L’Année sociologique

Abstract

Placing the postwar decline of antisemitism in the United States within a longer historical narrative demonstrates that this decline reflected a unique confluence of historically contingent conditions, not a transhistorical American exceptionalism; that the erosion of these historical conditions that sustained the postwar containment of antisemitism has made possible its present resurgence; and that antisemitism is linked to the same structural and political logics that drive other recurring prejudices. While our analysis focuses on the United States, the mechanisms it identifies are not unique to the American case and help to illuminate variation in antisemitism across liberal democracies more generally.