Anti-Semitism in the United States: Its History and Causes

Written in the early 1920s, this landmark study asks a question that still resonates: how did a nation born of religious freedom become poisoned by anti-Semitic prejudice? Levinger traces the history of American Jew-hatred from colonial-era religious suspicion through the nativist panics of the early twentieth century, identifying the economic resentments, social anxieties, and political manipulations that transformed abstract prejudice into organized movement. He applies the emerging science of group psychology to explain how ordinary people, people who consider themselves fair-minded, participate in collective cruelty against their Jewish neighbors. The book gains urgency from its historical moment: Levinger watched the rise of European fascism with horror and recognized its American echoes in the Henry Ford-funded propaganda machines and the KKK's renewed vigor. This is not a polemic but a clinical examination, written by someone who understood that you cannot fight what you refuse to understand. It remains essential reading for anyone seeking to comprehend how prejudice functions, adapts, and persists in democratic societies.