When Pamella Nadell, Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History, joined former Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) to discuss her sobering new book, Antisemitism: An American Tradition, on October 14 at Politics and Prose, it felt more like an urgent town hall than a typical book launch. 

Nadell explained that this work was born from a moment of shock: the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre. Before that tragedy, she had focused her career on the triumph of Jewish integration, celebrating the “golden age” of American Jewry. But the violence in Pittsburgh forced her to realize that historians, herself included, had missed a crucial, darker narrative. Antisemitism, she argued, is not a foreign virus or a fleeting aberration; it is a foundational American tradition that has persisted for 400 years.

Nadell, director of the Jewish Studies Program, traced this venomous lineage back to 1654, when Governor Peter Stuyvesant tried to expel the first Jewish arrivals in New Amsterdam, branding them a “deceitful race.” She connected those colonial roots to the industrial era, vividly describing how Henry Ford distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the glove boxes of his automobiles. Nadell emphasized that this history “echoes into the present,” culminating in what her book calls a “new litany” of violence: Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Bondi Beach, and the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Despite the heavy subject, Nadell framed her work as a distinct act of patriotism. She insisted that telling the true, unvarnished history of the United States—including its ugly prejudices—is essential for the nation’s health. She warned of a modern “virtual ghetto,” noting that while physical barriers have fallen, Jews are increasingly isolated online and in political spaces, facing vitriol from both the right and the left. Her book stands as a testament to resilience and historical truth, offering a necessary map for a community trying to understand why, after centuries of apparent success, they still feel unsafe in the land they call home.