This book examines the history of antisemitism in the United States and Germany in a novel way by placing the two countries side by side for a sustained comparison of the anti-Jewish environments in both countries from the 1880s to the end of World War II.
Author Richard E. Frankel shatters the widely held notion of exceptionalism in Germany and America: the belief that antisemitism in Germany was uniquely murderous and led inevitably to the Holocaust and that antisemitism in the United States was uniquely benign, making an American Holocaust all but unthinkable. In a series of new and previously published essays that have been revised, updated, and expanded, the book relates antisemitism to issues including Jewish and Chinese immigration, discrimination and exclusion, World War I and its aftermath, Hitler and Henry Ford, Nazis, the American Right, and the Roosevelt Administration, and a German Ku Klux Klan. Taken together, these essays reveal that antisemitism in Germany was less aberrant than commonly believed and that American antisemitism was indeed dangerous and more similar to what existed in Germany during the same period.
Antisemitism Before the Holocaust is an essential volume for students and scholars alike interested in European and American history, the history of the Holocaust and World War I.
Table of Contents:
1. A Transnational Jewish Question: Exploring Antisemitism in the United States and Germany Through the Lens of Global History, 1880-1914 2. ‘No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives’: Comparing Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States 3. An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914-1923 4. The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism: Comparing Coverage of the ‘World Jewish Conspiracy’ in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Dearborn Independent, 1920-1923 5. One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany 6. Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture
About the Author :
Richard E. Frankel is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His interests include antisemitism, nationalism, and political culture. Frankel’s other books include Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (2005) and States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism (2019).
Review :
“In this comparative study, Richard E. Frankel explores the manifestations and significance of modern antisemitism in the United States and Germany before the Holocaust and challenges the general assumption that antisemitism in the United States was essentially different from the more extreme German variant that culminated in the Holocaust… Frankel’s knowledgeable study persuasively refutes widespread assumptions about the comparatively moderate character of American antisemitism in the period 1880 to 1945…His findings will certainly inspire more comparative research on the manifestations of antisemitism in modern history, but also on the political and societal factors that enabled or indeed hindered the effectiveness of its exclusionary message.”
Christhard Hoffmann, University of Bergen, Norway, German History Journal
“Placing antisemitism in Germany and in the United States side by side is not a mere intellectual exercise. Rather, the exploration of Jew-hatred as a transatlantic phenomenon speaks to our current moment of racial reckoning and to escalating antisemitic violence in the United States and Germany. Against this backdrop, Richard Frankel’s erudite and powerful revelations remind us of how much “memory work” remains to be done in both countries… Antisemitism Before the Holocaust… offers a clear-eyed and forceful contribution to discussions of homegrown ethnonationalist movements in the United States.”
S. Jonathan Wiesen, University of Alabama at Birmingham. German Studies Review, Volume 47, Number 3, October 2024, pp. 527-529.
Frankel’s comparative method yields a nuanced picture that complicates simplistic narratives of national uniqueness. His meticulous use of archival sources, newspapers, and correspondence provides a rich empirical foundation. The book’s concision – at just 158 pages – and its structure along thematically organized articles makes it especially valuable for teaching, offering students a compact yet sophisticated entry point into the study of modern antisemitism.
Frankel’s negation of moral hierarchies and his focus on shared mechanisms of exclusion and conspiracy are a noteworthy and enduring achievement. “Antisemitism Before the Holocaust” is a concise and accessible, yet intellectually ambitious study that re-situates antisemitism within the global history of modernity. His work reminds readers that prejudice thrives not in isolation but through transnational exchange, crisis, and – most importantly – contingency
Margarita Lerman, Department of Jewish History, and Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem / Leibniz-Institut für, jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, H-Soz-Kult (2025)
