During the course of writing a number of times on Tim Russert’s offensive line of questioning of Barack Obama on Louis Farrakhan last night, I did a Google search of the term “jew-baiting.” The second hit on that search was a blog post by my friend Steve Gilliard, titled “Jew Baiting in America” from December, 2005, written in the heat of one of the annual wars on Christmas.

It’s a fascinating historical read, something that Gilliard was known for. I’m copying the introduction below, but recommend you read the whole piece.

The thing about American anti-semitism is that is is a disease, like herpes, which hides, then comes out, but has never really gone away. There has been a desire to pretend it’s in the American past, but the reality is that the various strains of anti-semitic activity in the US has come in waves.

The 1930’s was the highpoint, but the 1960’s saw a race-based revival.

The current wave of anti-semitic activity, couched in code words and hints, hasn’t reached threats and violence, yet, but as familiar themes, like the corruption of the media and the attacks on Christianity reach a fever pitch, that isn’t unlikely.

So how did we get here?

Into the 1960’s, there was a strong black-Jewish political alliance. But as Jews assimilated into the American middle class, their interests with blacks diminished. Also, blacks were lured by the appeal of Islam as a “authentic” black religion, until people reseached and found that Arabs also owned slaves and treated blacks as second class citizens.

Conservatives used their affinity for Israel to gain inroads to Jewish support, while playing up ethnic conflict between blacks and Jews to imply widespread anti-semitism within the black community. Jesse Jackson’s Hymietown comment and Louis Farrakhan’s speeches were given a great deal of attention by the Anti-Defamation League, to the point where people believed that the two communities had divergent interests, and many felt that ADL head Abraham Foxman had an animus towards blacks.

But lurking in the background were people like Pat Buchanan, who’s admiration of fascist ideology and resentment of Israel is widely known. In 1992, he delivered a memorable Republican convention speech which attacked “Hollywood”. Warren Beatty called it anti-semitic, and with good reason, but was laughed at. People didn’t want to believe it.

Move forward to 2005, and Foxman gives a similar speech and Jews are divided on how to respond. Some fear upsetting their “allies”, others think that he’s mistaken. A few get what he was saying.

The irony is that blacks and Jews have always realized that their fates are effectively intertwined. Underneath every racist is an anti-semite and underneath every anti-semite is a racist. While exploiting and heightening their differences, fundamentalists convinced Jews that they supported a Jewish Israel, and played on the deep religiocity of the black community, meaning neither well.

A Salon article on this suggested that Jews were alone in the fight to keep a secular society, which I felt was untrue for this reason. The “Christianity” promoted by the fundies on the right excludes blacks as well as Jews. Brothers in Christ means white brothers in Christ in many cases.

A famous reverend on the West Coast, Fredrick Price, was doing fellowship with a white minister, who told him he would never let his daughter marry a black man. That shook Price deeply. Why? I have no idea. The racism of many fundamentalist Churches lies on the surface, not hidden away.

A few months ago, I ripped into Amy Sullivan for repeating anti-semitic code words, words which she didn’t even realize were anti-semitic. Which is how code words work. So you can get a Joe Lieberman decrying the video game industry, and Ted Stevens attacking Howard Stern for indecency and it seems ok. But then you get ranting about the “War on Christmas” and no one adds it up. At the very least,its using coded language which harks back to the most brutal anti-semitic language of the last century.

Here are some examples of an earlier, openly anti-semitic text from Henry Ford’s The International Jew and some comparisons, all taken from Media Matters.

Again, you can read Gilliard’s whole piece here.

Another day, another friend in the New York Times. Today the Times profiles Jessica Valenti, author and blogger at Feministing. The article is in the context of how feminists are dealing with presidential politics, but it’s a great tribute to the impact Jessica has had in contemporary feminism that her work and her efforts at Feministing are a key example of how feminists are responding to this year’s campaign. To make things even better, the Times article actually does a good job of showing how hard Jessica works as a blogger and how thoughtful and important the commentary written by her and other authors at Feministing is to contemporary debate.