Professor John Turner had seen displays of antisemitism on the news, such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, or the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. But it was a former student’s research project that really opened his eyes to the prevalence of the issue.
The George Mason University professor said the project involved quantifying the antisemitic incidents that took place at GMU in northern Virginia.
“I can’t remember the exact data off the top of my head, but I was surprised how many incidents of antisemitism [the student] was able to identify,” Turner said. “It was maybe a several-year period at George Mason that intersected with things going on nationally.”
Turner heard about bias incidents on campus from former students — a sukkah being vandalized during Sukkot, posters of hostages being torn down or defaced and students making derogatory remarks to student representatives of Mason Hillel.
“I wanted to understand, what were the longer-term factors that were leading to contemporary antisemitism?” Turner said.
“Really disheartened” to hear about the resurgence of anti-Jewish hate over the past decade, Turner proposed a podcast on the history of antisemitism in the U.S.
His colleague, Lincoln Mullen, also a professor of history at GMU, is the executive director of the university’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, which is home to a podcast studio. After recruiting author Mark Oppenheimer to narrate the historical podcast and Syracuse University professor Britt Tevis to serve as lead scholar, “Antisemitism, U.S.A.” was born.
The 10-episode podcast, with an introductory episode released in May, discusses the roots of antisemitism in American history — contrary to what some may believe, this type of hatred is nothing new.
Each episode contains a story set in one specific time period. Many feature well-known historical figures, such as Henry Ford, who believed in antisemitic tropes, and Richard Nixon and evangelist Billy Graham, who held secret Oval Office conversations about Jews.
“That wasn’t new information that we discovered,” Turner said of the Nixon information. “But we thought that was a really good opportunity to tell a story about those, according to Gallup, [who] were the two most admired individuals in the country as of 1972 and they’re in the Oval Office together sharing really vile ideas about Jews controlling the media and politics, as not being trustworthy, as being animated by Satanic power.”
Mullen, a co-writer of the podcast who was also troubled by the modern-day rise in antisemitism, said he wanted to draw a connection between antisemitism today and that of the past.
“Certainly, American Jews may be more attuned to that history than non-Jewish Americans, but even then, I think it’s a history that has not been well and concisely told in a way that is accessible for public audiences,” Mullen said. “People will talk about antisemitism in Charlottesville or the Tree of Life shooting as if it was new and a surprise, so we wanted to explain the ways that that had been connected to past issues.”
Rather than retell the “basic outlines” of American history, Mullen said the team took existing scholarship and tried to “translate” it for a wider audience: “Pretty much each episode is split into two parts, and each part tells a story.”
Turner said he believes history lends itself to storytelling, as this method can be more engaging to a general audience.
“You can do that in a book; you can do that in a blog,” Turner said of storytelling. “I think for a lot of people who might be interested in history, but maybe struggle to find the time to sit down and read a book at night, podcasts are great because you get history in a little bit more of a digestible way. So maybe 30, 40 minutes at a time, while you’re driving or doing something else.”
Tevis, the lead scholar of “Antisemitism, U.S.A.,” said she believes everyone has an interest in history, even those who may not realize it yet.
“They just haven’t encountered really, really high-quality history yet,” Tevis said. “And when they do, they’ll be immediately hooked because really great historians are able to explain how things change over time and explain the world that we’re living in, and I think for people who are seeking to understand anything, that’s meaningful.”
She said she was enthusiastic when Turner and Mullen originally contacted her in 2022 with the idea for this podcast.
“I was really excited, particularly because antisemitism in the U.S. is an understudied topic,” Tevis said. “There’s recently been a shift to pay more attention to it because of its seemingly sudden increase. But both John and Lincoln[‘s] interest in the subject predates that rather sudden increase and I was excited to work with them to bring attention to this important subject.”
Tevis’ experience with archival research helped her bring in and use primary sources to help contextualize antisemitism and its long history in the U.S. The podcast team also interviewed scholars in the field including Mitchell Hart, a history professor and chair of Jewish studies at the University of Florida, and David Sorkin, a professor of Jewish history at Yale University.
The creators of “Antisemitism, U.S.A.” celebrated its launch in July at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Turner and Mullen have distributed the podcast within their professional circles, and hope to expand to high school and college students and the American Jewish community.
Mullen hopes that the podcast will help Americans better understand the history of conspiratorial thinking — which is directly intertwined with antisemitic ideas — which will better help us understand our current world.
“One goal of the podcast was that people would be able to think as historians for themselves, and when they find antisemitism in their day-to-day lives in the present moment, they would be better able to recognize it and understand how to better resist it if they understood the history,” Mullen said.
