annual exercise in communal formation of antisemitic attitudes. Until Pope John XXIII removed the phrase in 1958, the Catholic Good Friday liturgy included a prayer for ‘the perfidious Jews.’ Protestant equivalents varied by denomination but consistently framed the crucifixion narrative in ways that assigned collective Jewish responsibility and depicted Jewish religious leaders as villains. Year after year, in churches across the country, Christians were reminded that the Jews had killed their God — and that this was not a matter of history but of ongoing theological reality, since Jews continued to refuse the truth that their own martyrdom had revealed.

B. Silence During the Holocaust

In 1933, most European and American Christian leaders took a ‘wait and see’ attitude toward Nazism. Throughout the Christian world — both Protestant and Catholic — there was little condemnation of the most striking and ominous element of Nazi ideology: its virulent antisemitism and its stated intention to remove Jews from all aspects of German society. Indeed, many Christian leaders before and throughout the Nazi era cited Christian teachings as a justification for anti-Jewish rhetoric and policies.

The American Protestant response to the Holocaust was, with few individual exceptions, silence. The Federal Council of Churches — the predecessor to the National Council of Churches — issued statements of concern, but these were not accompanied by sustained advocacy, public protest, or pressure on the Roosevelt administration to rescue European Jews. Many Protestant pastors and theologians, shaped by the same theology that had produced centuries of persecution, viewed Jewish suffering as not entirely inconsistent with what they had been taught to expect.

In Germany, the mainstream Protestant churches — not only the ‘German Christians’ who merged explicitly with Nazism but the ordinary Lutheran and Reformed congregations — were, in the words of one Holocaust scholar, ‘mostly silent as Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered.’ The Confessing Church, which is often cited as the Protestant resistance to Nazism, was itself deeply ambiguous: it resisted Nazi interference with the internal life of the Church but was far more reluctant to speak for the Jews. When a few members of the Confessing Church demanded in September 1935 that their Church take a public stand in defense of the Jews, they were overruled by Church leaders who wanted to avoid conflict with the regime.

The notable exceptions — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, André Trocmé, the Danish Lutheran Church, Corrie ten Boom — are celebrated precisely because they were exceptions. The rule was accommodation, silence, and in many cases collaboration.

C. The Billy Graham Revelation

Billy Graham was not a fringe figure. He was the most prominent Protestant preacher in America for four decades, the confidant of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama, the man who presided at presidential prayer services and National Days of Prayer, the face of mainstream American Protestant respectability. His organization reached tens of millions of Americans through television, radio, and mass crusades. He was understood by the American public and by himself as a model of Christian decency and goodwill toward all people.

When Nixon White House tapes were released decades after their recording, they revealed a conversation in the early 1970s in which Graham agreed with Nixon that Jews controlled the American media, and that this control was harmful to the country. The conversation was not a moment of doubt later corrected. It was a window into what Graham actually thought in private — the beliefs of a man whose public career had been built on a message of universal Christian brotherhood. Graham apologized when the tapes became public. But the revelation was a reminder that even at the height of postwar Protestant-Jewish warming, even among the most publicly decent and respectable Christian leaders, the oldest stereotypes survived in private.

D. The Formal Repudiations — And Their Limits

The formal repudiation of centuries of anti-Jewish theology came late and slowly. Pope John XXIII removed the ‘perfidious Jews’ from the Catholic Good Friday liturgy in 1958 — eleven years after the Holocaust ended. The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate in 1965 formally rejected the deicide charge, stated that ‘Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,’ and warned against antisemitism. It was a genuine and consequential shift. It was also, as scholars have noted, a ‘soft supersessionism’: it rejected the worst formulations while leaving the fundamental structure of replacement theology largely intact.

The Episcopal Church did not reject the charge of deicide until its House of Bishops issued a statement in 1964 — the same year as the Civil Rights Act. The Presbyterian Church USA did not formally proclaim ‘Christians have not replaced Jews’ and repudiate ‘the church’s long and deep complicity in the proliferation of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions through its teaching of contempt’ until 1987. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did not renounce Luther’s anti-Judaic writings until 1994. The Lutheran Church in Germany issued its condemnation of Luther’s antisemitism only in 2016.

The gap between formal repudiation and transformed practice was substantial. Issuing a denominational statement does not immediately change what is preached from thousands of local pulpits. It does not revise the Sunday school curricula distributed to thousands of congregations. It does not alter the theological frameworks within which seminary students are trained. As late as 2021, the Episcopal Church’s own official document acknowledged that anti-Judaism was expressed across ‘liturgical texts, interpretation of scriptures, preaching, devotional practices, poetry, iconography, hymnody, academic writing, pastoral advice, and educational resources’ — and that this work of correction was still ongoing.

 

PART FIVE

The Arab Boycott and Corporate Antisemitism

V. The Arab Boycott — Economic Antisemitism at Scale

A. The Structure of the Boycott

On December 2, 1945, the newly formed Arab League — then comprising six members — issued its first call for an economic boycott of the Jewish community of Palestine. The declaration read: ‘Products of Palestinian Jews are to be considered undesirable in Arab countries. They should be prohibited and refused as long as their production in Palestine might lead to the realization of Zionist political aims.’ After Israel’s establishment in 1948 the boycott was formalized and expanded into a three-tier structure that would operate for the next half-century.

The primary boycott prohibited direct trade between Arab states and Israel. The secondary boycott extended this to any company worldwide that did business with Israel. The tertiary boycott prohibited commerce with companies that dealt with other blacklisted companies. The Central Boycott Office, headquartered in Damascus, maintained comprehensive blacklists and coordinated enforcement across Arab League members. But crucially — and this is the detail most relevant to the present discussion — the boycott also applied to companies that the Arab League identified as having ‘Zionist sympathizers’ in executive positions or on the board.

This last provision made Jewishness itself, or expressions of sympathy with Jewish causes, into a corporate liability. A company’s access to Arab markets could be revoked not because of anything it made or sold in Israel, but because of the religion or political sympathies of the people who ran it. American corporations were placed in the position of having a financial incentive to avoid promoting Jewish executives, to screen their boards for Jewish directors, and to discourage their employees from making charitable contributions to Israel or expressing sympathy for Jewish causes. The boycott, in other words, institutionalized corporate antisemitism at the level of shareholder value.

B. The Major Corporate Cases — Coca-Cola, Ford, RCA

The most dramatic single moment in the boycott’s American history came when the Arab League’s Boycott Office voted simultaneously to ban Coca-Cola, RCA, and Ford Motor Company. Coca-Cola had been blacklisted because it granted an Israeli bottling franchise to Abraham Feinberg, a Manhattan banker who was also president of the Israel Development Corporation. The company had twenty-nine bottling plants, 139,000 dealers, and a fifty-million-dollar investment in the Arab world. Egypt immediately prepared to shift nine bottling plants from Coke to ‘Nasr Cola.’ RCA was blacklisted for allowing phonograph records to be pressed in Israel. Ford had a sixty-million-dollar stake in assembly plants in Casablanca and Alexandria.

The pattern these cases reveal is clear: it was not what the companies did in Israel that mattered to the Boycott Office in the Coca-Cola case — it was who was given a franchise, and what that person had done for the Jewish community. Feinberg’s offense was not selling soft drinks in Israel. His offense was being an identifiably pro-Israel Jew in a position of corporate significance. The logic was directly continuous with the logic of hotel signs that read ‘No Hebrews’ and university admissions offices that counted Jewish applicants by a different standard.

C. ARAMCO and US Government Complicity

The most extraordinary dimension of the Arab boycott story is the extent to which American institutions — including the United States government itself — complied with its antisemitic provisions. Saudi Arabia informed the Arabian American Oil Company that it would not issue visas to ‘undesirable persons,’ by which it meant Jews. ARAMCO complied, systematically screening its employees by religion. This was a major American corporation, doing significant work on behalf of American strategic interests, implementing religious discrimination against American citizens in compliance with a foreign government’s demand.

Even more disturbing was the US Army Corps of Engineers. Congressional hearings in 1975 revealed that the Army Corps of Engineers excluded Jewish soldiers and civilians from projects it managed in Saudi Arabia. This was not a private corporation cutting corners for profit — it was the United States military, implementing a foreign government’s religious discrimination against its own personnel. Senator Frank Church’s publication in 1975 of the Saudi blacklist of 1,500 American firms was the first time the American public understood the full scope of what had been happening. The revelation produced the Export Administration Act of 1977, which made it a criminal offense for American companies to comply with the boycott — the only country in the world to adopt comprehensive anti-boycott legislation.

D. The Celebrity Blacklists

The Arab League maintained personal blacklists alongside corporate ones. Marilyn Monroe was blacklisted for ‘pronounced pro-Israeli sympathies,’ for collecting donations for Israel — and for converting to Judaism. Elizabeth Taylor’s films were banned throughout the Arab world after she converted to Judaism and purchased Israeli bonds. Edward G. Robinson was blacklisted for ‘pronounced pro-Israeli sympathies’ and for being Jewish. Frank Sinatra was blacklisted for pro-Jewish and pro-Israel activism. Eartha Kitt was blacklisted for the same. Sophia Loren was removed from the blacklist only after she personally promised not to appear in any more films made in Israel.

The logic of these blacklists was the same logic as the corporate blacklists: Jewish identity, or sympathy with Jews and the Jewish state, was the disqualifying characteristic. The entertainment industry was not simply being asked to divest from Israeli productions. It was being asked to sanction individuals for being Jewish, for converting to Judaism, for expressing solidarity with Jewish causes. The Arab boycott, in its treatment of celebrities and corporations alike, was not merely an economic tool directed at the State of Israel. It was a systematic effort to make Jewishness itself a market liability throughout the global economy.

 

PART SIX

Suppression, Persistence, and Resurgence

VI. The Underground Years and the Resurgence

A. The Postwar Suppression — Real But Incomplete

The postwar period brought genuine change. The Holocaust made the lethal endpoint of antisemitism undeniable. Hundreds of thousands of American Jewish veterans returned from a war fought against fascism and were in no mood to accept discrimination as natural or normal. Federal and state anti-discrimination legislation, pressure from returning veterans, and media exposure through films like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) — in which Gregory Peck investigates American antisemitism by pretending to be Jewish — created new social norms. By the early 1960s, most resorts and housing developments had formally dropped their restrictive policies, college quotas had mostly ended, and professional fields were more receptive to Jews than at any time in the century.

But the change was a change in what was expressible, not fully in what was felt. Researchers consistently noted that declining survey numbers might reflect the new social stigma attached to expressing antisemitic sentiments rather than a complete elimination of the underlying attitudes. The attitudes that had been formed over centuries by theological teaching, social custom, and institutional practice did not evaporate when the laws changed. They went underground — surviving in private conversation, in club cultures that no longer posted signs but still managed their membership through informal mechanisms, in the unspoken preferences of hiring committees and admissions offices, in the private asides of ministers who publicly preached brotherhood.

B. The Left — A New Vector

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a new source of antisemitism emerged from a direction that surprised many observers. The New Left, which included substantial numbers of Jewish students and organizers, developed a strand of anti-Israel politics that drew on Marxist and Third World solidarity frameworks. Jewish activists who had been central to the civil rights movement found themselves in an awkward position as that movement’s leadership — under the influence of Black Power ideology and its rejection of white and Jewish liberal paternalism — began to distance itself from Jewish partnership.

The tensions were real and had legitimate sources in the history of the Black-Jewish alliance. But they were exploited by antisemites who used the cover of anti-Zionism to advance old hatreds with new language. Jews who operated businesses in African American neighborhoods were denounced as ‘bandit merchants.’ Israel was equated with South African apartheid, with settler colonialism, with American imperialism — frameworks that drew on genuine political analysis but were applied with a specificity to the Jewish state that was not applied to other states engaged in comparable or worse conduct.

C. The 1984 Rupture — Jackson and Farrakhan

Jesse Jackson’s reference to New York City as ‘Hymietown’ in 1984 — made in what he believed was a private conversation with a reporter — was a symptom rather than a cause. The word ‘Hymietown’ was not invented in 1984; it expressed a contempt for Jews that was not Jackson’s alone but was widespread in certain segments of the communities he represented and led. His month-long delay before apologizing, and his initial refusal to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan, revealed the degree to which antisemitic attitudes had persisted in sectors of American life that were supposed to have left such prejudices behind.

The far more consequential figure was Farrakhan. Before 1984, Farrakhan could be described as the leader of a fringe Black Muslim sect. The Jackson controversy launched him into national and international visibility. From that platform, Farrakhan proceeded to inject his movement’s unremittingly antisemitic worldview — Jews as cosmic oppressors, orchestrators of the slave trade, controllers of media and government — into the cultural mainstream with a persistence and reach that no American antisemite had achieved since Father Coughlin in the 1930s. The specific lie that Jews were major players in the African slave trade had essentially no traction before 1984. After Farrakhan’s rise it became a subject of popular and even academic discussion. Candace Owens’s promotion of this lie to her millions of followers in recent years is one manifestation of a trend Farrakhan began.

D. The Internet and White Supremacist Radicalization

The white supremacist movement that had been driven underground by legal action, social stigma, and the massive defeat of fascism in World War II found new infrastructure in the internet of the late 1990s and 2000s. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the Czarist-era forgery that portrayed an international Jewish conspiracy for world domination — became freely searchable, downloadable, and shareable. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent articles, neo-Nazi pamphlets, Holocaust denial literature: all of it was accessible to anyone with an internet connection. What had required a mimeograph machine and a mailing list in 1950 could now reach millions at essentially zero cost.

The radicalization pipeline operated below the threshold of social visibility. Young men who felt economically displaced, culturally threatened, and personally humiliated found in white supremacist online communities a framework that named their enemy, explained their failures, and offered brotherhood. The enemy was always, at the center of the conspiracy, the Jews. The Great Replacement theory — the claim that Jews are orchestrating mass immigration and demographic change to eliminate white Christian civilization — emerged from this online ecosystem and provided the specific ideological motivation for the most deadly antisemitic attacks in American history.

E. Charlottesville and Pittsburgh — The Underground Surfaces

At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, hundreds of self-described neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and white nationalists marched with torches through the University of Virginia campus chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Blood and soil.’ They had come ostensibly to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, but as scholars observed, their antisemitism was not ancillary to their racism. It was a cornerstone of their worldview. The rally’s organizers had been radicalized in online communities where antisemitism was the unifying ideology.

The Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 was the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Eleven people were murdered during Shabbat services. The shooter had posted online about his belief that Jews were ‘the enemy of white people’ and that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was ‘bringing invaders in that kill our people.’ His specific grievance was about immigration — but the framework that made immigration into a Jewish conspiracy, and that made killing Jews the appropriate response, was the Great Replacement theory that had been circulating for years in the online communities where he had been radicalized. The Poway synagogue shooting came six months later.

President Trump’s statement on the day of the Pittsburgh shooting expressed ‘disbelief’ that antisemitic attacks could still be happening. The disbelief was the problem. The antisemitism had never gone away. It had been suppressed, driven underground, forced to change its language and its venues. When the social structures that enforced suppression weakened — when a president of the United States called neo-Nazis ‘very fine people,’ when online radicalization platforms were allowed to flourish without accountability, when the boundaries of acceptable political discourse were deliberately expanded to include rhetoric that had been excluded for a generation — what re-emerged was the same thing that had been underground.

F. The Contemporary Multi-Front Crisis

The present moment is characterized by antisemitism emerging simultaneously from multiple directions that do not share a common ideology and have no structural relationship to each other, but that all draw on the same deep historical reservoir of anti-Jewish stereotypes and theological contempt.

From the right: white nationalist and Christian nationalist movements that frame Jews as the orchestrators of demographic replacement, cultural destruction, and political subversion. The ‘globalists’ language used by mainstream conservative politicians is a transparent recoding of ‘international Jewish conspiracy.’ The ‘Jewish space lasers’ accusation leveled by a sitting member of Congress was not an isolated absurdity — it was a contemporary version of the blood libel: the claim that Jews are behind inexplicable disasters.

From celebrity culture: Kanye West’s 2022 statements that he would go ‘death con 3 on Jewish people,’ followed by his appearance with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, reached hundreds of millions of people across social media platforms before any response could be organized. Kyrie Irving’s promotion of a film claiming Jews had perpetuated systematic harm against Black people — a claim traceable directly to the Nation of Islam tradition Farrakhan built — reached the massive audience of one of the NBA’s most prominent players.

From the campus left: following October 7, 2023, Jewish students at elite American universities found themselves in an environment where their identity made them targets of harassment, exclusion, and intimidation. Resurgent tropes about ‘Zionist control’ of universities, associations of Jews with greed and bloodthirstiness, chants calling for the eradication of the Jewish state — all of it was present in campus encampments at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, MIT, and dozens of other institutions. The ADL documented a nearly four hundred percent increase in antisemitic incidents in the first few months after October 7.

 

PART SEVEN

The Progressive Protestant Campaigns and Palestinian Outcomes

VII. The Mainline Protestant BDS Campaigns — A Study in Counterproductive Activism

A. What the Churches Actually Did

Beginning with the collapse of the Oslo peace process in 2000, mainline Protestant denominations in the United States — the same institutions that had spent the previous decades formally repudiating their centuries of anti-Jewish theology — launched a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. By 2024, ten Protestant denominations had passed resolutions supporting BDS measures to varying degrees. The Presbyterian Church USA voted for divestment in 2014 by a margin of seven votes. The United Church of Christ followed in 2015. The United Methodist Church voted to divest from Israel bonds in 2024.

These campaigns were driven by clergy and their most engaged lay leaders — not by the congregations. Research published in 2024 found that eighty percent of mainline church attendees had never heard of the BDS movement, and only seven percent supported it. The denominational votes were products of activist minorities working through committee and floor processes, not expressions of congregational sentiment. When the United Methodist Church’s finance committee rejected BDS resolutions in 2016, a delegate and BDS opponent observed that the proposals ‘pretty much went down in flames’ — but they kept coming back in subsequent General Conferences until they finally succeeded in 2024.

B. The Theological Continuity — Supersessionism in Progressive Dress

The most important analytical observation about the mainline Protestant Israel campaigns is the one that their participants have been least willing to make: the campaigns reproduced in progressive form the essential structure of the theology they claimed to have renounced.

Supersessionism assigned Jews a unique and uniquely negative role in the moral drama of human history. In its original form, that role was as the people who rejected God’s son and therefore forfeited their covenant. In its progressive form, that role is as the people who uniquely embody settler colonialism, apartheid, and systematic human rights violation — a uniqueness that requires special condemnation unavailable to other states engaged in comparable or worse conduct. Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, Russia’s conduct in Chechnya and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen — none of these generated Presbyterian divestment resolutions, Episcopal statements, or Methodist BDS campaigns. The Jewish state was the unique moral problem requiring special action. The structure of the accusation was continuous with the tradition it claimed to reject.

A Presbyterian theologian made this observation in 2004 when examining the same 1987 statement that had repudiated the ‘teaching of contempt.’ The statement’s sixth affirmation contained language suggesting that Jewish possession of the land of Israel was conditional on covenant obedience — which was precisely the supersessionist logic the statement claimed to reject. The formal repudiation of antisemitism in the abstract was compatible, within the same document, with a theological framework that treated the Jewish state as having forfeited its legitimacy through disobedience. The old theology had a new object.

C. The Palestinian Reality — What Actually Happened

Over the exact years during which mainline Protestant denominations were most intensively engaged in BDS campaigns and divestment resolutions — 2004 through 2024 — Palestinian living conditions deteriorated on virtually every measurable dimension, settlement expansion accelerated dramatically, the two-state solution moved from improbable to effectively dead, and the events of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath produced the worst human catastrophe in the region’s modern history.

The data is not ambiguous. UNCTAD’s comprehensive assessment found that by 2024, Palestinian GDP had fallen to seventy percent of its 2022 level, erasing twenty-two years of economic progress. Gaza’s GDP shrank to just thirteen percent of its 2022 level. Unemployment surged to eighty percent in Gaza and thirty-five percent in the West Bank. The settler population in the West Bank increased from under 200,000 in 2000 to approximately 735,000 by end of 2023. In 2024 alone the settlement economy was valued at fifty-three billion dollars — nearly five times the size of the entire Palestinian economy. The West Bank’s economic trajectory, measured from 2000 to 2019 alone, represented a cumulative cost of fifty-seven billion dollars attributable to Israeli closures and restrictions.

The church campaigns generated resolutions, press releases, denominational votes, and theological statements. They did not generate one centimeter of settlement retreat. They did not create one day of improved economic conditions for Palestinians. They did not advance the two-state solution by one step. What they generated was the normalization, across educated and progressive Protestant communities, of the idea that Israel was uniquely, specially, distinctively the moral problem at the center of the world. That normalization had consequences — not for Israeli policy, which did not change, but for the intellectual and social environment in which antisemitism was evaluated.

D. The Palestinian Voice Against BDS

Among the voices least heard in mainline Protestant discussions of BDS were Palestinian voices that opposed the campaign — not because they accepted the occupation, but because they believed BDS made their situation worse rather than better. One Palestinian peace activist wrote directly: ‘As a Palestinian dedicated to working for peace and reconciliation between my people and our Israeli neighbors, I do not believe that BDS advocates are helping our cause. On the contrary, they are just creating more hatred, enmity, and polarization.’

The ‘anti-normalization’ doctrine embedded in BDS — which discouraged virtually any sustained contact between Israelis and Palestinians who were not in open conflict — was particularly damaging to peace efforts. The people most likely to be targeted by boycotts were not settlement builders or government ministers. They were Israeli citizens who opposed the occupation, and Palestinians who believed engagement was more useful than isolation. BDS defined any cooperative enterprise between Israelis and Palestinians who were not adversaries as morally compromised ‘normalization.’ The effect was to narrow the space for anyone who was actually trying to end the conflict.

E. The Double Standard as Theological Continuity

The argument that the mainline Protestant Israel campaigns represent a form of theological continuity with the tradition they claimed to reject is not a claim that the people involved were antisemites, or that Israeli policy deserves no criticism. It is a structural observation. The pattern of singling out the Jewish state for unique condemnation, of applying standards that are not applied to any other state, of treating Israel’s conduct as a matter requiring special denominational action while comparable conduct by other states goes unremarked — this pattern fits the description ‘antisemitism’ by virtually any serious operational definition.

The ADL’s definition, the IHRA Working Definition adopted by most Western governments, and the State Department’s operational definition all identify as antisemitic the application of double standards by requiring of Israel behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. The mainline Protestant campaigns, taken as a whole, meet this definition. This does not mean every person who voted for a divestment resolution was antisemitic. It means that the pattern of the campaigns, their structural logic, and their practical consequences were continuous with a tradition of treating Jews and their institutions as uniquely problematic — a tradition these same denominations had formally repudiated.

That this continuity was unconscious, that it was pursued in the name of justice and human rights, that it was accompanied by genuine concern for Palestinian suffering, does not make it less continuous with its theological antecedents. Centuries of persecution were also conducted in the name of truth, justice, and righteousness. The road from good intentions to bad outcomes is well paved in this particular history, and the failure of the progressive Protestant churches to reckon with their own role in that road is one of the more instructive stories in the recent history of American religion.

 

VIII. Conclusion: What the History Teaches

The history assembled in this document makes several things clear that are easy to miss when examining any single period in isolation.

First: antisemitism has never required an immediate practical grievance to sustain itself. It has been reproduced across many centuries through institutional transmission — through theology, through social custom, through educational systems, through the quiet practices of admissions committees and country club membership rolls and hotel reservation desks. It does not require bad people. It requires systems that normalize contempt and make exclusion unremarkable.

Second: the suppression of antisemitism is not the same as its elimination. The postwar decades produced genuine progress. The deicide charge was formally repudiated. Quotas fell. Restrictive covenants were voided. Borscht Belt resorts closed because Jews could vacation anywhere. But the attitudes that had been formed over centuries did not disappear because they were no longer expressible in polite company. They went underground, surviving in private conversation, in informal practice, in the cultures of institutions that had officially abandoned their discriminatory policies while maintaining their social character.

Third: antisemitism is not ideologically stable. It expresses itself through the available ideological frameworks of the moment. In the medieval era, the framework was theological. In the nineteenth century, it was racial pseudoscience. In the 1930s and 1940s it was nationalism, racial biology, and conspiracy theory. In the postwar era it was redirected — on the left through anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity frameworks, on the right through white nationalism and Great Replacement theory. The same deep structure of accusation — Jews as uniquely dangerous, Jews as orchestrators of harm, Jews as the special problem requiring special action — migrated from one ideological vessel to another without losing its essential character.

Fourth: the progressive Protestant churches provide a particularly instructive case because they believed they had genuinely left the tradition of contempt behind. Their formal repudiations were sincere. Their concern for Palestinian human rights was genuine. Their commitment to social justice was real. None of this prevented them from reproducing, in the register of progressive politics, the essential structure of the theology they had formally renounced. Good intentions, sincere commitments, and genuine concern for justice are not sufficient protection against the reproduction of deep structural patterns — particularly when the people involved do not know those patterns well enough to recognize their echoes in themselves.

Fifth: the people who paid the price for the church campaigns were, above all, the Palestinians. Over twenty years of intensifying BDS activism, Palestinian living conditions deteriorated on every dimension. Settlement expansion accelerated. The two-state solution died. October 7 happened. The campaigns that claimed to act for Palestinian freedom produced no freedom and added to the conditions that produced catastrophe. This is not because the people who ran the campaigns were malevolent. It is because they were wrong about how change actually happens in this conflict, and because their campaigns served their own institutional and theological needs — the need to have a position, to take action, to express values — more than they served the people in whose name they were conducted.

People who drove the church campaigns knew the history of Christian antisemitism. They had read the apologies and repudiations. They had studied the Holocaust. What they lacked was not information. What they lacked was the empathic depth — the capacity for genuine perspective-taking across civilizational difference — to understand what their actions looked like from inside the Jewish community they believed they were engaging as partners.

The world needs people who can hold their own deepest commitments alongside genuine openness to the other, who can listen across civilizational, cultural, and ideological divides not despite their convictions but through them. They are not a luxury. They are what is required to break the cycle this document has traced. The cycle does not break through resolutions, repudiations, or campaigns. It breaks through the long, painstaking formation of people who have genuinely internalized the other’s perspective — who would have recognized, before voting for a BDS resolution, what the Jewish community was hearing in that vote, and why, and how that history shaped what they were hearing. That recognition is a skill. It requires formation.