1933 and 2023 – The Recurring Nightmare of Rising Antisemitism

“The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” proclaimed The Atlantic magazine in its April lead article. Its modern retro cover with English and Yiddish characters shaded in dim red, white, and blue colors portends an eviction of the Jews from the American public square. Its liberal Jewish author, Franklin Foer, frets how quickly the best of times for American Jews in terms of safety and prosperity has turned dark and foreboding.

Foer says that the progressive left and educational institutions are now lining up Jews for condemnation and cooking up a toxic brew of antisemitism in the name of “anti-colonialism.” Both leftwing and rightwing activists seem to be grabbing the torch of antisemitism from those who bore it in the past. Can Jews and Christians do anything about it? There is a powerful precedent that could supply a measure of hope.

In February 1933, Adolf Hitler of the Nazi Party assumed leadership of the government in Germany. Soon, there were credible and disturbing reports leaking out of Germany about a spreading pattern of depredations directed against Germany’s Jewish populace. One New Yorker, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, immediately grasped that this rise of antisemitism in Germany was going to hit against the American shores stirring up native antisemitism. The Jewish leader recognized that success in a democracy required allies. He was prepared for the fight. In just nine days, Wise assembled a stellar program and secured Madison Square Garden for an evening of protest on March 27, 1933.

The rabbi was especially qualified for public leadership on this issue at this perilous moment. He was honorary president of the American Jewish Congress and a Reform Rabbi in New York City of the Free Synagogue which he founded in 1907. Both the Jewish and Christian publics generally recognized his leadership. He was no stranger to readers of the English language press, who regarded him as a reliable spokesman for Jewish interests.

The rally collected an astounding audience and received terrific coverage in both the English and Yiddish language newspapers. The following day, The New York Times’ largest headline proclaimed, “55,000 HERE STAGE PROTEST HITLER ATTACKS ON JEWS.” Wise’s speech was quoted at length, as were those of noted New York politicians.

The Madison Square Garden meeting was a turning point in the United States’ history of Jewish and Christian relations. While the clergy of both sides had made tentative gestures toward better relations, they had never before risked offending their respective constituencies by a public display of unity in such a large public spotlight. Wise took the chance by urging his fellow Jews to welcome Christians on the podium and reminding Christians that this was their opportunity too.

So, an additional element was present on the stage that would have been less familiar to the public. Placed under the sub-heading, “Other Faiths Join In,” the Times story described how an assembly of well-respected Christian clergy was also present! Their voices were spreading the message that Hitler’s treatment of the German Jews must not be met with a silence from Christian America. In fact, the Christian speechmakers went further than expected by turning the spotlight on antisemitism in America, which suddenly was in the glare of headlines about Germany’s shameful treatment of its Jewish citizens.

The appearance of these leading Christians did not materialize out of thin air. For decades, Wise had been preparing the way by planting seeds of inter-religious cooperation on social reform projects with like-minded Christian clergy. Wise’s biographer Melvin Urosky noted that the rabbi joined Christian clergy very early in criticizing liquor and gambling interests and child labor.  Wise started this sowing in 1900 when he was beginning his rabbinate in Portland, Oregon. He brought his public concern to New York City where he joined with progressive Christians to fight poverty, pollution, and the lack of public playgrounds Now, it seemed, his efforts were making a more fully developed understanding of antisemitism important to American democratic thinking. This development would eventually lead to a new, post-war era of Jewish-Christian relations.

Wise knew he needed these allies in the non-Jewish world, and he knew where to find them. The lowest hanging fruit were the representatives of progressive Christianity and the progressive politicians with whom he had taken such pains to cultivate. In time, well-known Protestant Christian intellectuals such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr also raised their voices.

Fast forward to now. Once again, American antisemitism, long assumed to be if not dead at least close to it, has sprung into newly revived virulence. Once again, Jewish people need allies. Once again, American Jews are tasked with the challenge of making the case to counter an increasingly vocal and menacing opposition to the ideas that Jewish citizens are to be valued and their civil rights protected. Only this time, the big arena of conflict is right here in America, not over in Germany.

But where are our allies to be sought and where are they to be found? One thing that is increasingly clear is they are not to be found among the groups where Stephen Wise found them. One need only behold the spectacle of Ivy League university presidents Liz Magill, Claudine Gray, and Sally Kornbluth tap-dancing around the question of whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their respective schools’ code of conduct. Their tepid response to the intensified spike in hateful speech and action at bastions of academia around the country is a sad testimony to the shocking decline of the level of positive response not only to Israelis but also to Jews generally. Where once such progressive institutions could be safely counted in the corner of Jewish support, that is presently, emphatically, not the case.

The same erosion of support for Jews is evident in progressive political and ecclesiastical circles. At one time such people were resolutely dependable, judging by the array of politicians and clergy Wise was able to assemble on such short notice in 1933, which included former New York Governor and presidential candidate Al Smith, Senator Robert F. Wagner, and Mayor John Patrick O’Brien. In the ensuing years, such well-known political figures as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey would add their voices to the chorus. Such is no longer the case.

Progressive politicians today are likely to voice a full-throated condemnation of Israel. Even the more moderate voices on the left speak far more cautiously in its defense, if at all. The same conspicuously timid advocacy for Jews seems to be the road taken by American mainline Christianity, or what remains of it. As early as November 2023, Union Theological Seminary was preparing an endorsement of disinvestment from defense companies that sell to Israel, liking such transactions to support of the apartheid government in South Africa. Now, as the Associated Press recently reported, Israel’s staunch supporters both in word and deed are more likely to be found among American Evangelicals. By contrast, try finding “We Stand With Israel” on the reader boards of the mainline churches in your hometown.

In the aftermath of the 1933 rally, it was a different story. Then, a robust statement from a broad spectrum of Christian churches and organizations was forthcoming in terms of further public expressions of sympathy for the Jewish plight, which in turn resulted in a strengthening of relations between the Jewish and Christian representatives who had participated in the March 27 protests or were otherwise sympathetic with their aim. On May 26, the Times carried a petition composed by Harry Emerson Fosdick of the Riverside Church in Manhattan, which was signed by approximately 1200 Protestant ministers, including prominent figures, such as Everett R. Clinchy, founder and director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, through which the petition was organized. It read, in part, “We, a group of Christian ministers, are profoundly disturbed by the plight of our Jewish brethren in Germany. That no doubt may exist anywhere concerning our Christian conscience in the matter, we are constrained, alike with sorrow and indignation to voice our protests against the present ruthless persecution of the Jews under Herr Hitler’s regime.”

Of course, at the time, there was no Jewish homeland. It is much easier to side with the defenseless. That too has changed. No longer defenseless, Israel is now cast in the role of villain and oppressor as never before and bears the brunt of the anti-Israel feeling that has festered into a revival of an all-too-recognizable generalized hatred of Jews. In addition, statements of support from Christian clergy, where they can be found, no longer command the same attention as they did in 1933 and the public role of Christian intellectuals such as Niebuhr is virtually non-existent.

What, then, is the source of the uniquely frenzied form of hatred that presently emanates against Israel that has now so easily spilled over onto all Jews, Israeli or not? Of course, lest anyone think that hostility toward Jews emanates solely from the left, set that thought aside. While the landscape of leftist attitudes has shifted dramatically over the decades, the stony terrain of some rightists has remained depressingly the same. The demonstrators who chanted “The Jews Will Not Replace Us” in Charlottesville in 2017 sound like the antisemites of the nineteen twenties and thirties such as the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin who took to the radio to regularly denounce “Jewish bankers” and promote the infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Such hatred from the remnants of the antisemitic right is not unexpected. It is the abandonment of longtime allies on the left that is so jolting. In an insightful article, “What Jews Mean to America,” that appeared in April’s National Review, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Director of Yeshiva University’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, writes that contemporary progressives despise the parallel of Israel’s chosen role by God to bring forward salvation to the nations and America’s covenant with God to be a new nation to bring about democracy and equality of peoples. The progressive narrative rigidly divides the world into the oppressors and the oppressed so that neither Israel nor America can be blessed with an honorable role.

I would take this a step further. The Jews have been and continue to be, whether they know it or not, a transcendent, prophetic presence that, in the manner of Moses to Pharoah, bears witness against the falsehood of self-serving, self-righteous would-be masters of the universe who would displace God’s authoritative claim upon creation and humanity. So, the new oppressors turn their hatred toward our contemporary prophetic messengers and the message that every person in America—Jew and non-Jew— are equal bearers of the image and love of God.

This scripturally rooted understanding of the grace of God toward Israel and America is the point of connection that Rabbi Wise seized upon to inspire those of the Christian faith to take up the Jewish cause. This is our opportunity to speak to our character as a city and nation. There are a vast number of Catholics, and Protestants, particularly evangelicals, in New York City who could be enlisted. Will they revive the 1933 spirit of Jewish-Christian unity against antisemitism? This is our recurring American faith-based dream of liberty that can defeat the nightmare of 21st-century antisemitism.

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A native New Yorker, Alan M. Shore holds a doctorate in Modern Jewish History and Culture from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He has a particular interest in Yiddish language and literature. Shore contributed an entry on the work of Sholem Asch to the Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture and wrote the foreword to A Hebraic Inkling: C. S. Lewis on Judaism and the Jews by P. H. Brazier.