Britt P . Tevis | Columbia University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Britt P . Tevis

Oxford Encyclopedia of U.S. History, 2023

Antisemitism in the United States-whether acts of violence, social exclusion, cultural vilificati... more Antisemitism in the United States-whether acts of violence, social exclusion, cultural vilification, or political and legal discrimination-has resulted from antidemocratic currents refracted through bigoted beliefs about Jews. Prejudiced conceptualizations of Jews positioned them as outsiders to the nation, emphasizing Jews' refusal to accept the supremacy of Christ; depicting Jews to be racially distinct (i.e., inferior or dangerous); and imagining Jews as greedy, dirty, untrustworthy, scheming, manipulative, powerful, and dangerous. Antisemitism has consistently been (and continues to be) connected with anti-Black racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. Throughout US history, non-Jews deployed bigoted ideas about Jews for personal, professional, social, and/or political gain. As a result, with degrees of variation, Jews in the United States endured personal hardships, faced collective discrimination, and confronted political intolerance.

American Jewish History, 2021

This article illuminates trends in the study of antisemitism in US history as they have appeared ... more This article illuminates trends in the study of antisemitism in US history as they have appeared in English language academic publications between 1951 and January 2021. During this time, historians have employed a capacious definition of antisemitism. To highlight this range of scholarship, I, too, have used a broad conceptualization of antisemitism. On defining antisemitism, see

The Journal of American History, 2021

By the early 1860s, Putnam's property had become a resort, where guests ate lavish meals in forma... more By the early 1860s, Putnam's property had become a resort, where guests ate lavish meals in formal dining halls and gossiped in chandeliered parlors. Patrons often stayed for extended periods, especially during the summer. Four brothers purchased the establishment in 1864 and tweaked the property's name. The Grand Union Hotel, a late nineteenth-century playground for the rich, attracted American elites-among them Joseph Seligman, a Bavarian-born Jewish banker. For nearly a decade he and his family decamped from their Manhattan home to vacation at the hotel. On May 31, 1877, however, the hotel's manager, Henry Hilton, denied the Seligmans accommodations. Hilton said they were unwelcome because they were Jews. 1 The so-called Seligman affair ranks among the most famous episodes of anti-Jewish discrimination in American history. Its immediate notoriety highlights Seligman's social status: in 1877 he was among the wealthiest and best-known American Jews. The affair's continued resonance reflects its position as scholars' favored example of "social anti-Semitism," a category of analysis that first appeared in the late 1890s, and is now the principal way historians conceptualize anti-Semitism in America. Since the 1950s, social anti-Semitism has typically referred to discriminatory acts rooted in perceptions of Jews as undesirable, vulgar, loud, and clannish-a diffuse, cultural dynamic ostensibly unrelated to the official church and state repression common in Europe. Scholarship asserts that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants resented Jews' economic success; ideologies such as Christianity, racism, or nationalism, which motivated anti-Semitism elsewhere, did not inspire anti-Jewish political movements in the United States. Crucially, social anti-Semitism was unrelated to law and was not state sanctioned. Proprietors' exclusions of Jews, in this reading, were private incidents between private actors, reflecting white Americans' distaste for Jews because of the latter's supposed vulgarity. 2

Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal, 2019

American Journal of Legal History, 2019

This article explores the career of Jacob Panken, the first judge elected on a Socialist Party ti... more This article explores the career of Jacob Panken, the first judge elected on a Socialist Party ticket in the United States. Situating Panken in an early twentieth-century Jewish immigrant milieu and analyzing some of the cases over which he presided, it shows how he employed legal realism to weave Yiddish socialism, a political philosophy espoused by turn-of-the-century Eastern European Jews in New York City, into his judicial decisions. Illuminating Panken's unique place in the American judiciary, it contributes to scholarship on American socialism, twentieth-century American Jewish lawyers, and local legal histories.