The historical truth regarding the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments in America

As an educator, truthsayer and as a histrorian. I spend hours doing research of historical documents in my hours of research to verify historical truth.

To be truthful one must take an unbiased and neutral stance so as to comprehend the actions in the past and historical personas. Additionally, one must also take into account and understand the influences of the time period.

To fully comprehend, the historical truth regarding anti-Jewish sentiments in America requires that one must "wade" (read) through the biased point of view, dysinformation and revisonist history of others for comparison to the document truth.

Historical Background: "Isolationism"

The period following World War I saw the United States shift decisively back toward a policy of isolationism. This stance was not total withdrawal from the world, but rather a strong commitment to non-involvement in European political and military affairs, often referred to as non-entanglement.

This isolationist wave was driven by a deep disillusionment with the results of the war, returning soldiers who experience severe and profound PTFD and a desire to focus entirely on domestic issues.

The most famous act of post-WWI isolationism was the rejection of President Woodrow Wilson's vision for collective security.

The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war and included the charter for the League of Nations. The Senate's opposition was focused primarily on Article X of the League's Covenant. Senators, led by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, feared that Article X, which required member nations to protect the independence and territory of all other members, would:

• Infringe upon U.S. Sovereignty: Force the U.S. into foreign conflicts without a vote by Congress.
• Violate the long-standing American tradition of "no entangling alliances," a policy dating back to George Washington.

The election of Republican Warren G. Harding in 1920 was a popular repudiation of Wilsonian internationalism and a mandate for turning inward on a platform promising a "return to normalcy".

The exception to the rule of "Isolationism" was that the USA could not completely disentangle from the global economy. This period is sometimes called independent internationalism rather than pure isolationism.

During this period the U.S. initiated the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference (1921-1922), resulting in treaties (like the Five-Power Treaty) that limited the size of the world's major navies. This was an attempt to maintain peace and reduce military spending without entering into a binding alliance.

It should be noted that the U.S. participated in efforts to resolve the crisis over German war reparations, caused by the overly severe French demands in the Versailles Treaty most notably through the Dawes Plan (1924) and Young Plan (1929), which restructured German debt and stabilized the European economy. U.S. banks and businesses continued to invest heavily overseas. 

The financial collapse of the Weimar Republic with it's economic hardship, food shortages and government corruption led to the eventual rejection of the Weimar Republic and empowered the rise of Adolph Schickgrupper (aka Hitler) and the the National Socialist German Workers' Party better known as the Nazi Party. 

The desire to isolate the nation extended to the people and cause a wave of nativism and fear of foreign radicals. 

The causes behind the anti-Jewish fears:

One must remember the heavy participation of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and throughout Europe -Rosa Luxemburg  a leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and later co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League, which evolved into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). An influential member of the international socialist movement, she is remembered for her writings on imperialism and revolution, and as a champion of socialist democracy who famously stated, "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

The rise and fear of Communnism inspired Congress to pass two major Restrictive Quota Acts the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act).

It should also be noted that during the mass immigration of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe (1880-1920), many had socialist or Bundist backgrounds. Many of these Jewish refugees provided the core membership and much of the leadership for the unions in the garment industry. 

These unions were often founded by the workers themselves to combat the notoriously brutal conditions of the New York sweatshops.

The most important Jewish founder in the history of American labor is Samuel Gompers who founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) (1886).

• Gompers was a Sephardic Jew who arrived from London, his style of unionism—"pure and simple" unionism focused on "bread and butter" issues like wages, hours, and working conditions, rather than radical socialist revolution—defined the mainstream American labor movement for decades. He was integral to founding the Cigar Makers' International Union in the 1870s, which served as a model for the AFL.
• David Dubinsky organized the massive workforce of mostly Jewish and Italian women in the women's clothing industry the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and led the famous "Uprising of the 20,000" strike in 1909.
• Sidney Hillman was the founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) the leading union for the men's clothing industry. Hillman was one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country and a key advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal era.
• Bernard Weinstein, Morris Hillquit, Abraham Cahan Established in 1888, the United Hebrew Trades UHT was an umbrella organization that helped coordinate and establish over 20 separate Jewish unions in trades like cigar-making, shirt-making, and printing, often using Yiddish to organize workers.
• Abraham Cahan was a socialist and labor activist who founded and edited the influential socialist Yiddish-language newspaper, the Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), which was a vital tool for organizing and educating Jewish workers.

The unions led by the East European Jews went beyond the Gompers model of just wages and hours. They pioneered "Social Unionism," which treated the union as a comprehensive community and mutual aid society. This unique approach introduced a strong commitment to social justice and a broader vision for a more equitable society.

It was the concepts and leaders of "Social Unionism," particularly those coming out of the Jewish-led garment unions, served as a significant and direct inspiration for key policies within Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

The core principle of Social Unionism—that an organization must serve its members' total well-being, not just their wages—was integrated into the federal government's approach to the Great Depression in the Social Security Act (1935), Public Works Administration (PWA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933) and the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act, 1935).

Anti-Jewish sentiment and fear in the United States 

The anti-Jewish sentiment and fear in the United States during the 1920s was derived from the massive wave of immigration, particularly of Eastern European Jews and the involvement of Jews in socialism. 

The anti-Jewish sentiment reached a historical "high tide" due to a convergence of long-standing religious/racial prejudice and immediate post-WWI anxieties about immigration, social change, and political radicalism.

Eastern European Jews immigrants were often poorer, more religiously traditional, spoke Yiddish (not English), and were concentrated in urban centers like New York. This foreignness clashed with the idealized image of a homogenous, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. Nativists viewed the new Jewish immigrants as unassimilable and a threat to "American homogeneity."

This fear directly led to the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act). By setting quotas based on the 1890 census, the law was intentionally designed to cut off the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, where the vast majority of Jews were coming from.

Anti- Jewish conspiracy theories:

A powerful tool for spreading anti-Jewish fear was the propagation of fictional, large-scale conspiracy theories like the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion originating in Czarist Russia, that claimed to document a secret Jewish plot to achieve world domination by manipulating the economy, controlling the press, and instigating wars. It was treated as factual evidence of a Jewish global cabal.

The most prominent American figure to popularize this forgery was industrialist Henry Ford. Through his personal newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, Ford ran a series of articles from 1920 to 1927 titled "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem." Ford used his immense platform and distribution network (via his auto dealerships) to legitimize and widely disseminate the idea of a malignant Jewish financial conspiracy.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917), American fears of domestic communist subversion and anarchism skyrocketed, leading to the First Red Scare. This ecause some prominent early communist leaders in Europe (like Leon Trotsky) were of Jewish descent, and many Eastern European Jewish immigrants held socialist or unionist views, the false and dangerous stereotype arose that Jews were synonymous with Communism and were actively trying to overthrow American capitalism and democracy. This conflation made Jews a target for those seeking to purge America of "un-American" political influences.

Anti-Jewish sentiment was prevalent at all levels of society, from the populist working class to the elite establishment.

• Jews faced rigid discrimination, known as "social antisemitism," from the elite. This included:
• Residential Restrictions: Exclusion from certain wealthy neighborhoods.
• "Restricted" Areas: Denial of service or accommodation at hotels, resorts, and social clubs.
• Educational Quotas: Leading universities, most notably Harvard, began instituting quota systems in the 1920s to limit the number of Jewish students admitted, claiming they needed to protect the universities' "Anglo-Saxon" character.

Because of these fears and old hatred The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) experienced a massive revival in the 1920s, expanding its focus beyond Black Americans to target Catholics and Jews as threats to white Protestant supremacy and American values. The KKK's power peaked during this decade with millions of members.

In the end ultimately, the anti-Jewish fear of the 1920s was fueled by a national reaction against perceived foreign and modern threats—from the foreign-speaking immigrant worker to the shadowy international financier—with Jews being cast as the scapegoat for all these unsettling changes.