Newspaper ads would seek to rent spaces for "gentiles only." Hotels attempted to restrict their clientele to non-Jews. Henry Ford could freely publish antisemitic libels in The Dearborn Independent, and fully a quarter of all Americans listened to Dr. Charles Coughlin broadcast his antisemitic opinions on the radio. Ivy League universities imposed quotas on the number of Jews they would allow to attend.
The Holocaust and the State of Israel seemed to end that. Americans recognized the hate in their midst and no longer tolerated it. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jews could live where they want, travel where they want, apply for jobs where they want, go to college where they want. The second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate appeared to herald a new era in Jewish-Christian relations and to end official Christian antisemitism.
History will look at 1970-2015 as a golden age, where Jewish men in most Western cities could walk openly with a kippah without much concern. where synagogues did not need to have guards or combination locks to enter. Antisemitism still existed, of course, but it went underground - it was unacceptable.
During this Golden Age, Jews could go on family outings with only a vague worry that there is a tiny chance that some crazy person might harass them. No one had a second thought about walking to and from synagogue with the kids.
Some seven decades of limited antisemitism in the West has come to an end. People can now publicly harass and attack Jews at will, and Jews are reverting to living in fear.
As with previous flavors of antisemitism, the new antisemites pretend to be righteous and protecting the victims of Jewish evil. This is what the Communists said about workers, what the Germans said about pure-blooded Aryans, what the Christians said about their children. The supposed Jewish oppressors could be bankers, or Hollywood, or communists.
Today "Zionists" are the oppressors who must be fought by the modern antisemites. They don't hate Jews, they claim, they are just protecting Palestinians that the Jews are oppressing. And the current hate for Jews from the Left and from the Muslim community has empowered the far Right to crawl out from under their rocks and join in with the orgy of publicly hating Jews and publicly attacking Jews - all for a noble purpose, they say.
The days of Jewish Americans being free to do what they want, where they want, are rapidly ending. And we can see the future, because what is happening in America is exactly what has been happening in France, the UK and Sweden in recent years.
Certainly there are some neighborhoods where Jews are still safe, but the map of where Jews can walk without fear has been shrinking. It shrank dramatically since October 7, after decades of expansion.
New York City - the most tolerant, diverse city in world history, the city with more Jews than any other city ever - is now the scene for daily attacks on and harassment of Jews.
Like it or not, the normal state of the world over the past 2000 years is where Jews are outcasts and demeaned. These last decades were not a trend as we had hoped, but an anomaly.
Not to say that things are all bad. There are many, many non-Jews who are aghast at antisemitism. Israel has supporters. Jews have allies. But the trend is decidedly negative.
The West should be nervous. Jews are the canary in the coal mine, and this is just the beginning. History shows that the future for countries that decide that it is too much trouble to protect their Jews is bleak indeed.
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