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From Outhouse to Public Square: When Antisemitism Became Respectable

66 0
30.04.2026

“Antisemitism has moved from the outhouse of American politics to the living room.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former New York Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal had already sounded that warning publicly in 1992 — in his columns and in a major address on antisemitism — when I interviewed him on my radio program in New York City amid an increasingly volatile political climate.

More than three decades later, his words feel less like history than diagnosis.

Antisemitism today is no longer merely in the living room.

It has spread across the public square.

Rosenthal’s warning came at a time when Patrick Buchanan’s presidential insurgency was testing political boundaries, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke had entered the Republican presidential race, and Leonard Jeffries’ antisemitic rhetoric was roiling academia and national discourse. Rosenthal recognized early that the gravest threat was not merely prejudice itself, but its growing social and political acceptability.

His concern was normalization.

America had........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)