Description
Book SynopsisPierre Birnbaum offers a timely reconsideration of the tear-stained pages of Jewish history and the persistence of antisemitism.
Trade ReviewWith characteristic understanding, learning, and historical range, Pierre Birnbaum compellingly illuminates central aspects—past and present—of the American Jewish experience.
Tears of History provocatively chronicles how antistate white supremacist insurgencies have come to target Jews, transforming prior circumstances in which political antisemitism had proved incapable in the United States to a situation Birnbaum compares to the status of Jews in Weimar Germany and Dreyfus-era France. -- Ira Katznelson, author of
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our TimeIn this chilling book, we get a message from a distinguished scholar of French Jewish history that we may now have entered a dangerous new age. Birnbaum asks readers to contemplate a sea change that seems to be happening in American life, which portends that antisemitism, once absent from the political realm, may be now rearing its ugly head. His history of fringe antisemitism in the American past is well worth reading as we contemplate both present and future. -- Hasia R. Diner, author of
Immigration: An American HistoryAs the leading Jewish historian in France, Birnbaum offers a French perspective on Jewish-American history that compares American antisemitism to its European counterpart. In the process, he calls many myths—including that of American exceptionalism—into question. This interesting, provocative book is more sophisticated than recent books on antisemitism and explores a subject of great contemporary relevance. -- Maurice Samuels, author of
The Betrayal of the DuchessTable of ContentsPreface to the American Edition
Introduction: On American Happiness
1. Salo Baron, the Golden Country and the Refusal of a Lachrymose History
2. The Leo Frank Affair: The Lynching of a Jew
3. From the Jew Deal to the Storming of the Capitol
Conclusion: Kishinev
à l’américaine—the End of Hope?
Notes
Index
