I’m not Jewish, and until relatively recently, I don’t think I understood just how deeply antisemitism runs through history—or how persistently it has followed Jewish people into the present.

Like a lot of people, I learned about antisemitism primarily through the lens of the Holocaust. I understood, of course, that hatred of Jews existed before then and continued afterward. But I’m not sure I understood the sheer continuity of it—how an ancient hatred has survived across centuries, countries and political movements, changing its language and its targets along the way.

And the more I started paying attention to what was happening in the world now, the more I wanted to understand what came before it.

Because one of the things I’ve learned over years of covering news is that very little happens in a vacuum. The stories we see unfolding in real time often have roots stretching much further back than the news cycle allows us to see.

The Deep Roots of Antisemitism

When it comes to antisemitism, those roots run extraordinarily deep.

And the numbers suggest this isn’t just history.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2025—an average of 17 per day. While that was down from the record set the year before, it was still the third-highest total since the ADL began tracking incidents in 1979, and five times higher than a decade ago.

And the FBI’s numbers tell a similar story: In its latest hate-crime data, 69% of all reported single-bias religious hate-crime offenses were anti-Jewish.

In other words, this isn’t just a conversation about the past. It’s a conversation about what’s happening right now. That’s why I wanted to talk with historian Pamela Nadell. Nadell is an historian of American Jewish history and the author of Antisemitism, an American Tradition, a book that traces the history of antisemitism from its centuries-old European roots through its evolution in the United States.

Our conversation follows much of that same path.

We talk about Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal and arriving in New Amsterdam in the 1600s; the Rothschild conspiracy theories; Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the open discrimination American Jews faced in employment, housing and education; the Holocaust and the postwar period that some have called a “golden age” for American Jews; the Tree of Life synagogue shooting; October 7; anti-Zionism; college campuses; social media; and the rise in antisemitism Nadell sees today.

The Question That Stayed With Me the Most

Perhaps the question that stayed with me most after our conversation: How much does the present resemble the past?

I asked Nadell directly whether she believes we are back in the 1930s.

Her answer was more nuanced—and, I think, more useful—than a simple yes or no:

“The good thing about being a historian is I know that history doesn’t repeat; it echoes from the past into the present.”

She doesn’t believe we are reliving history exactly. But she does believe we should be paying attention to the echoes.

The full conversation is just under an hour, and I encourage you to listen to it all. Below, you’ll find a condensed version of our discussion, beginning centuries ago and ending with the question that matters most now: Where do we go from here?

The Historical Roots of Antisemitism

A conversation with historian and author, Pamela Nadell

SONNI: For someone whose only knowledge of the topic is what happened in World War II: How bad is antisemitism in the country right now? And how bad has it always been?

PAMELA NADELL: The first thing that I would say is, right now it’s really bad. We’re in a moment that, as early as 2021, I was calling the high tide of American antisemitism.

As far as the question about where has it always been, we really have to go back to Christianity and what you learned growing up, which is reading the Gospels and the idea that the Jews called for the murder of Jesus, and then the idea that the Church Fathers created, which was that the Jews should be tolerated, but they should always live in very difficult circumstances.

SONNI: If you were to compare the roots of this—how this all started—how bad is what you’re seeing happening today relative to some of the bigger historical issues that we’ve known about?

PAMELA: It’s so interesting that you reference the Holocaust, because there are Holocaust museums and memorials all across the United States, including a huge one on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. And I think there was the idea that if we would only learn the lesson of the horror of the Holocaust, and we would learn that in the United States and around the world, that Jew hatred would disappear.

And, of course, the Jew hatred, the justification for the Jew hatred of the Holocaust, was that the Jews were a degenerate racial group and that they endangered the Aryan race, and so therefore they had to be exterminated, root and branch. And that led to the extermination of six million men, women, and children.

And what we have at the moment is we have the legacy coming from the right of that idea that the Jews remain a degenerate race that’s dangerous to the whites. But we also have at the moment what’s coming from the left, which is that the Jews have created this state in Israel, this settler colonial society, and that needs to be destroyed.

SONNI: Let’s take it back. You go all the way back to medieval Iberia—Spain, Portugal—the history of these forced conversions, the Inquisition. Why is that an important foundation for understanding modern antisemitism?

PAMELA: It’s important for understanding modern antisemitism because it actually has the element of both Christian anti-Judaism and racial antisemitism already sort of merging.

What people don’t remember is that the Inquisition—and I bet most of our listeners have heard of that—the Inquisition with its burning people at the stake and its torture and its torture chambers and its trials, the Inquisition could only try Catholics. And the people they were trying were Jews at one time. Some of them remained Jewishly affiliated, but they had been physically, violently persecuted starting in the late 1390s, so way, way back, and many of them saved their lives by being dragged to the baptismal fonts.

And then what happens after that is that in Spain they become suspicious. Both Spain and Portugal become suspicious that these people, after a generation, and they’re raising their children—what are they doing? They’re secretly practicing Judaism, which makes them heretics. And if there’s heresy in the church, the Messiah is not going to come again.

So what do they do? They establish the Inquisition. They go after those people who have to prove that they’re faithful Catholics, but of course they’re not able to. And some of them were not. Some of them were secretly Jewish.

And the reason I start there is because some of them managed to escape Spain and Portugal, and eventually they came to what became the United States.

Jewish Life and Antisemitism in Early America

SONNI: Let’s follow those people. Let’s track from modern-day Spain and Portugal to America. They’re coming to America?

PAMELA: Jews come in 1654. They’re actually coming from Brazil, which had become once again after a war a colony of Portugal. And Portugal and Spain in the 1490s had thrown all the Jews out. Actually, in the case of Portugal, they threw them out and then they forced them to convert.

So a lot of Portuguese Jews were really Portuguese Catholics who had once been Jews, [and] really remained staunchly, secretly Jewish. And so they had lived in Brazil when it was a colony of the Dutch, not a colony of Portugal. And then the Portuguese conquer it, and they’re very generous. They give them three months to get out; otherwise, they’re going to be tried by the Inquisition.

So they come to New Amsterdam. Most of the Portuguese Jews who fled, or the Jews in Brazil, most of them actually just go to Amsterdam, where they’re allowed to live as Jews. So they come to New Amsterdam, and Peter Stuyvesant, who’s the governor of New Amsterdam—it’s not yet called New York—Stuyvesant wants to kick them out.

So when you say Jews were moving from places to places, often they did because either they couldn’t afford to live somewhere, or they weren’t able to stay there, or they got thrown out.

SONNI: We know New York as modern-day Americans as maybe the most welcoming place for Jewish people in America. How does it go from a place where they are experiencing yet more persecution to where it actually ends up being a refuge of sorts?

PAMELA: You’re absolutely right. So what happens is Stuyvesant doesn’t get the permission to kick the Jews out. The colonies—they’re so tiny then—they need colonists, they need people. He’s not allowed to kick them out.

And eventually more Jews come to what become the colonies, and then what becomes the United States, and eventually the community grows to the size of where it is now—a significant religious minority community of somewhere between, depends on how you count it, somewhere between 6.5 and 8 million people.

And in America, Jews do what they did elsewhere. They thrive. They build synagogues. They build community centers. They create schools. They raise their families. They interact with their neighbors. They serve in public office.

…And that’s what I think makes this story tough, because on the one hand Jews thrive and succeed; on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that they don’t continue to face anti-Jewish animosity.

The Rise of Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories

SONNI: You talk about this evolution of attitude toward the Rothschild family. In the 1830s, some American newspapers were actually quite favorable in their coverage of them. But now when you say the word “Rothschild,” that family name has really become shorthand for some elaborate conspiracy theories about Jewish power, about Jewish influence. How does that transformation happen, and why has that narrative proven to be so durable over time?

PAMELA: I think it’s become so durable because I think the Rothschilds, in a sense, have become the poster child for antisemitic conspiracies, antisemitic ideas.

So what you have to remember is this is a family in the mid-1700s. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, he actually lives in a ghetto in Frankfurt am Main. He has a whole bunch of sons, and eventually he becomes a banker, and he sends the sons to the glittering European capitals where they become bankers. But he starts out, he’s very poor, and eventually, by the early 1800s, they amass a great deal of wealth.

So on the one hand, you’re right. There’s that great article from like the 1830s where they’re saying, “Look at this amazing family and what they’ve been able to do and how they’ve been able to escape the ghetto.”

But then, at the same time, there becomes—and some of it’s coming from the left—this idea that these are wealthy bankers, and they’re controlling not only the economy, but they’re controlling the world, and they’re controlling the governments, and they’re controlling the wars.

And so historians look at them and say that they are really the poster child for all antisemitic conspiracy theories. And this is before the granddaddy of all of those conspiracy theories, which is something called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But that doesn’t emerge till the 20th century.

SONNI: You talk about the story of the Dearborn Independent. This is the early 20th century. You recount Henry Ford, who is dealing with a struggling publication, telling his staff to “find an evil, go after it, and stay after it.” That decision seems to ultimately have led to the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and years of antisemitic propaganda. Would you call this a turning point in the history of really mainstreaming antisemitism in America?

PAMELA: Absolutely, because first of all, what people don’t remember: Henry Ford was the most famous American of his day. I mean, at one point he was even contemplating running for president. And so whatever he said, people paid attention to, including, by the way, Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany in 1923 and beyond.

And Ford, he has this newspaper. For 91 weeks he ran a column called “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” and eventually [it] got translated into multiple languages. Our listeners can actually go onto Wikimedia and read all of its articles.

And so he did. He published this tract called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was created in Russia in 1903. It purports to show a cabal of Jewish leaders fomenting liberal revolutions to take over the world. Same things that were charged against the Rothschilds, but doesn’t use the Rothschild name.

And it’s a fiction. I mean, we even know what it’s based on. But it doesn’t matter, because Henry Ford publishes it, and if Henry Ford said it was in the Dearborn Independent, and it was in his newspaper, then it was true. People trusted him.

Antisemitism in the Years Leading Up to World War II

SONNI: We’re talking Great Depression era, World War II, ’30s all the way up to the mid-’40s. I think history kind of compresses this time period. But this was years of hatred fomenting, years of rhetoric, normalization, escalating hostility. Talk us through how that process unfolded and some of the warning signs that may be similar to what we’re seeing today.

PAMELA: What makes the ’20s and the ’30s and into World War II and even beyond, what makes them so tough is that Ford, his rhetoric sets a tone. But then what happens is there are quotas on the admission of Jews to colleges and universities. It starts at the Ivy League, but extends to hundreds of schools.

There are places that—nobody’s going to remember this, none of our listeners are going to remember this—but if you wanted to get a job or rent an apartment, you opened the newspaper every morning and you went to the want ads, right? And, by the way, the want ads were want ads for women, want ads for men, male jobs, female jobs.

And antisemitism was at your breakfast table because so many of those want ads said “Christians only.” Jews can’t apply. I mean, even in places like Brooklyn, where there were tons of Jews, even for jobs like secretaries and stenographers. Not that anybody knows what a stenographer is any longer.

And so it sets a tone.

But then what we also have, especially with the rise of the Nazis, is we have the Nazis literally are trying to fund Nazi sympathizers in the United States. They’re doing it through their consuls. They’re doing it through engaging people like Charles Lindbergh. There’s an America First movement that he’s championing.

And as a result, you even see street brawls where Nazis will be having street meetings, and Jews will go, and there’ll be fights between the two groups.

So when you think of the moment we’re in now, where you’re seeing a lot of these protests on streets of different cities, it echoes that period of the 1930s. Echoes the period before World War II.

The Postwar “Golden Age” of American Jewish Life

SONNI: After World War II, Jews did thrive in America, and there was a time, maybe up until the Tree of Life or October 7, where Jews seemed to have found a place where they felt safe. Am I characterizing this correctly?

PAMELA: You’re definitely characterizing it correctly. So correctly that American Jews have been arguing, starting in the 2020s, we’ve been arguing about: When did the golden age end?

First of all, let me tell you, 1945. The minute 1945 hits and the war is over, antisemitism doesn’t go away in America. In fact, it really crops up again. But what happens in those postwar years is that those structural discriminations against Jews become illegal.

All of a sudden, there’s fair educational acts. You cannot discriminate against students who are applying to colleges and universities. There are fair housing acts. You cannot put an ad that says Christians only should rent this apartment. And ultimately, the 1964 Civil Rights Act becomes protective of Jews as well as people of color and preventing them from discrimination, and also women. I mean, it says we can’t discriminate employment against women.

So for Jews, all of a sudden, all these barriers that existed, they’re knocked down and they flood in. And so there’s the perception that antisemitism is gone, that Jews have complete and full access to the United States everywhere.

And there are so many markers of that that people kind of just ignored the markers that showed that there were still examples of Jew hatred.

I’ll give you one example. I was talking to a colleague one day, another professor, and he grew up in the ’80s, New Jersey. And I said, “Do you ever experience antisemitism?” He says, “Nah, never.”

And then he says, “Well, you know, there was that one time where those guys stole a bulldozer and they bulldozed the wall of the brand-new synagogue in my town.”

And so then I went looking in the newspapers of the time, and I saw they also wrote on one of the walls they didn’t bulldoze, “Into the ovens with the Jews.”

So Jews succeeded, and they entered society, but Jew hatred continued to percolate underneath.

Tree of Life, October 7, and a New Era of Antisemitism

SONNI: You said that the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh was a turning point for you. Let’s refresh everyone’s memory.

PAMELA: On a Saturday morning—Jews worship in their synagogues on Saturday mornings—in the synagogue building of the Tree of Life in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh, a white nationalist who left his screed on social media, he burst into a synagogue and he murdered 11 people while they were at prayer.

And in some ways this was a major turning point for the American Jewish community.

I need to tell you that American Jews have long been worried about being attacked. There’s no question. I mean, my children went to a Jewish day school, and in the early 2000s, every morning, bomb-sniffing dogs went through the building to keep them safe.

…And if you walk by a synagogue, whether it’s in New York City or it’s in Pittsburgh or it’s in the suburbs not far from where I live, there are guards outside synagogues and there are concrete barriers so trucks can’t ram into them. This has been a longstanding problem.

This murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue really sent a shock wave across America’s Jews. It’s the deadliest attack on American Jews so far, and it came from a white nationalist who hated Jews and hated immigrants.

But when we move to October 7, the shock of October 7—which didn’t shock me because I had been watching the anti-Israel, anti-Zionism coming from the left for a long time; it comes straight out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s to the United States—but I was horrified, of course, because this was the kind of attack that Jews had endured in the pogroms in Europe, in the Holocaust.

It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. 1,200 people were murdered, 250 were taken hostage. The youngest was under the age of one. The oldest was a man in his 80s.

And it unleashed, as I am convinced that the attackers expected, it unleashed a horrific war. But it also unleashed a media campaign against Jews around the world, and particularly in the United States.

SONNI: Looking back on how people responded after October 7, what was the immediate reaction that was the most shocking to you?

PAMELA: The immediate reaction that was the most shocking, of course, because I’m a professor, was 30 Harvard student organizations signed on to a statement blaming Israel for the violence, blaming Israel for the attack, and then saying that the occupation of Gaza—which, by the way, Israel did not occupy Gaza at that point; they did at one point, but they had pulled out—they blamed Israel and Zionism for everything that has happened since then.

And, of course, this is part of this longstanding anti-Zionist campaign. It’s so much so that now there are student policies at certain schools that recognize that calling a Jew “Zionist,” that they’re using it essentially as an epithet.

What they do is they say that they’re not antisemitic, but they’re only anti-Zionist. But we know that over 90% of American Jews, every time there’s a survey, they believe Israel has a right to [exist]. And some of it’s because they need a place if they have to go somewhere.

Understanding Zionism and Its Connection to Israel

SONNI: Start by explaining what Zionism even is, and why it became so entwined with everything that it has been in the course of this discussion.

PAMELA: Zionism was the national movement for a Jewish state. I mean, it’s created in the late 1890s, but it’s built on the historic connection that Jews have to that land, to the land of—now it’s called Israel or Israel-Palestine.

But Jews, their homeland is the land of Zion. Jerusalem was their capital, and every year Jews have yearned across the millennia. They’ve ended their Passover seders with “Next year in Jerusalem,” meaning yearning to go back to Jerusalem. You often find that Jews who live elsewhere, when they die, their bodies are flown to be buried in their historic homeland.

So there’s a millennial-old Jewish connection to the land. Jews continue to live there. There were always Jews who were inhabitants of the land, even after it was conquered by Muhammad’s armies, even if it was conquered by the Crusaders, then by the Ottomans. Jews have always been there.

But the modern movement, it’s part of modern nationalist movements. The modern movement was a late-19th-century movement that recognized that there was so much Jew hatred in Europe that Jews had to have their own state to protect them.

So Jews move there. They’re not—I mean, yes, they colonize. They settle. They settle there, but they’re not the British who are creating colonies to milk them for their resources. They settle there and they build up the foundations of what becomes a community.

And then after World War II, the United Nations—as the British, who had held the mandate on the land, the British say, “We can’t solve this problem.” Just like they held the mandate over India, “We can’t solve this problem. You have to solve this problem.”

And so the United Nations says, “We’re going to have two states. We’re going to have an Arab state”—they were using the word Arab, not Palestine, at that point—“we’re going to have an Arab state, and we’re going to have a Jewish state.”

The Jews accept it. The Arabs say no. The Jews proclaim their independence in the Declaration of the Independence of the State of Israel in May of 1948, and five Arab armies invade. And the Israelis survived, and they have survived multiple wars, multiple attacks, including the most recent one.

And the issue is today: 45% of the world’s Jews live in Israel. If there is no Jewish state, where are they going to go?

SONNI: How has “Zionism” become a bad word?

PAMELA: It’s become an epithet. It’s become a bad word because it’s a way of expressing, kind of in shorthand and code, opposition to the existence of the state of Israel.

And what nobody remembers is that after 1948, there were about 800,000 Jews living in the Middle East and in North Africa, and the conditions in Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, and Egypt, Yemen became so impossible that they fled. They were either pushed out or they fled.

So today, about half the population of Israel, not hailed from Europe. They are either immigrants or the children of immigrants who came from the Middle East and North Africa.

So every time you hear, “Oh, the Zionists are white settler colonists,” they’re not. They come from the Middle East and North Africa, and they had no place else to go.

SONNI: A lot of the conversations that are happening about this topic are happening on American college campuses. If you could go to a group of these encampments, particularly right after October 7, what one argument would you want to make?

PAMELA: What I would ask as a faculty member is, I would ask for complexity, for understanding that this is an intractable situation, that there’s been horrific suffering on both sides, and that despite the best efforts—for example, President Clinton was very, very close to creating a Palestinian state—that there needs to be a way for the two peoples to figure out how to create two states in that area.

But I’m really convinced that at this point that two-state solution is dead in the water.

When Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism Intersect

SONNI: What do you say to people who say, “I’m not against any individual Jewish person. I am only against the actions of the Israeli government?” What are they missing, if anything, in your view?

PAMELA: First of all, it’s acceptable to oppose the actions of any government, right? We’ve had demonstrations in the United States, the No Kings demonstrations. As long as we’re not in an authoritarian situation, we’re in a democracy. People can oppose the actions of the government, and they do, and they should.

The difference is when it spills over into violence.

And what we’ve had in the United States recently, like I talked about a little while ago, is we’ve had these violent attacks against Jewish people. Who are the perpetrators? In Pittsburgh, it came from the right, but the perpetrators now are coming from the left.

And I live outside of Washington, D.C. And in May of 2025, a beautiful young couple was gunned down as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, a social event where Jews who worked in politics in D.C. could meet one another.

…The young woman who was murdered, Sarah Milgrim, graduated my university. And that just showed where this rhetoric, this constant drumbeat, where they say, “I’m not antisemitic, I’m only anti-Zionist”—this constant drumbeat is allowing violence to break out.

Rhetoric—you can’t disassociate antisemitic rhetoric or anti-Zionist rhetoric from antisemitic violence.

Are We Hearing Echoes of the 1930s?

SONNI: Are we back in the ’30s? We talked about the period of 10 to 15 years where things were small at first, and then when things finally took root, they got big and they got big quick. So are we back there?

PAMELA: The good thing about being a historian is I know that history doesn’t repeat; it echoes from the past into the present.

And we are hearing those echoes.

We’re hearing them because in the ’30s, the antisemitism, especially in America, but also in Europe, came from the right, primarily. Although not in the Soviet Union—the Soviet Union came from the left. Then in America, it came primarily from the right.

So we’re hearing those echoes, but we’re also hearing the echoes from the Soviet Union’s exportation of its anti-Zionism in the 1960s to the United States and its client states around the world.

So I won’t say it’s the same. But it’s definitely rhyming from the past.

Social Media and the Spread of Antisemitism

SONNI: There is a theory that there is an infiltration of money coming in from foreign actors who are subsidizing bot farms on social media to create hateful rhetoric, or these nefarious actors that are quite literally permeating the minds of young America. Do you bite into that theory—that the attack isn’t coming from guns and mortars and missiles, but is rather slowly seeping in through our phone screens?

PAMELA: Well, I definitely think it’s seeping in through social media. There’s absolutely no question.

And the reality is that even if the U.S. were to pass laws controlling social media, social media is global. So young people—and I’m not on social media that much—but they’re going to be hearing this stuff. It’s just going to come in, even if the big social media firms like Meta, even if they did something.

But what’s interesting, as a historian, is that new media has always spread antisemitism. The printing press spread Jew hatred, and then the radios, both in Germany and in the United States, spread Jew hatred.

So social media is the medium of the moment. But if I had a solution to the social media problem, I would have a totally different job at a much higher pay grade.

Where There Is Hope

SONNI: Where do you have hope?

PAMELA: Where I do have hope is doing a lot of work where I am educating educators about Jews and antisemitism.

There are all these dedicated teachers and faculty and administrators from higher education who are spending part of their summer or a full-day workshop during the academic year, where they’re trying—basically the way you’re trying to educate your audience—they’re trying to understand a phenomenon that they never really needed to understand because it wasn’t so significant.

And I am in awe of what they’re doing, and I consider it a real privilege to be in conversation with them.

And I’ve been in Milwaukee and Boston, and I’m going to Philly and in Washington. I mean, there are so many of these initiatives.

And that’s what gives me hope, because they can get the message out to their students.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope you’ll join me on Substack for more posts like this one.