Antisemitism beyond conspiracy

Interview with historian Britt Tevis

Hello and Welcome to the Documensch Newsletter,

This week we marked Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The historical lessons of the Holocaust are both more important and more contested than ever. Three decades ago James Young, a pioneer in the field of Holocaust memorialization, offered insights that are as timely as they are clarifying. “The ‘art of memory’ remains incomplete…until we who remember the Holocaust have grasped — and then responded to — current suffering in the world.” Seems like the art of memory, the work of Holocaust education and scholarship, and the sanity of our political and institutional leaders remains… incomplete.

The past several months have offered a sobering look at what happens when the institutions fighting for civil rights and Jewish safety become contested terrain. Last fall, the FBI severed ties with the ADL, accusing the organization of spying on conservatives. The ADL quietly removed “Protect Civil Rights” from its website, laid off 22 staffers, and shuttered its flagship anti-bias education program after four decades.

Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive Jewish organizations condemned the ADL’s “Mamdani Monitor” as “Islamophobic and racist,” while J Street accused the ADL of applying scrutiny to left-of-center critics of Israel that it never applies to MAGA leaders whose antisemitism poses, in their words, “a clear and dangerous threat to American Jews.” A senior ADL antisemitism researcher departed to work for the Nexus Project, a rival watchdog that has repeatedly challenged the ADL’s approach.

With the memory of the Holocaust in our hearts and debates raging about how best to ensure the safety of Jews around the world, we find ourselves caught in political currents that are heavy on histrionics but light on history.

Enter historian Britt Tevis.

Her new book, Sanctioned Bigotry: A Documentary History of Antisemitism in the United States, out from Yale University Press next month, offers something the current cacophony around antisemitism largely lacks: historical grounding. Tevis argues that antisemitism in America is not best understood as a conspiracy theory or a feeling — it is a concerted, recurring effort to deny Jews equal civil and political rights, animated by Christian nationalism, racial science, and conspiratorial thinking in overlapping combinations. The archives, she shows, make this uncomfortably clear. She shares this perspective and more in our monthly interview, below.

We’ll be back in a few weeks with the Documensch Research Report. In the meantime, check us on the Documensch Daily website or on Bluesky to get your fix before then.

Comments, suggestions, and questions are always welcome: bermanarchive@stanford.edu.

-Ari

Ari Y Kelman, Director, Berman Archive

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Antisemitism in the archive
Interview with historian Britt Tevis

What does it mean to study American antisemitism as a historian? Not a journalist, not a theorist, but someone trained to read what the archives actually say? With her forthcoming book Sanctioned Bigotry: A Documentary History of Antisemitism in the United States (Yale University Press, May 2026), Britt Tevis, assistant professor of history at Syracuse University, offers a fresh and unsettling answer: antisemitism in the United States has always been, at its core, a political project and a sustained effort to deny Jews equal civil and political rights. We connected with Tevis this week to talk about the 178 documents she assembled for this book, what they reveal about the intellectual forces driving anti-Jewish bigotry in America, and why she thinks most public conversation on the subject is still getting it wrong.

Tell us a bit about your background, research interests, and your new book.

Britt Tevis: I am a historian by training. I earned my Ph.D. and J.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I had the good fortune of learning Jewish history from Tony Michels and David Sorkin. My research examines the intersection of Jews and law, illuminating the many legal entanglements between Jews and the state. My new book, Sanctioned Bigotry: A Documentary History of Antisemitism in the United States, exemplifies my research interests by illuminating instances of anti-Jewish bigotry, violence, and discrimination that, to varying degrees and in different ways, involved the country’s legal regime, policymakers, and state systems.

In the most basic sense, the book is a collection of 178 documents that originated between 1645 and 2024, which collectively highlight different dimensions of antisemitism. I’ve arranged these sources thematically in ten chapters, each of which explores a different dimension of antisemitism. These chapters address themes such as the blurring of church and state; antisemitism and anti-Black racism; immigration and citizenship; defamation; exclusion and segregation, among others. Each chapter begins with an introductory essay identifying some larger historical trends illuminated by the included documents and each document is paired with historical commentary. Finally, the book as a whole begins with an introductory essay that offers a fresh historical analysis about the operation of antisemitism in the United States.

The book is a collection of primary documents. When did you realize that you had a collection that needed a book of its own?

The realization that compiling a book of primary sources highlighting antisemitism in the United States would constitute a meaningful scholarly contribution didn’t come to me in a single moment but a string of conversations and interactions. For one, because I have been researching and writing on this topic for the better part of a decade, scholars began reaching out to me to ask for primary sources that they could use in their classrooms, and it struck me as odd that they seemed to be operating without them. Another compelling moment came when a good friend and fellow historian pointed out that I had amassed quite a collection of these documents and that I might consider sharing them to the benefit of educators, scholars, and students. Finally, almost in passing, I ran the idea of producing a collection of primary sources about antisemitism in the US to a trusted mentor and he immediately and emphatically told me I had to pursue this project. He was so insistent that he followed up within a few days with an email instructing me to get to work at once. These were all important exchanges that convinced me I should produce this volume.

What is the story that the book tells about American antisemitism?

First and foremost, Sanctioned Bigotry shows readers the who, what, where, when, and why of antisemitism in the United States — specific and detailed examples of anti-Jewish bigotry, discrimination, and violence in America’s past. The work does not claim to include every antisemitic episode in the nation’s past; rather, it highlights some instances that many readers will be familiar with as well as many events and phenomena that remain poorly understood and even barely recognized as such.

Second and equally if not more importantly, Sanctioned Bigotry offers readers a fresh way to think about antisemitism in the US. So often one reads that antisemitism is a “conspiracy theory,” and while conspiratorial thinking is certainly central to the operation of antisemitism in the United States, this definition is insufficient, because it simplifies antisemitism while, at the same time, focuses our attention on the content of a given conspiracy while ignoring how that conspiracy has functioned to deny Jewish equality. In part, the popular misconceptualization of antisemitism is the result of the fact that most of the people invited to speak about antisemitism in the public sphere are not historians but journalists or theorists of one sort of another who, unfortunately, have declined to generate any new ideas on the subject since at least the mid twentieth century, if not earlier.

By contrast, Sanctioned Bigotry is a work of history, meaning that it offers readers an understanding of antisemitism based on archival research. And, as is so often the case, the archives offer us a fresh perspective on the subject. In fact, archival research shows that antisemitism in the United States, in the most basic sense, is Jewish political inequality — an effort to deny Jewish equal civil and political rights. This concerted political effort to deny Jews’ rights has been inspired by three strands of overlapping yet nevertheless distinct intellectual threads: (1) Christian nationalism — the belief that America is and ought to be a Christian nation, rendering adherents to all other faiths second-class citizens; (2) racial science — the belief that people can be divided into groups of biologically distinct people based on how they look, and that how one looks is directly related to one’s intellectual and moral capacity; and (3) conspiracy theory — explanations of the world that resist falsification or verification, which point to evil actors (in this case Jews) to explicate ongoing developments.

Take Robert Bowers’ 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Pittsburgh, PA, for example. That incident cannot properly be called a conspiracy theory; this was an instance of mass murder — the right being denied in this case was the ultimate right, the right of life. And what motivated the murder? According to his online posts, Bowers was motivated by the belief that Jews were immigration champions. In other words, the notion that Jewish Americans were engaged in politics — in this case, immigrant advocacy — meant, in the mind of this shooter, that, for the good of the country, they ought to be murdered. Now, obviously Jews do not have a single unified position on the issue of immigration. However, the conspiratorial belief that Jews hold a single position in favor of immigrants motivated anti-Jewish violence.

Time and again, the archives show that the diversity of expressions of antisemitism — ranging from violence to graffiti on Jewish headstones — share a common goal: Jewish political and civil inequality. Moreover, that goal has been motivated by Christian nationalism, racial science, and/or conspiratorial thinking.