(JEWISH GROUP) The dark political history of American anti-Semitism

[Behind the Aegis]

THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!! RESPECT!

When hundreds of white supremacists bearing torches and giving the Nazi salute descended upon the University of Virginia’s campus on August 11, they began a chant that would have been entirely unrecognizable to the figures immortalized in the statues they sought to preserve: “Jews will not replace us!”

Neither the Confederacy nor the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan — founded in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to terrorize newly freed blacks — were very concerned with the few Jews then living in the South. (In fact, Jefferson Davis appointed the first Jewish cabinet member in the western hemisphere, Judah Benjamin.)

Yet 50 years after the end of the Civil War, virulent anti-Semitism became intertwined with white supremacy, and these views seeped into new American laws that targeted Jews. The restrictive immigration laws of 1921 and 1924, written by eugenicists and cheered by white supremacists, came a decade before the Nazi Party took power in Germany. These laws were still on the books in the 1930s and 1940s, severely limiting the number of Jews who would be able to find refuge from Nazism.

The Ku Klux Klan reemerged in 1915, while Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist, sat in the White House and “Birth of a Nation” filmgoers gave standing ovations when triumphant Klansmen galloped onto the screen.

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