Opinion

As we remember the Holocaust, it's time to confront America's long history of antisemitism

(RNS) — At sundown April 13, Jews will mark Yom Hashoah, the day they have chosen to commemorate the catastrophe of the Holocaust. With rising antisemitism in the US, it's time to reckon with America's own history.

FILE - People attend the "NO FEAR: Rally in Solidarity with the Jewish People" event in Washington, Sunday, July 11, 2021, co-sponsored by the Alliance for Israel, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith International and other organizations. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Pamela S. Nadell
April 13, 2026
RNS


(RNS) — Barbara Steinmetz, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, was participating in a Boulder, Colorado, rally calling for the release of the Israeli hostages on June 1, 2025, when a man shouting “Free Palestine” hurled Molotov cocktails at the demonstrators. At least a dozen protesters were burned, Steinmetz among them, and another died of her injuries.

Steinmetz had escaped the Holocaust. Her burns proved that she had not escaped antisemitism.

In fact, while much has been written about the surge in antisemitic incidents in the United States following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, the fact is, antisemitism is a long and too often forgotten part of American history.

The USC Shoah Foundation, which is dedicated to collecting eyewitness accounts to the Holocaust and other genocides, has documented Americans’ experiences with antisemitism along the way.

Not long after World War II, Holocaust survivor Alice Silban tried to rent an apartment in Germantown, a Philadelphia neighborhood. When the rental agent learned that she was Jewish, he said: “We don’t rent to Jews.” She cried out: “Oh mein Gott, I knew somebody else who didn’t like Jews, and you know what (was) left from them: Ashes.” The agent grabbed her by the collar and marched her out to the street and threw her into the gutter, she said.

In the mid-1990s, Holocaust survivor Marion Adler was an insurance agent. When she went to meet a prospective client in Somerdale, New Jersey, he asked about her accent and religion. Hearing that she was a Jew, he tore up his application and shouted: “Hitler should have killed you and all the Jews.” He then called her manager at New York Life Insurance Company to ask how dare they hire Jews.

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When Erin Schrode was just 25 and running for Congress in California’s second district in 2016, her Judaism also made her a target. She recalls one email, showing her face next to a yellow star, imprinted “Jude,” with the words: “Get out of my country, kike. Get back to Israel where you belong. That or the ovens, take your pick.”

Antisemitism in America is not novel and dates all the way back to 1654, when 23 Jews arrived in New Amsterdam, and the governor, Peter Stuyvesant, tried to throw them out. Calling Jews “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” he appealed to the colony’s owner, Amsterdam’s Dutch West India Company, to banish them. Surely, their enmity and “deceitful trading with Christians” merited expulsion. But even as his wish was not granted, Stuyvesant’s hostility foreshadowed the antisemitism Jews would bump into, from time to time, in America.

America’s Jewish community remained small until, starting in the 1880s, poverty and pogroms drove more than 2 million Jews out of Russia and Poland. They came expecting better lives in this golden land, and many found them.

Nevertheless, by the 1920s, their children and grandchildren learned that college and university quotas limited their educations, corporations and businesses boldly advertised that they hired only Christians, and housing ads announced, as those Holocaust survivors would later discover, no Jews allowed. Only after World War II would legislation, capped by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, make such educational, employment and housing discriminations illegal.

Americans mostly ignore this history of our nation’s antisemitism. Instead, the Holocaust has become the framework for understanding the hatred of Jews and where it could lead. A seemingly never-ending stream of cultural productions — films, plays, books, museums, memorials and testimonies — have been produced. At least half the nation’s states mandate Holocaust education, although most teachers spend no more than two hours a year teaching it.

From sundown April 13 through sundown April 14, Jews around the world will mark Yom Hashoah, the day the Jewish people have chosen to commemorate the catastrophe of the Holocaust. In their homes, Jews will light memorial candles in memory of the 6 million murdered. In their synagogues, they will gather for special services. In many places, like on my own university campus, students and faculty, no matter their faiths, will take turns reading out the names of the murdered and the places where they were killed.

In today’s fraught moment, we can only hope these memorials remain peaceful and that they remind us of something we have been too slow to reckon with: the Holocaust did not happen here, but antisemitism did, and does.

(Pamela S. Nadell is the author of “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.” She is the director of the Jewish studies program at American University in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)