Nazi persecution of Jews

Nazi persecution of Jews is the historical reality that gives political meaning to the Roth family’s fear in the novel’s alternate-history United States. Recalled through a Jewish child’s family memories and adult narration, it is not distant background: the persecution in Germany shapes how the family judges Charles A. Lindbergh, the case for American neutrality, and government programs that alter Jewish life at home. The narrative also distinguishes the documented history it invokes from the political events it imagines.

Historical persecution and Lindbergh

After the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and the conviction of Bruno Hauptmann, Charles A. Lindbergh and his family left the United States for England. From there Lindbergh traveled to Nazi Germany five times. The visits gave him a firsthand view of the German war machine, while his public treatment by the regime—including an elaborate welcome from Hermann Göring and a decoration bestowed in Adolf Hitler’s name—made his regard for Hitler politically consequential. He called Germany the world’s most interesting nation and Hitler a great man, despite the persecution already underway.

The novel sets that admiration against the legal exclusions imposed on German Jews in 1935. The racial laws removed their civil, social, and property rights, revoked their citizenship, and prohibited marriage between Jews and Aryans. In November 1938, Kristallnacht escalated persecution into organized violence: synagogues were burned, Jewish homes and businesses destroyed, and thousands of Jews taken from their homes to concentration camps. When urged to return the Service Cross of the German Eagle after the pogrom, Lindbergh refused, arguing that surrendering it publicly would insult the Nazi leadership. The contrast between the violence and his refusal helps explain why his name provokes indignation in the Roth household.

Persecution as an American political argument

By the time Philip Roth began school, his family already associated Lindbergh with the antisemitism voiced by Charles Coughlin, whose weekly Social Justice had a sizable audience during the country’s hard times. Lindbergh’s 1940 Republican nomination therefore arrives in the family’s memory not as an ordinary change of political leadership but as a threat to the security Philip had taken for granted as a Jewish child in an American school and city. His parents’ fear is shaped both by the known treatment of Jews in Germany and by Lindbergh’s own public record.

That conflict is made explicit at Madison Square Garden, where Lionel Bengelsdorf argues against American entry into the war. Bengelsdorf acknowledges the harassment and persecution of German Jews and speaks of Jewish scholars he knew in Heidelberg and Bonn who had lost their positions and were being persecuted because of their ancestry. He says that he opposes their treatment, and claims Lindbergh does as well, but argues that war would make their situation worse. He then places his identity as a Jew beside his identity as an American citizen and asks what would be gained if Jewish American families also lost sons in Europe.

The scene shows how recognition of persecution can coexist with a political argument for nonintervention. Bengelsdorf uses the suffering of German Jews as part of his case against war, while the Roth family hears his speech as a defense of the administration. Philip’s mother leaves the room; his father and Alvin remain silent, each in a different state of agitation. Their response registers the gap between naming Jewish suffering and confronting what that suffering demands politically.

Administrative pressure at home

The novel connects the danger abroad to domestic programs that use the language of opportunity and national belonging. In May 1942, a letter from Metropolitan Life presents Homestead 42 as a government-backed relocation initiative for senior employees. It compares the program to the Homestead Act of 1862 and describes government-funded moves as a chance for families to settle in new regions and strengthen their Americanness. The corporate language turns relocation into an appealing benefit, even as families are selected and directed to move.

When Philip asks Evelyn Finkel whether the Wishnows can be relocated in place of his family, she points to pins on maps: one map marks selected New Jersey families, another their assigned destinations across the country. She emphasizes the many offices, corporations, and government partners involved, and says that no one person makes the decisions. She also presents relocation as a way for Philip to become more than a Jewish child whose frightened parents keep him within the ghetto. Her explanation treats the administrative system as both complex and beneficial; the map and pins, however, make visible how individual households have become units to be assigned.

The Good Neighbor Project extends that reshaping to the neighborhood. After Jewish families leave, Italian families from the First Ward are assigned to flats on Summit Avenue. A rent discount sweetens the arrangement, but the placement is made by government edict. The stated purpose is to increase the number of non-Jewish residents in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and to enrich the Americanness of everyone involved. At home, and sometimes at school, the project is understood more darkly: as a means of weakening Jewish social solidarity and reducing the community’s electoral influence. The novel describes a projected Christian majority in at least half of the country’s twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods by the start of Lindbergh’s second term. This is presented as the community’s understanding of the plan and its potential consequences, not as a simple restatement of the government’s public justification.

Fear, belonging, and public memory

The adult narrator frames these events through a recurring fear that accompanies childhood rather than ending with one political shock. After the Iceland understandings, Americans celebrate the prospect that there will be no more war, while Jewish elders speculate about what might be done to their community and whom they could trust. Children return from school frightened by what older boys say about conversations between Lindbergh and Hitler. The Roth family’s decision to maintain its planned visit to Washington is partly an effort to reassure the children that the country remains governed by its Constitution. That reassurance does not erase their fear; it shows how ordinary family plans become a way of testing whether public life has fundamentally changed.

The pressure is also expressed through a family argument over what it means to be American. After Jewish families have left their neighborhood, Bess tells Herman that Lindbergh is teaching them what it is to be Jews and that they may only think of themselves as Americans. Herman rejects the premise that their belonging is negotiable, insisting that the administration’s view of them as outsiders does not make them less American. Their exchange gives the political conflict an intimate form: persecution and exclusion are not only questions of law or policy, but challenges to the family’s sense of home and citizenship.

Public mourning supplies a contrasting form of response. After Walter Winchell’s assassination, thirty thousand mourners pass his flag-draped coffin at Pennsylvania Station. Fiorello La Guardia declares a citywide day of mourning for American victims of Nazi violence, and black buttons bearing the question Where is Lindbergh? circulate outside the station and elsewhere in New York City. The memorial joins a public challenge to the administration with a communal act of remembrance. In the novel, persecution is therefore represented not only through threatened families and administrative displacement, but also through the contested meanings attached to victims, citizenship, and national responsibility.

Historical record and the novel’s argument

The postscript identifies The Plot Against America as fiction and describes its purpose as helping readers distinguish historical fact from historical imagining. That distinction matters to this subject. The account of the racial laws, Kristallnacht, and Lindbergh’s German visits invokes historical events and conduct; the American administration and relocation policies belong to the novel’s alternate history. The book brings these registers together without making them identical: persecution in Nazi Germany is the historical reference point, while Homestead 42 and the Good Neighbor Project show how the fictional United States develops its own forms of pressure against Jewish communities.

The result is a narrative in which public language repeatedly promises security, opportunity, or national unity while Jewish characters measure those promises against a record of exclusion. The family’s fear is not presented as a claim that every American policy is equivalent to Nazi rule. Rather, the memory of persecution makes the consequences of political choices newly legible: admiration for Hitler, the defense of neutrality, and the reassignment of Jewish households cannot be heard as abstractions by people who know what has already happened to Jews in Europe. By making that knowledge part of a child’s recollection of family life, the novel turns historical memory into a test of belonging and political judgment.