American Jews Face the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–2025

Abstract The hostility that the Ku Klux Klan exhibited toward Jews and other minorities (Blacks, Catholics, immigrants) has long attracted the scholarly interest of American historians. They have shown virtually no interest in the ways in which American Jews—either collectively or individually—opposed the “Invisible Empire.” It emerged in three distinct postwar periods—after the Civil War, exclusively in the South, by deploying violence to undermine the aspirations of the freed slaves; after the First World War; throughout the United States, when the impact of mass migration raised basic questions of national identity; and finally, after the Second World War, primarily in the South, by defying the emerging civil rights movement. Beginning in 1915, a Jewish defense agency, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), became entwined with the “Invisible Empire,” which had been sensationally depicted on the screen that year in The Birth of a Nation . Habits of secrecy made the Second Klan especially vulnerable to journalists who were intent on exposure, such as Pulitzer Prize winners Herbert Bayard Swope and Louis Isaac Jaffé. In the wake of the Holocaust, other Jews launched attacks on the Klan on behalf of pluralist ideals, and helped destroy whatever influence lingered. Bigotry was increasingly grasped as un-American. Fractured and enfeebled, the groupuscules of the twenty-first century continue to promote antisemitism as well as racism but also had to compete with other white supremacist organizations freed of the historic baggage that hampered the Invisible Empire. It nevertheless remained the most notorious expression of racial and religious prejudice, and because the Klan has exercised such a hold on the American imagination, notable Jewish resistance occurred in the mass media and even in art. That the Klan has loomed far larger in collective memory than in posing any contemporary danger can be partly attributed to the work of communal defense agencies like the ADL as well as to Jewish thinkers and activists in advancing the claims of democratic inclusion.