Talk about good timing. Antisemitism, an American Tradition, a powerful new book by American University professor Pamela Nadell, has just been published. The book comes at a time when certain sectors of America have become feverish with hatred towards Jewish people.
Antisemitism, An American Tradition goes from colonial America to the modern day, offering a shameful history of prejudice against Jews. When they first arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, one colossal administrator tried but failed to deport them. “Year-in and year-out,” Nadell writes, Christians “heard the Gospels recount how the Pharisees, whose heirs would become the Jews’ rabbis, displayed enmity to Jesus and how, when the Roman imperial governor Pontius Pilate gave the Jews the chance to save a prisoner, the crowd freed the bandit Barabbas and clamored to crucify Jesus.” Ministers frequently preached on the Jews’ guilt. In the 1660s, in Boston’s Second Church, the Puritan clergyman and Harvard College president Increase Mather vilified them in sermons published as “The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation.”
