Those looking for a good read during the Holidays or as a gift for others could do worse than a new hardcover one that is attracting considerable favorable attention for personal enlightenment, book clubs, and the like: Anti-Semitism, An American Tradition.
Written by Pamela S. Nadell, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., 352–page book looks at how that practice has been a pervasive, systematic, and often a central feature of American life for centuries. Meticulously researched and superbly written, it includes a segment recalling the role that Minneapolis played, for the worse in that heinous history.
In his eye-opening book in 1948, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America, noted left-leaning journalist Carey McWilliams expanded on his earlier characterization of Minneapolis in an article entitled “The Curious Twin: A. Re-examination,” in a magazine entitled Common Ground, as the as “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.”
Maltreatment Matters
The maltreatment of Jews here was hardly unique. But it was more pronounced than in many other places, earning it this dubious distinction for its exclusionary practices in education, employment, housing, and other matters.
The McWilliams pieces noted the relatively affluent mercantile nature of the Jewish community living in its own ghetto largely confined to the north side of the City, among other features.
But these features existed in other cities, too, which did not have that same reputation – and reality – of anti-Jewish feelings.
But while anti-Semitism was deeply-embedded in Minneapolis, the City and state also were a pace-setters combatting discrimination against Jews and others, at least in the eyes of the law. Shortly after World War I, the state enacted a measure proscribing religiously restrictive covenants in property deals, which most affected Jews and Blacks in keeping them out of most neighborhoods. But the law was disregarded by real estate sellers and their agents, which kept Jews confined to sections of the Northside and a small, even more affluent pocket near the lakes in the Southwest part of the City.
It was not until 1948 that the U.S. Supreme Court banned the legal enforceability of these restrictive decrees in a case entitled Shelley v. Kraemer. But even that ruling did not extinguish the exclusionary practice, which continued unabated in the community. It was so prevalent that when Jews began migrating from the Northside, where about 70% of their population lived after World War II, they tended to pass over adjoining Golden Valley where many neighborhoods were “restricted” to St. Louis Park, which did not, leading that community to become known as “St. Jewish Park” for its large Jewish population beginning in the late 1950s and persisting throughout the ensuing decades.
Exceeding 10,000 Jews, “The Park” became the largest concentration of Jews in the Twin Cities, which now has about 98% the vast bulk of the estimated 66,000 Jews of living in Minnesota in some 35,000 Jewish households. They represent only a minute fraction of the state population, less than 1%, compared to the 7.5 million around the country who comprise about 2.4% of the overall national populace.
Scourge Secret
But McWilliams writings about the scourge of anti-Semitism here exposed the community its dirty little secrets. This prompted the Mayor at the time, a young rising politician named Hubert H. Humphrey to create one of the nation’s first civil rights agencies, which expanded in 1957 to the state Commission on Civil Rights, now known as the Department of Human Rights, coinciding with the early stages of the national civil rights movement.
As Mayor, Humphrey sent forth a clarion call for what developed into that civil rights movement with his passionate plea at the Democratic National Convention in 1948 to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Sixteen years later, on the eve of his selection as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice-presidential running mate, he was a chief author of the Federal Civil Rights Act as well as other anti-discrimination measures.
Above: In July 1948, Minneapolis mayor and future Vice President Hubert Humphrey addressed the Democratic National Convention in a speech that brought together the Democratic Party and the national movement for civil rights.
Humphrey’s mayoral dream of demolishing discrimination has never been fully reached, and reports of anti-Semitic behavior has increased exponentially in recent years, aggravated by the Hamas-Israeli dispute and other provocative issues.
While Minneapolis has come far from its sobriquet as the anti-Semitism “capital,” but still has a long way to go, as exhibited most recently by graffiti and other threats to Jewish faith institutions.
Drawing upon anti-Semitism experiences here and elsewhere, Nadell’s book forecasts that the dilemma will continue “for the foreseeable future.”
So, as the end-of-year Holidays roll around, especially Christmas and, of course, Hanukkah, starting December 14th, the “American Tradition” is one that deserves attention – and remembrance.
Thank you for this piece.