2016/01/25 by Baum, Steven K. 1953- · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Jewish Identity and Society #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1163/9789004307148
openalex publication_date 2016/01/25 · openalex created_date 2016/08/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Despite its evident imperfections, the vast majority of American Jews view the United States as a uniquely hospitable host in the history of a diaspora fraught with nearly endless discrimination.1 Yet, for many, this positive assessment has always coexisted with a concern that matters, even in this "golden medina," could get far worse on the turn of a dime.2 With this historically-understandable 1 Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford, 1994), and others have documented how America from the beginning offered Jews a far more hospitable environment than what they had left behind in Europe, though the encounter with antisemitism frequently remained a part of Jewish life in the New World. Dinnerstein and others document the growth of anti-Jewish hostility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed by its rapid and marked decline after World War II. Nathan Perlmutter (former National Director of the Anti-Defamation League) and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, in The Real Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Arbor House, 1982), 281, describe the United States as a land ". . . more hospitable to us than to anti