Antisemitism in the United States

Antisemitism in the United States is not confined to private prejudice or isolated acts of hostility in the novel. It moves from public political speech into official policy and neighborhood life, giving discrimination the appearance of patriotism, administrative procedure, and popular consent. The result is a widening pressure on Jewish Americans: they are described as disloyal, treated as a population to be reorganized, and left to weigh the safety of their families against institutions that claim to include them.

Political speech and public legitimacy

As Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed Congress to repeal the arms embargo and loosen neutrality restrictions to help Britain, Charles A. Lindbergh became more outspoken against intervention. In a widely heard Des Moines radio speech, he singled out Jews—less than three percent of the population—as among the groups pushing the country toward war. By identifying Jewish Americans as a distinct and suspect political force, Lindbergh transformed an argument over foreign policy into a public accusation against a minority. The speech’s reception made that distinction consequential: its supporters cheered, while its claims provoked denunciations from liberal journalists, Jewish organizations, Roosevelt’s press secretary, and prominent Republicans, including Thomas Dewey and Wendell Willkie.

The opposition did not dislodge Lindbergh from public life. After criticism from Democratic cabinet members, including Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, he resigned his Army reserve commission rather than serve under Roosevelt. The America First Committee continued to support him, and he remained a major advocate of neutrality. That continued backing reveals how prejudice could coexist with, and become bound to, a popular political cause. Lindbergh’s claims about Jewish influence in the press, radio, government, and motion pictures found support among some America First Committee members and a broader constituency. His language about European ancestry and the danger of racial dilution likewise expressed convictions that extended beyond the most committed antisemites. The novel places these ideas in ordinary political circulation rather than depicting them as beliefs held only at the margins.

At the Republican convention, the party chose Lindbergh by acclamation at four in the morning on June 28. The nomination came after reactionary members of Congress seconded his candidacy and followed his public denunciation of Jews as a powerful group whose influence threatened the country. The narrator stresses the contrast between this picture of Jewish power and Jewish Americans’ small numbers, limited access to public authority, and claim to democratic loyalty. Antisemitism here is not merely an insult; it is a political story that recasts a vulnerable minority as a hidden power and makes its supposed influence a reason to distrust its citizenship.

Competing claims of loyalty

The novel also shows how Jewish public figures respond to this political climate in sharply different ways. When Charles A. Lindbergh visits Newark, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf appears at the airport and publicly supports his candidacy. Bengelsdorf presents Jewish loyalty to the United States as the basis for his endorsement, insisting that Jewish religious identity does not depend on another national homeland. For the narrator’s parents and many other local Jews, his appearance is a source of consternation. His stance exposes a conflict over who can speak for Jewish Americans and whether visible accommodation to a hostile political movement can protect the people it targets.

Herman Roth rejects that accommodation. After the Roth family is evicted, he tells Verlin M. Taylor that the eviction is a shock and connects it to the fact that Charles A. Lindbergh is president and is friendly with Adolf Hitler. Later, confronted by Lionel Bengelsdorf, Herman argues that Hitler’s record of aggression and persecution makes trust in an understanding between the leaders dangerous. Bengelsdorf answers by distinguishing Lindbergh’s administration from Nazi rule: he points to Lindbergh’s election, free enterprise, and the absence of openly declared government persecution, and describes the Office of American Absorption as an invitation for Jews to enter national life. The dispute turns on the difference between formal inclusion and the conditions attached to it. For Herman, a program can be framed as opportunity while still weakening Jewish security and communal independence; for Bengelsdorf, participation in national life is evidence that the program is not exclusion.

Administrative programs and community pressure

The Office of American Absorption gives this conflict a bureaucratic form. Its stated aim is to incorporate religious and national minorities into the wider society, but the novel describes its attention as concentrated on Jewish Americans. Through Just Folks, Jewish boys aged twelve to eighteen are sent from their urban homes to work for eight weeks as farm laborers, hundreds of miles away. Sandy Roth leaves for Kentucky in the summer of 1941. The separation is especially difficult because he has never before been away from home, the family faces unusual uncertainty, and Herman opposes a policy he believes threatens family solidarity. Evelyn, Herman’s sister-in-law and an executive assistant to Bengelsdorf, supports Sandy’s participation; she challenges the assumption that a Jewish boy should remain sheltered from the wider country. Their disagreement makes assimilation a lived family conflict, not just a government slogan.

Homestead 42 extends the same administrative logic to adults and whole neighborhoods. A company letter tells Herman that he has been deemed qualified for a relocation opportunity under a nationwide initiative. Evelyn explains the machinery of assignment to Philip by pointing to pins on a map: one map marks selected families in New Jersey, while another shows where families across the country are to be sent. She describes cooperation among officials, corporate employers, and receiving states, and emphasizes the scale of the planning. That account makes the program’s reach visible while also showing how individuals are converted into locations on an administrative map.

The Good Neighbor Project accompanies the relocation of Jewish families with the arrival of non-Jewish households in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. On Summit Avenue, two apartments vacated by families moved under Homestead 42 are occupied by Italian families from the First Ward. Their housing is assigned by government edict, with a rent discount paid by the Department of the Interior. Officially, this is meant to enrich the Americanness of the neighborhoods. At home and sometimes at school, however, residents hear a different interpretation: the policies will weaken Jewish social ties and reduce Jewish electoral influence. The prospect of Christian majorities in heavily Jewish neighborhoods makes the language of inclusion inseparable from a potential remaking of local political power.

Everyday hostility and threatened violence

Political rhetoric reverberates in ordinary encounters. The narrator remembers being insulted by a man who calls Herman a Jew with a political slur, followed by a woman who expresses a wish to strike him. The family encounters hostility in places as routine as a cafeteria near Union Station, and the child narrator comes to associate his Jewish identity with secrecy and criminality. The fear is not produced by one encounter alone: it grows through accumulated remarks, public accusations, and the knowledge that influential figures have described Jews as a danger to the nation.

After the Iceland Understandings, popular confidence in Charles A. Lindbergh’s ability to deal with Adolf Hitler leaves Jewish families more exposed in the narrator’s perception. Adults in the neighborhood speculate about what might be done to them and whom they could trust. Children return from school frightened by reports of what the two leaders may have said about Jews. These reactions show how political decisions become domestic apprehension: the uncertainty of diplomacy is felt as a question of whether anyone will protect Jewish families if persecution spreads.

The same atmosphere accompanies the German-American Bund’s resurgence. At its Madison Square Garden rally in 1942, a crowd of about twenty-five thousand supports the administration’s invitation to the German foreign minister and denounces Democrats as warmongers. Under Roosevelt, the FBI and congressional committees had investigated the Bund, identified it as a Nazi front, and brought criminal charges against leaders. Under Lindbergh, government harassment ceases and the organization rebuilds its strength by presenting itself as patriotic, anti-Communist, and opposed to foreign wars. Its public display changes: Nazi flags, uniforms, and other conspicuous symbols seen at the 1939 rally are absent. But the organization continues to circulate antisemitic propaganda, associating Judaism with Bolshevism and promoting a Gentile-ruled United States. The altered presentation makes its ideology easier to present as ordinary patriotism without eliminating its hostility toward Jews.

As Walter Winchell’s campaign meets organized hostility, the connection between public antisemitism and street danger becomes more immediate. In South Boston, jeering hecklers grow into a mob; a burning cross is carried toward Winchell’s platform, and shots are fired into the air. After violence in Boston and Detroit, Newark’s Jewish residents fear that unrest will reach their own streets, where a large Jewish neighborhood borders working-class Irish, Italian, German, and Slavic communities. Community leaders and local organizers prepare for the possibility that public authorities will not respond effectively. Longy Zwillman arranges for Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit and train local Jewish youths for the Provisional Jewish Police, supplementing the work of the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. The defensive preparations mark a grave consequence of the climate: the state’s assurances and the appearance of normal civic life are no longer enough to make the threatened community feel secure.

Significance

Across political campaigns, family disputes, relocation plans, and street encounters, the novel traces how antisemitism gains force by changing its public form. It can appear as an accusation of disloyalty, a defense of neutrality, a claim to assimilative opportunity, or a neutral-seeming assignment on a map. Each form asks Jewish Americans to prove belonging while treating their collective identity as a problem to be managed. The contrast between official language and the effects on families is central: programs described as incorporation and neighborhood enrichment coincide with separation, weakened communal ties, and anxiety about political displacement. The atmosphere of hostility does not require every American to express open hatred. Its reach is already evident when a child learns to fear his identity, when a family debates whether a government program is safe, and when a neighborhood begins organizing its own protection.