Antisemitic Violence and Racism in United States ¹

By Rachel Kranson

Associate Professor and Director of Jewish Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Like many other scholars in my specialty of American Jewish history, my approach to the history of antisemitism fundamentally changed in the wake of the 10/27 attack here in Pittsburgh. The massacre was, most certainly, a heinous act of antisemitic violence. But as the gunman’s comments on social media revealed, his actions were also fueled by white supremacist, conspiratorial thinking that included not only a hatred of Jews, but also animus against immigrants and people of color. These circumstances pushed me to start thinking systematically about the ways that these hatreds shaped and magnified one another over the course of American history. After a year in which seventy-eight percent of violent hate crimes in the United States were committed by people as deeply invested in racism and xenophobia as by animosity against Jews, such an approach felt crucial to understanding what happened in my own neighborhood.

Until quite recently, the issue of antisemitic violence -- and antisemitism more generally -- had not been at the center of how most American Jewish historians have analyzed our subject ².  There had been something of a consensus in the field that while antisemitism is always unfortunate and worrisome, that in the context of the United States it had rarely turned violent, it has rarely entered into American politics, and it rarely prevented white American Jews from achieving economic or social success. As historian Stephen Whitfield put it back in 1980, “An interpretation [of American Jewish history] that stresses persecution in a nation that has known no pogroms is unlikely to be convincing. A paradigm that is written in terms of martyrdom, when no American Jew has been seriously impeded in his faith, does not address itself to our condition in America.” In the end, Whitfield calls American antisemitism “the dog that did not bark.” ³

The result of this consensus has been that relatively few American Jewish historians have addressed the question of why antisemitism has been so persistent in the United States. Instead, what they have tended to ask is -- why has there been relatively little antisemitism in the United States?

This question revolves around a comparison between the United States, a place where Jews for the most part achieved integration and economic success, and modern Europe, where Jews were the victims of exclusion, prejudice, and eventually genocide. There is some merit to this question. Even if you compare the high points in American antisemitism to low points in European antisemitism, historically speaking American Jews have still enjoyed less exposure to violence than European Jews ever did.

But for me, as an American Jewish historian trying to understand a deadly antisemitic incident that happened in my neighborhood, I found this framework deeply unhelpful, if not dismissive of the pain that we experienced in our city. I challenged myself to think about antisemitism in the US not as a European import or in comparison to Europe, but rather as an American phenomenon that matters on its own terms.  And once I started thinking about antisemitic violence as a fundamentally American phenomenon, it felt imperative fully unpack its relationship to the American forms of racism and white supremacy that also sparked the gunman’s deadly fury.

Of course, the phenomenon of antisemitic violence does not encompass the entire history of antisemitism in America. Antisemitism can also consist of bias, discrimination, prejudice, and hate speech targeting Jewish people. Indeed, some of the most notorious examples of American antisemitism have not been violent. Examples include General Ulysses S. Grant banishing all Jews from his military district in Tennessee during the civil war; the quotas that limited Jewish access to institutes of higher education in the early twentieth century; Henry Ford’s publication of the 1903 conspiratorial hoax “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the Dearborn Independent; and the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s disproportionate investigations of Jews during the cold war of the 1950s. As harmful as these instances have been, I have found specific instances of violence somewhat more instructive in helping me clarify the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of violent racism in the United States.

To begin, let’s consider the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was the victim of a deadly lynch mob in 1915. This act of violence took place in Atlanta, Georgia, a state dominated by an agricultural economy until the end of the civil war. In the postbellum period, Atlanta began to rebuild its economy not through agriculture but through industrialization. This economic transformation challenged the rigid racial dynamics of a region in which, historically, white people owned farmland, and black people worked on the farmland owned by white people. Industrialization offered all people in the South, both white and Black, access to new kinds of labor in factories rather than in the fields.

Most of the Jews who lived in Atlanta in the early twentieth century made their living through retail rather than agriculture, which meant that they had connections to manufacturers and suppliers in the North. This put them in a good position to become leaders in Atlanta’s new industrial economy. In response, some of the white Christians in Atlanta began to blame Jews for undermining the agricultural system that had long upheld their white supremacy.

This tension came to a head on April 26th, 1913. On this date, Mary Phagan, a 14 year old worker in a pencil factory in Atlanta, was strangled to death. Her body was found in the cellar of the factory the next day.

Leo Frank was the superintendent of that factory. He was the son of middle-class, Jewish immigrants from New York, and moved to Atlanta in 1910. Frank was the last person who admitted to seeing Mary Phagan alive, and thus became the prime suspect. If you look at both the trial transcript and the Southern news coverage, you will see that the prosecutors absolutely considered Leo Frank’s northern, Jewish identity to be relevant to the case. In the end, Frank was convicted by the jury after only 2 hours of deliberation, though the evidence against him was largely circumstantial and did not prove his guilt.

By the end of 1914, Governor John Slaton of Georgia became convinced that Frank was innocent, and he commuted Frank’s sentence from hanging to life imprisonment. This sparked protests all over Georgia.  Eight weeks later, Frank was abducted from jail by 25 men who called themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan. They hung Leo Frank from a tree, brutalized his body, and took pictures of his corpse which they then distributed as postcards throughout the state. Though their identities were known, none of the men who lynched Frank were ever tried or convicted of his murder.

The lynching of Leo Frank cannot be understood outside of the broader history of racist violence in America. Frank’s lynching represents the only time in US history that a Jewish person was killed by a lynch mob. In contrast, nearly 4,000 Black Americans were lynched in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. So Leo Frank was not only the victim of antisemitic violence, he was the victim of a form of violence that was indelibly tied to white supremacy.

The same can be said of another wave of antisemitic violence that took place later in the twentieth century, at the peak of the civil rights movement. Between 1957 and 1958, white supremacists started to attack synagogues throughout the South. Generally, they targeted synagogues whose rabbis had been supportive of racial integration as the civil rights movement gained momentum. So much like the Leo Frank case, these attacks occurred at a moment at which white supremacists saw a threat to their power.  

Many of these white supremacists specifically blamed Jews for the civil rights movement. It is true that compared to other Americans of European descent, Ashkenazic Jews were disproportionately supportive of racial integration in midcentury America. However – and I hope it is needless to say – it was the commitment and sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans who turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. The idea that Jews were responsible for the civil rights movement was – and still is today -- a conspiracy theory that depends on both antisemitic and racist assumptions. On the one hand, it relies on the antisemitic trope that Jews are the masterminds behind progressive social change all over the world. At the same time, this conspiracy theory also relies on the racist notion that black Americans are not capable of organizing their own social movements.

The first of these synagogue attacks happened in November of 1957. The janitor of Temple Beth El in Charlotte, North Carolina, noticed a package leaning against the rear wall of the synagogue building. When he opened the package, he discovered six sticks of dynamite. Someone had lit the fuse, but the flame had fizzled out before it could cause an explosion. Four months later, 30 sticks of dynamite were found outside Temple Emanuel in Gastonia, North Carolina. Once again, the fuse had gone out before setting off the explosives.

Eventually, the explosions started to hit their mark. On the night of March 16th, 1958, bombs exploded in Miami’s Temple Beth El, and then another bomb exploded hours later at the Jewish community center in Nashville Tennessee. Other attempted and successful bombings continued to occur throughout the South in 1957 and 1958.

Of all the synagogue bombings, the one that caused the most damage was the explosion at the Atlanta Reform Temple on Peachtree Street. The Rabbi of this Temple was Jacob Rothschild, who had been born and raised here in Pittsburgh before finding his Atlanta pulpit. Rothschild was an outspoken critic of segregation. And in a moment of racial tension, this made his synagogue a target.

The explosion ripped through the side of the Atlanta Reform Temple at 3:30 am on October 12th, 1958. A message received by the press right after the blast said: “this is the last empty building that we will bomb.”

This act of intimidation ended up being counterproductive in terms of quashing Jewish support of the Civil Rights movement.  Atlanta’s Jews got enormous support after the Temple bombing, from their fellow Atlantans and from their elected officials, even those who were segregationists. Georgia senator Herman Talmadge, who had said he would rather close Georgia’s schools rather than integrate them, called the synagogue bombing a “shocking and unthinkable act.” So instead of making Atlanta’s Jews afraid to support civil rights, it made them more outspoken. You can see some of this confidence in the sermon that Rothschild preached on the Sabbath directly after the bombing, the title of which was “And None Shall Make them Afraid.” ⁴

After this public show of support, these synagogue bombings slowed and eventually ceased. But it is important to keep in mind that Black Americans did not get nearly the same amount of support that white Jews did when Black churches were bombed during the Civil Rights movement.  These acts of violence against black sacred spaces continued well after 1958, in fact they peaked in 1962 and 1963, when a bomb killed four young girls at the Sixteenth street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama. And this tells us two things – first of all, that public shows of support by elected officials really can make a practical difference, they are not just symbolic. And second of all, looking at similar acts of antisemitic and racist violence together can tell us things we might miss if we look at them separately.

Now to be clear, not every instance of antisemitic violence in America has been perpetrated by a white supremacist. But considering that this is such a persistent pattern, it seems to me quite important that scholars, activists, and policymakers seriously consider antisemitism alongside other forms of hatred that target anyone who is not white, Christian and native born.

For the most part, scholars of American Jewish history have not tackled antisemitism through this lens. Instead, there has been a tendency to treat antisemitism not as intertwined with other forms of hatred, but in competition with them. Numerous scholars have posited that the reason European antisemitism has been more deadly than American antisemitism is precisely because American bigots had a wider selection of targets upon which to unleash their vitriol. In a now classic article on the historiography of American antisemitism, Jonathan Sarna summarized the argument thusly: “American antisemitism has always had to compete with other forms of animus…because the objects are so varied, hatred is diffused, and no one group experiences for long the full brunt of national odium.” In other words: American antisemitism has been “less potent than its European counterpart” specifically because Americans have been more invested in other forms of hatred. Presumably, a preoccupation with racism distracted bigots from antisemitism and rendered white, American Jews safe by comparison. ⁵

I am deeply disturbed by this notion that American racism has shielded American from hatred and violence. I am uncomfortable with this idea both as a historian, and as a person of conscience.

As a historian, I simply don’t see how the historical record bears out the idea that American racism has been competing with American antisemitism, distracting bigots from targeting Jews and protecting them from violence and harm. Most of the antisemitic violence in the United States was perpetrated by people whose hostility toward Jews has been deeply intertwined with their hatred of people of color, who in fact often blame white Jews for the successes of people of color in America.

The historical record demonstrates that American racism does not compete with antisemitism but amplifies it, rending Jews (of all racial backgrounds) more vulnerable at moments of heightened racial tension. Time and again in American history, antisemitic violence peaked when white racists fought hardest to maintain their supremacy. In post-civil war Atlanta, during the Civil Rights movement, and in Pittsburgh, racists were not distracted from antisemitism as they fought to subjugate Black Americans or ban immigrants from South and Central America. Rather, their racism and xenophobia fed their antisemitism as they blamed Jews for changes within the entrenched social order.

To be clear – in focusing on the intertwined nature of antisemitism and racism in the United States, I do not deny that many Jews have benefited from white privilege in America. Indeed, my own research has demonstrated that Jewish upward mobility in midcentury America was dependent on their access to whiteness. But even as their racial identity offered white Jews material advantages, the racism that produced their white privilege has also made them vulnerable to antisemitic violence. Both things can be true.

Not only does my position as a historian compel me to reject the notion that antisemitism and racism complete with one another, but I also reject this logic as a person of conscience. Because if racism really did distract bigots from investing in antisemitism, it might encourage white Jews to invest in racism in order to increase their safety. No targeted group can achieve security at the expense of another’s well-being – this is a false promise, based on faulty evidence. As a person of conscience, I find this idea both immoral and unacceptable.

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¹ Many of the arguments in this article were originally published in Rachel Kranson, “Rethinking the Historiography of American Antisemitism in the Wake of the Pittsburgh Shooting,” American Jewish History 105.1-2, January/April 2021, 247-253

² Important exceptions include the work of Leonard Dinnerstein and that of Deborah Lipstadt, the current US special envoy against antisemitism.

³ Stephen Whitfield, “The Presence of the Past: Recent Trends,” American Jewish History 70 (Dec 1980), 151

⁴ This history of the synagogue bombings comes from Clive Webb, “Counterblast: How the Atlanta Temple Bombing Strengthened the Civil Rights Cause,” Southern Spaces, June 22, 2009

⁵ Jonathan Sarna, “Antisemitism and American History,” Commentary vol. 71:3 (March 1981), 46

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