In December 2023, Pamela Nadell, a professor of Jewish history at American University, testified alongside the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses.

If you don’t recall her testimony, don’t blame her or yourself: That’s the hearing when two of the presidents, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, appeared to equivocate on how their schools were handling charges of antisemitism, and consequently resigned under pressure.

At the time, Nadell was at work on a history of antisemitism in America, and couldn’t have known that she would become a supporting player in a key moment in that story. Now she has completed the book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition,” in which she chronicles the different forms Jew-hatred has taken from colonial times to the present.

Puncturing the largely flattering story of an America that created the conditions for Jews to flourish as never before, the book shows, she writes, “how powerfully antisemitism has coursed throughout American history and how much it impacted the lives of America’s Jews no matter where they lived.”

It’s a history that includes Peter Stuyvesant’s efforts to oust the 23 Jews who had recently landed in what is now New York in 1654; the discrimination Jews faced in the Revolutionary and Civil War eras; the anti-immigration fervor of the early 20th century; the virulent isolationism and pro-Nazism of the 1930s and 1940s, and the purported “Golden Age” that saw Jews come into their own after World War II.

It concludes with the current-day explosion of antisemitism on the right and the left: the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the white power marches in Charlottesville, Virginia; pro-Palestinian demonstrations that, she writes, “erased” the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the killing of two Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish event in Washington, D.C.

While Nadell believes that Jews are facing a “high tide” in terms of the psychological impact of what others have called the “enduring hatred,” she also stresses that hers is not a “post-Oct. 7” book. If anything, the impetus for writing the book was a remark made by a colleague years before the start of the current Israel-Hamas war, who noted how antisemitism appeared to be “all over” her previous book, “America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today.”

“I was stunned,” she said. “I went back and I looked, and I had some story about an anti-Jewish encounter in every chapter. Which brings me back to the point that to be a Jew, no matter where you live or when, is to encounter anti-Judaism or antisemitism. It’s just part of that experience.”

Nadell also believes her book is one of the first to see American antisemitism through the eyes of its victims. While Jews have flourished since World War II, she takes seriously their hard-to-account-for but persistent insecurity. Call it paranoia, but the psychological impact of antisemitism, despite the Jews’ outward signs of prosperity, is “profound,” she said. “It shapes how Jews live their lives.”

Nadell, 73, is professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University in Washington, D.C. She is a past president of the Association for Jewish Studies.

In our conversation Thursday, we talked about the distinction she makes between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, why the post-war years were less golden than they seemed and how the Trump administration is using antisemitism in its efforts to remake American universities.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to call the book “Antisemitism, an American Tradition”? What does that phrase capture?

The phrase is a nod to historian Tony Michels, who wrote an important article about 15 years ago pointing out that American Jewish historians had essentially ignored antisemitism in our histories. We wrote hundreds of books about how Jews engaged with America, but because we were products........

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