Tears of History

The Rise of Political Antisemitism in the United States

By: Pierre Birnbaum, Karen Santos Da Silva (Translator)

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Hardcover | 1 August 2023 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.96 x 1.75

Hardcover

$185.80

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For many Jews, for more than a century, the United States has seemed to be a safe haven. There has been antisemitic prejudice, but nothing on the scale of the discrimination, persecution, pogroms, and genocide witnessed in Europe. White American ethnic violence has assailed many targets, but Jews have rarely been among them. Observing what he took to be an American exception, the influential historian Salo Baron challenged the "lachrymose conception" of Jewish history as an unending flow of oppressions, and many have followed him in seeing American Jews as sheltered from violence. But in recent years a spate of antisemitic attacks has cast doubt on this rosy view.

The eminent French scholar Pierre Birnbaum offers a timely reconsideration of the tear-stained pages of Jewish history and the persistence of antisemitism. He explores the promise of American tolerance as well as the darkest moments of American intolerance, such as the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank. Birnbaum engages deeply with Baron's views about Jewish history and tracks the echoes of European antisemitic violence in American culture. He argues that a new and insidious form of antisemitic ideology has arisen, one that sees the state as an instrument of Jewish control--and threatens further bloodshed. Thoughtful and eloquent, Tears of History is an important reflection on the roots of antisemitic violence and hatred.

Industry Reviews

With characteristic understanding, learning, and historical range, Pierre Birnbaum compellingly illuminates central aspects-past and present-of the American Jewish experience. Tears of History provocatively chronicles how antistate white supremacist insurgencies have come to target Jews, transforming prior circumstances in which political antisemitism had proved incapable in the United States to a situation Birnbaum compares to the status of Jews in Weimar Germany and Dreyfus-era France. -- Ira Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
In this chilling book, we get a message from a distinguished scholar of French Jewish history that we may now have entered a dangerous new age. Birnbaum asks readers to contemplate a sea change that seems to be happening in American life, which portends that antisemitism, once absent from the political realm, may be now rearing its ugly head. His history of fringe antisemitism in the American past is well worth reading as we contemplate both present and future. -- Hasia R. Diner, author ofImmigration: An American History
As the leading Jewish historian in France, Birnbaum offers a French perspective on Jewish-American history that compares American antisemitism to its European counterpart. In the process, he calls many myths-including that of American exceptionalism-into question. This interesting, provocative book is more sophisticated than recent books on antisemitism and explores a subject of great contemporary relevance. -- Maurice Samuels, author of The Betrayal of the Duchess
Recommended. * Choice *

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