In the first half of the 20th century, Jews were discriminated against in some employment, not allowed into some social clubs and resort areas, given a quota on enrollment at colleges, and not allowed to buy certain properties. Antisemitism reached its peak during the interwar period. The rise of the
Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the antisemitic works of
Henry Ford, and the radio speeches of
Father Coughlin in the late 1930s indicated the strength of attacks on the Jewish community.
As late as 1945 Dartmouth College had a limiting quota of Jewish students. To limit the growing number of Jewish students, a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools instituted a quota system referred to as
Numerus clausus. These included
Harvard University,
Columbia University,
Cornell University, and
Boston University.
[citation needed] In 1925
Yale University, which already had such admissions preferences as "character", "solidity", and "physical characteristics" added a program of
legacy preference admission spots for children of Yale alumni, in an explicit attempt to put the brakes on the rising percentage of Jews in the student body. This was soon copied by other Ivy League and other schools,
[citation needed] and admissions of Jews were kept down to 10% through the 1950s.
Such policies were for the most part discarded during the early 1960s although the last vestiges were not eliminated at Yale University until 1970.
During 2004, a number of prominent public figures accused Jewish members of the Bush administration of tricking America into war against Saddam Hussein to help Israel. U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (D-South Carolina) claimed that the US action against Saddam was undertaken 'to secure Israel.' Television talk show host Pat Buchanan said a 'cabal' had managed 'to snare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests.'"[64] Hollings wrote an editorial in the May 6, 2004 Charleston Post and Courier, where he argued that Bush invaded Iraq possibly because "spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats."
A 2009 study entitled "Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes", published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009, tested new theoretical model of antisemitism among Americans in the Greater New York area with 3 experiments. The research team's theoretical model proposed that mortality salience (reminding people that they will someday die) increases antisemitism and that antisemitism is often expressed as anti-Israel attitudes. The first experiment showed that mortality salience led to higher levels of antisemitism and lower levels of support for Israel. The study's methodology was designed to tease out antisemitic attitudes that are concealed by polite people . The second experiment showed that mortality salience caused people to perceive Israel as very important, but did not cause them to perceive any other country this way. The third experiment showed that mortality salience led to a desire to punish Israel for human rights violations but not to a desire to punish Russia or India for identical human rights violations. According to the researchers, their results "suggest that Jews constitute a unique cultural threat to many people's worldviews, that anti-Semitism causes hostility to Israel, and that hostility to Israel may feed back to increase anti-Semitism." Furthermore, "those claiming that there is no connection between antisemitism and hostility toward Israel are wrong."[65]
On April 3, 2006, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced its finding that incidents of antisemitism are a "serious problem" on college campuses throughout the United States. The Commission recommended that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights protect college students from antisemitism through vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further recommended that Congress clarify that Title VI applies to discrimination against Jewish students.?
In April 2015 the Anti Defamation League published its 2014 audit of antisemitic incidents. It counted 912 anti-Semitic incidents across the U.S. during 2014. This represents a 21 percent increase from the 751 incidents reported during the same period in 2013. Most of the incidents (513) belong to the category of "harassments, threats and events". The audit shows that most of the vandalism incidents occurred in public areas (35%). A review of the results shows that during operation Protective Edge there was a significant increase in the number of antisemitic incidents, compares to the rest of the year. As usual, highest totals of antisemitic incidents have been found in states where there is a large Jewish population: New York State- 231 incidents, California- 184 incidents, New Jersey- 107 incidents, Florida- 70 incidents. In all of these states, more antisemitic incidents were counted in 2014 than in 2013.[134]