Britt Tevis, Phyllis Backer Professor of Jewish Studies and assistant professor of history, has edited an anthology, Sanctioned Bigotry: A Documented History of Antisemitism in the United States (Yale University Press, 2026).

Tevis uses a variety of sources to chart the course of antisemitism in the United States from the colonial period to the present day. She examines the idea that antisemitism has only been a minor force in American society while highlighting how American Jews have fought back and negotiated their place in it. Her research examines the role played by both the government and private actors in facilitating violence against Jewish people.

Tevis divides instances of antisemitism into nine overlapping categories: church and state; disenfranchisement; racialization; defamation; antisemitism and anti-Black racism; immigration and citizenship; exclusion and segregation; violence; and anti-Zionism. A final chapter examines Jews’ varied responses to anti-Jewish discrimination, bigotry and violence.

Tevis joined the Maxwell School’s faculty as an assistant professor in 2024. Previously, she was the Plessner Postdoctoral Fellow in Holocaust and Antisemitism Studies at Columbia University. She received the Wasserman Essay Prize for best article in Jewish history from the American Jewish Historical Society in 2022 and 2016.

From the Publisher:

In a 1790 letter to Rhode Island Jewish leader Moses Seixas, President George Washington responded to Seixas’s concerns about Jewish persecution, assuring him that America “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, [and] requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” Historians have typically identified this letter as a symbol of American Jewish exceptionalism, the idea that Jewish life in the United States has been qualitatively distinct from, indeed better than, Jewish life in Europe.

Undergirding this idea is the claim that antisemitism has been a relatively minor force in American Jewish life. In this volume, Britt P. Tevis upends this narrative to reveal various manifestations of Jewish inequality in American history, highlighting the ways that Jews have encountered limited civil and political rights.

Using a remarkable array of primary sources, Tevis traces the history of antisemitism in the United States from 1654 to 2024. Comprising government reports, judicial decisions, correspondence, advertisements, cartoons, social media posts, and more, this documentary reader presents examples of antisemitism in nine overlapping categories: church and state, disenfranchisement, racialization, defamation, antisemitism and anti-Black racism, immigration and citizenship, exclusion and segregation, violence, and anti-Zionism. Tevis also shows how Jews have reacted to instances of inequality and have negotiated their place in America, both as individuals and as a community.

Collectively, these documents expose readers to the underexplored history of anti-Jewish discrimination in America, and the ways that Jews have championed and defended American ideals in the face of inequality.