دانلود کتاب آتش افروزان یهودی – آتش افروزی و یهودستیزی از جنگ داخلی تا جنگ جهانی اول

“What will the neighbors think?!” That was the refrain I heard most often from my late mother, regarding some aspect of my adolescent behavior when I was growing up. In Yiddish this concern is rendered as a shande far di goyim (an embarrassment broadcast to the Gentile community). In one form or another, that has sometimes been the reaction from those with whom I have shared the subject of my research. “What?! Why would you want to confirm that the charges of the antisemites are correct?!” “Do you really want to air our dirty linen in public?!” “Yes, the jokes are funny (and probably true) but isn’t there something else you could write about?” Indeed, in examining the early historical accounts of the Jews in America, it does seem that my mother’s admonition has hung not only over my head but over the heads of early historians of American Jewry, who not only wanted to highlight the Jews’ contributions to American society— especially underscoring their participation and sacrifice in times of war— but also, concomitantly, did not want to bring to light events that did not reflect well on the Jewish community. That is why when Jewish historian Gershom Scholem was asked in 1980 what new fields in Jewish studies remained to be invented, he answered, “The history of Jewish criminals.” The early Jewish historians’ filiopietistic reluctance to discuss the less salutary aspects of Jewish life in America paralleled the concerns of Jewish communal leaders, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were concerned about both antisemitism and rising nativist anti-immigration efforts. They consequently sought to keep Jewish delinquency, alcoholism, family abandonment, and crime “within the family,” out of the public gaze. When charges of Jewish involvement with crime did appear in the Anglo press, such as New York Police Commissioner Bingham’s infamous claim in 1908 that Jews made up roughly half of New York City’s criminals, the immediate reaction of Jewish leadership was to defensively declare that the entire Jewish people were being besmirched for the crimes of a few and to offer statistics showing that Jewish crime was low when compared to the general population.