From Multiculturalism to Antisemitism? Revisiting the Jewish Question in America

Previous scholarship suggests that American Jews have been the beneficiaries of a multicultural mode of incorporation since the 1960s. If so, what explains the recent resurgence of antisemitism in the United States? An answer to this puzzle is proffered that traces renewed antisemitism in part to problems of boundary definition and identity generated by multiculturalism. The talk provides additional support for this thesis by means of a historical comparison to cultural attitudes toward Jews in the the Calvinist or Protestant Reformed tradition, where analogous problems previously appeared.

Chad Alan Goldberg is Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology and an affiliate of the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a sociologist of politics and culture who uses comparative and interpretive methods to explore what history and social theory have to say to each other. His award-winning books include Citizens and Paupers: Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Workfare (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and (as editor) Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).

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