Strangers at Home: The American Tradition of Antisemitism

Kim Schultz: Welcome to our Seven Neighbors season five. We are so excited you are here with us. My name is Kim Schultz and I'm the director of Interreligious Engagement at Chicago Theological Seminary and producer of this podcast. Season five is titled Religion and Resistance in America, and we are hosted this season by Reza Aslan. Reza, welcome back. We had some great conversations so far this season. So what's resonating so far?

Reza Aslan: Well, Kim, I would say that what I find so interesting is speaking to all of these members of different religious communities and minorities, all of whom have had to struggle and fight for the rights that were promised to them in our founding documents, that there's so much that they have in common with each other. So much linkages, so many of their experiences are the same. And it begs the question, well, why is it so difficult sometimes for some of these religious minorities to come together to fight as a group for the rights that are at stake for all of them? And maybe that's a question that eventually we'll come to a better understanding of.

Kim: Yeah. Yeah. Today we are talking to Dr. Pamela Nadell. Dr. Nadell is the chair in women and gender history at American University. What are you hoping to delve into today with our guest?

Reza: Well, if there's anything that hopefully listeners have noticed this season is that we like to tell ourselves this comforting story about America, that this is a place that people came to, to escape religious persecution, that from the very beginning we were committed to freedom of belief that whatever conflicts we've had along the way were the exceptions, not the rule. But if we've learned anything at all this season, it is that story isn't quite true and it's certainly not true. When it comes to the problem of antisemitism, antisemitism isn't something that is new. It's not something that arrived later or something that was imported from elsewhere. It is something that has been present from the very beginning of this country. It's been woven into the very fabric of American life. And today's guest, Pamela Nadell, argues exactly that. In her book, "Antisemitism and American Tradition," she traces a history that runs from colonial New Amsterdam all the way to the present day.

And this history is presented not so much as a series of isolated incidents, but as a distinct pattern, a system, a recurring feature of how belonging has been defined in this country. And yet at the same time, this is not just a story about exclusion. It's also a story about resistance, about how Jewish Americans have fought back, how they've organized, how they've built lasting institutions, successfully challenged laws. And in doing so, they've helped expand the very meaning of religious freedom, not just for Jews, but for everyone in this country. So today, we're going to sit inside that tension. All right, let's get to it.

Pamela Nadell, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Americans like to think of antisemitism as something that's imported, something that happens elsewhere, or at best, something that appears only in moments of crisis in the US, but your work argues that there's something much more unsettling going on, that antisemitism isn't an interruption in the American story, as so many Americans like to think about it, that it's actually part of the structure of it. And so I want to walk you through that history, not just as a series of events, but as a pattern, as an ongoing pattern, and then ask you what that pattern reveals about the limits of religious freedom in the US. And so let's start at the beginning. We often think about the American story as a story about refuge, about people fleeing persecution so that they could build something freer.

But when you look closely, that promise seems to unravel almost immediately. And so when the first Jews arrive in New Amsterdam in, I believe, 1654 and are almost immediately met with hostility, can you tell us a little bit about what that moment reveals about the gap between America as this imagined refuge and America as it actually functioned?

Pamela Nadell: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me to be in conversation with you. This is such an honor. You picked a very important starting point because in September of 1654, 23 Jews who were fleeing persecution in Brazil made their way to New Amsterdam, which of course we now call New York, but back then was a Dutch colony. And as governor, Peter Stuyvesant did not like Jews and he wrote this astonishing letter where he talks about them. He wrote a letter because he could not make colonial policy that the colony was owned by the Dutch West India Company back in Amsterdam and he had to alert them that some Jews had arrived and he wanted to, as he said in his own words, get rid of this deceitful race, such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ. And what we learned from that and from other comments in that letter where he refers to the Jews as usurers, he refers to their deceitful trading practices with Christians, we learned that the first colonists to come to America not only brought knapsacks, but they brought traditional European ideas about nefarious Jews.

Reza: Yeah. That sort of already well established European antisemitism all the way going back to the accusation of blood libel. I mean, it's deeply rooted in European culture. And yes, you're right that we have to remember that when these colonists came from Europe, they brought those beliefs, those structures of exclusion with them, and that actually ended up really shaping what "freedom" would end up looking like here, wouldn't it?

Pamela: It would very much shape what freedom looked like because what would happen would be that Jews and Quakers and other religious groups would have to struggle to win a place in the new world. What is different about America is that they were successful. What happens is that the Dutch West India Company tells Stuyvesant that he has to let the Jews remain. He would never let them build a synagogue, but he has to let the Jews remain. And of course, the great document that really shows this is the one that comes from a few years later from the Flushing Remonstrance when the inhabitants of Flushing, then under a different name in the Dutch colony, when they protested the treatment that he had meted out to the Quakers who had made their way there. And ultimately, Stuyvesant has to let other faiths worship Lutherans and Quakers and Jews.

They may worship privately. They cannot disturb the peace of the colony. And he knew this. He said when he got the letter saying, "You have to let the Jews stay." He said, "The Lutherans and the papists are going to follow." He did not want religious diversity, but he ended up with religious diversity.

Reza: Right. It's such a fascinating moment in history because in so many ways it foretells the pattern that becomes so endemic to America's experience with religious diversity and religious freedom, which is a kind of grudging sense of tolerance that then provides the room for those communities to truly establish and insert themselves into the American civic experience. Let's talk about that just for a moment. What role would you say that Jewish communities had in the very founding of the American ideal? It's a role that I think most Americans are completely ignorant about. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Pamela: I think the place where we really see that kind of bursting out was in the letter that George Washington sent to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. The oldest historic building is still standing in the American Jewish community. And the first thing to say is that Jews were a tiny people. We're talking about maybe 2,500 Jews around the turn of the revolution, but Washington wrote letters to many religious groups. They wrote him first, congratulating him on becoming president, but this one letter really stands out because he speaks about what you were just talking about. He says that this is a country which will no longer speak of toleration of its different religious groups. And he says to them that everyone shall live under his own vine and victory as long as they comport themselves as good citizens. And it's really a foundational text that is guaranteeing religious freedom and religious freedom even before because of the date of the text, I think it's even before the First 10 Amendments were passed, the freedom of

Reza: Religion. At the same time, as we kind of move forward, that discrimination, which is sort of always there, as you know and as you write, despite the legal freedoms that are guaranteed to Jews and to other religious minorities, starts to become policy by the time we get to the early 20th century. And I think it's one thing to talk about discrimination and prejudice, but it's another thing to see how it starts to get built into systems, schools, jobs, institutions, how it starts to begin to quietly shape the lives of people. And so we have to turn to the 1920s and 1930s where we just start to see things like quotas and hiring restrictions, Christians only policies. Can you talk a little bit about how those systems functioned in practice, and then secondarily, how they went on to actually shape Jewish life in America?

Pamela: There's no question that the kinds of discriminations that are really enforced both socially, but also in terms of legally in the 20s and the 30s and beyond, that they have a tremendous impact on Jewish life. So the first thing to say is that there's been a huge transformation in American Jewish life by the time we get to the early 1920s. Between 1881, 1924, about two and a half million Jews, poor East European Jews come into America. When we get to the immediate post World War I period, it's their children and grandchildren who have established a foothold in America and who are looking for ways to enter into American life. And we immediately see in ... So for example, starting in 1922, on the front page of the New York Times, the president of Harvard says that he's going to set a quota on the number of students admitted to Harvard because it would help the Jews.

It would actually lessen the discrimination that he was seeing against them. And we know in these years, as you pointed out, we know that Jews cannot run departments in certain places that sign saying Christians are not only advertised in want ads even for jobs as secretaries and typists, but that they're dotting the landscape of the United States. And Jews know this and they know they cannot get hired in many of the most important institutions in American life at this time. Those secretaries, they could get hired by the government because they knew the federal government did not have discrimination, but they cannot get hired to work for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, one of the largest employers in the United States in those years. And what happens is it sets limitations on Jews' integration into American life. They can get into state universities, but they can't get into all the hundreds of schools that have quotas that don't allow Jews.

They can rent apartments only in certain neighborhoods, so they ended up clustering together. And I think one of the biggest drivers in these years is how it shapes their economic profile because so many Jews open small mom and pop shops because they can't get jobs elsewhere. And Jewish men who wanted to be doctors in the 1920s would have to go overseas to get their training and then come home. And that's something they can't do after the 1930s, after the rise of the Nazis in Europe.

Reza: I'm so glad you bring this up because I think for a lot of people, they think that ... Well, obviously there were these moments of extreme discrimination and antisemitism in our country, but there were fringe ideas that were on the margins. And I think one of the most striking things about your work is how you show that far from being fringe, these ideas were amplified by some of the most powerful and influential people in the country. And so, this is the moment where we have to talk about Henry Ford or Charles Lindbergh, these titans, these heroic figures in American society who had such profound influence and who, by the way, were key cogs in moving these sentiments from the margins into the mainstream. Can you talk about the role, particularly of Henry Ford in that process of mainstreaming this discrimination against Jews in the United States?

Pamela: I think Ford is the most crucial figure to talk about, at least in the 1920s, for mainstreaming antisemitism because he owned a newspaper called The Dearborn Independent. And starting in May of 1920, he published for 91 weeks a column called the International Jew the World's Problem, and he accused Jews of everything that he hated. He accused them, for example, of inventing jazz. But he also, in those newspaper columns, he also printed in English some of the very first copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The protocols of the Elders of Zion is the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories about hating Jews. It alleged that Jews controlled banks, they controlled media, they controlled the governments, they fomented liberal revolutions to overthrow the rightful masters of the earth. And it was invented in 1903 in Russia. It was brought to the United States by white Russians who were fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

It's actually read into even the papers of Congress. It's introduced into Congress in the late 19teens. And it was translated under the auspices of the US Army and it's Ford who sends it out into the world. So if you went to buy a Ford Motorcar, after all, this is the titan of car manufacturing. If you went to buy a Ford motorcar in those years when the international Jew was being published, you walked out of the dealership with a copy of the Dearborn Independent. And what's striking is that ultimately all of those articles were collected into four volumes. They were never copyrighted, and they were also, by the way, renamed the title of the books are The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem.

Reza: The path through which that we go from print to policy, right? The path through which those articles begin to lead into actual immigration restrictions, for instance, and not just to mention the sort of broader public fear of Jews as the world's problems, but actual policy is one that is quite frightening.

Pamela: What happens is that by the time we get to immediately after World War I, by 1921, when Ford has already been publishing these articles for some time, the United States actually enacts something called the Emergency Quota Act. Everybody knows about the 1924 Johnson Reed Immigration Act. People don't really remember that they were worried about immigration much earlier. And if you read the congressional record, as I did when I was writing antisemitism in American tradition, you will see that the congressional committee that's proposing this legislation was receiving reports from US consoles in Europe who were saying that Jews who had survived World War I, who had survived horrific pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, they were saying that millions of them were going to flood into America, and the congressional committee doesn't want Jews to come into America. So neither the 1921 Emergency Quota Act or the better known Johnson Reed Act of 1924 establishing quotas on the number of people who could immigrate from particular countries which favored Anglo-Saxon countries.

Neither of those acts ever have to mention the word Jew. What they do is they restrict the places Jews were coming from.

Reza: Right, right. This might be a difficult question to answer, but I'm curious, what do you think it means for someone in the Jewish community at this time to grow up in a country where exclusion isn't just social, it's codified, it's part of the very system. How does that affect? How does that transform Jewish identity in America, do you think?

Pamela: I think it transforms and affects Jewish identity in multiple ways. The first thing to say is that many of the Jews in the United States in those years, the majority of Jews in the United States in the 1920s, for example, they were immigrants. We don't get to the point where the majority of American Jews are born in the United States until some point in the 1930s. We don't know exactly when, but we're talking about an immigrant community. As an immigrant community, they had relatives in Poland and in Russia, relatives that they stayed in contact with, relatives also whose connections disappeared for them as there was so much turmoil and so much death as a result, not only of World War I, but also of the Spanish flu of those years. But they have deep ties to these places that they came from, deep familial ties, and they're trying to maintain those, but they're also disruptions.

So that's sort of the first point. The second point is how much it impacted their economic opportunities. And one of the things that I was able to find for the 1930s was a man who worked for a historic Jewish organization at that time called the American Jewish Congress. And he would get complaints about employment discrimination and he would try to investigate. For example, a school known for training secretaries wrote a young woman whose name was Cohen, classically Jewish name, and wrote her and said, "It is our policy not to accept students of Jewish background." There was nothing he could do about it. So what happened, and it's actually what got me into my book, hearing stories, people telling me from a later period, what led me to write this book was that I would hear stories about antisemitic encounters, and especially I was hearing them from women, and because I was on tour with my book, America's Jewish Women, and there were stories that showed how they had experienced antisemitism up close and personal through their children, their families, their extended families, and from their grocer and their neighbors.

Reza: And of course, it's not just discrimination and exclusion. There are these moments in which that erupts into violence. And I think those moments are instructive about what we can understand about what's sort of beneath the surface all along. And so I want to ask you about Leo Frank. And first, could you just tell us a little bit about Leo Frank and what happened to him? And then I want to talk about how that moment was such a touchstone when it comes to the first experiences of most Americans of what white supremacy and racial violence actually looks like in the United States.

Pamela: Right. First of all, let me tell our listeners a little bit about Leo Frank and who he was. And some of them may actually know the story because this was, as you said, a touchstone, such a powerful touchstone that the great playwright, Alfred Uri turned it into a play and a Broadway musical that has recently retoured the country in just in the past couple of years. So Leo Frank was the first thing to say is this happens in Atlanta, but Leo Frank was an outsider to Atlanta. He was a northerner, he was college educated, and he was a Jew. And he went to Atlanta to manage the pencil factory of a family member. And on Confederate Memorial Day in 1913, one of his workers, a 13-year-old child named Mary Fagan, was found murdered. She was found dead in the basement of the factory. And immediately the focus towards the perpetrator, it just gloms onto Leo Frank as this outsider.

And one of the things that I found when I was doing research is that during his trial in the summer of 1913, his mother wrote a letter to the Washington Post decrying not only what was happening to her son, but how her people, her Judaism was just being ridiculed in that courtroom. And ultimately, Leo Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. In his closing testimony for the trial, Frank's lawyer said that only a Jew would have been convicted in the South because the key witness against him was an African American janitor who was an ex- convict. And Frank was sentenced to die. In 1915, as the appeals for his case ended, the governor of Georgia became convinced that there had been irregularities in the trial, and especially the key witness had made multiple conflicting testimonies. So he commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment with, I think, the anticipation that ultimately Frank would be exonerated, but he was never exonerated because a group of men leading citizens of the town Mary Fagan was from Marietta, Georgia.

They broke into the jail where he was held without firing a shot, and they lynched him. And the Leo Frank case really haunted American Jews. I'll give you two examples. The rabbi of what's known as the temple in Atlanta, David Marks, that he spent the next years, he wouldn't talk about what happened to Frank, but he spent so much time speaking in churches and in civic organizations. He wanted to show people that Jews didn't have horns and that Jewish clergy were just like their clergy. And then I also remember finding an entry into a woman's diary about a decade after Frank died, where she wrote, "Today is the anniversary of Leo Frank's death." It haunted American Jews.

Reza: It haunted American Jews. It also, in some very interesting ways, led to a kind of sentiment of resistance that starts to rise to the surface. Obviously, there's the founding of the ADL, but I'm really interested in one particular figure, Gussy Herbert, and what that story reveals about the way in which Jewish Americans begin to fight back, not just legally, but I would say even more importantly, culturally, civically. Tell us about Gussy Herbert.

Pamela: The first thing to say is she's such a great story. She's amazing. This is really the work of the historian, Scott Seligman, who wrote a wonderful book called The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906. And Gussy Herbert was a plucky 13-year-old in public school in Brooklyn in 1905, and it was the Christmas pageant. And the principal of her school gave a speech where he talked about that Jesus loved everybody except for the hypocrites, and he could forgive everyone except for the hypocrites, and the hypocrites were the people who didn't believe in him. He said, "Boys and girls be like Jesus and not like the hypocrites." And Gussy, whose parents were immigrants, who was a Jewish child in Brooklyn, this is a period when there are lots and lots of Jews living in Brooklyn, and she marches up to the front of the auditorium and she turns to her principal and she says, "Don't you think teaching about Jesus belongs in the church or the Sunday school and not in public school?" And you can just imagine the conversations that emerged when all those kids went home that day and said to their mothers, "Did you hear what Gussy did?" Because ultimately, over the course of the next year, there's an investigation into what the principal said.

And then when the Jews in Brooklyn and beyond in New York City are really upset that there has not been enough change, the following year, they kept tens of thousands of their children home on the day of the Christmas pageants, and ultimately it leads to beginning of change in what you can actually do and teach in the public school. So for example, as a result of this, they could still have Christmas trees, they could still have Bible readings, but they would not be singing Christian hymns any longer.

Reza: Yeah, I love that story. I think it's such a great story. And of course, there was the ADL, which forms not long after the lynching of Leo Frank, I believe. Am I correct about that?

Pamela: It's actually before the lynching. It's after the trial.

Reza: Right. It's after the trial. Tell us about the ADL, the role that it played in those years and how it becomes sort of the bulwark of resistance, legal resistance to the established systems of discrimination that were so codified at that time.

Pamela: This, by the way, was not the first time that Jews organized to stand up against attacks on their people. We have examples before, but I think it's right to focus on the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League founded in the wake of Leo Frank's trial because it was founded by a Jewish organization called Benet Brith, which still exists today. And in those days, when it was meeting in the 19teens and the 1920s, it was really just a small group of men meeting at a men's club in Chicago, and they allowed one woman to attend who was the president of the National Council of Jewish Women. And she would say, she would write about these reports and she would describe how difficult it was to listen to this litany of attacks on the Jews in the 1920s. They're focusing very carefully on what Henry Ford was doing. And they're trying to figure out how to educate, how to use the legal system, which at this time is not really very helpful in terms of responding to discrimination, but also how to stop the infiltration of antisemitic ideas, even at the very youngest ages in America.

So one of my favorite stories is that the women of the National Council of Jewish Women were aware that these collections of Mother Goose nursery rhymes included one that was about Jack who was a rogue of a Jew. And they would go into bookstores or wherever Mother Goose was sold, and they would look and thumb through the copies of the Mother Goose Nursery rhymes. And if those volumes included that antisemitic rhyme, they would tell the owner not to stalk it. And then he would have to push back and say, "Well, it came from England. I really can't do that much about it. " But they were raising awareness of spreading even lies to young children about the Jews.

Reza: These conversations are so wonderful because as you know, and as we talk about a lot on this season of Our Seven Neighbors, this notion, this idea of America, a myth really of America as this unified Christian nation has really caught the imagination of so many people in our political establishment. You're hearing it all over again. Again, what I really love about your book is that it shows that this isn't just a myth, it's actually a recurring political project. It's a concerted effort to redefine the country in these terms. But of course, this idea of America as an explicitly Christian nation and the attempts to define it that way, either through rhetoric or law or heck even constitutional amendments, which was tried for a while, I did not know that until I read your book, that these aren't just a vision of what America actually is.

It's also just as much an attempt to define what America is not. And as such, it becomes this real structural driver of antisemitism in America. If we could talk a little bit about what happens to a religious minority when the idea of belonging is defined not just culturally, not even just racially, but theologically.

Pamela: It's so difficult. I'll give you a personal answer to this. I'm old enough to remember to have been in elementary school when the Supreme Court outlawed the reading of the Lord's Prayer, our Father Art in heaven, albeit. And I remember as a child, I remember my friends telling me, "You're really not supposed to say that when you have it every morning in the classroom." But I was little. I was really little. I didn't understand. And I also remember the relief I felt when we didn't have to say that. And like my parents said, "You can't say this any longer, your teacher's not allowed to have it in the classroom." And of course, at that time also, we had Bible readings in the classroom and sometimes they were from the Old Testament and sometimes they were from the New Testament. And I think what happens is there is a sense of discomfort for Jews, and I would say Muslims and Sikhs and people of other minority religions, there's a sense of discomfort when we live in an American society where we're told we need to adopt or fit into the Christian society.

And you mentioned the current moment we're in. And I think one of the things that really struck me this past year was at Christmas for a long, long time now, American government officials have always been very careful to send out holiday greetings that are essentially ecumenically neutral, not this year. This year, holiday greetings coming out of so many government offices referenced Jesus. And as you said, there was even at one time a Christian amendment introduced during the Civil War that wanted to make Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior of America, wanted to stick it right into the preamble of the US Constitution. And one of the leaders of that movement for Christian Amendment was a Supreme Court justice. So these are not insignificant figures promoting this in the past nor in the present.

Reza: Sometimes when I have these conversations, we talk about, for instance, antisemitism, like it's a historical phenomenon. You have, I think, rightly noted that this moment that we're living in right now is, I think you call it a new high tide of American anti-Semitism. And I think what's striking, at least for those of us who are aware of American history is how familiar it all seems. When you look at events like Pittsburgh or Charlottesville, and obviously more recent attacks on Jewish places of worship, this is a strange way of putting it, but what to you feels new about the antisemitism that we are seeing in such a strong way now? Here we are in 2026.

Pamela: The first thing to say is I've been looking at antisemitism in American life since ... I mean, I've been working on this for quite a while now, and I was using the phrase that it's a new high tide of American antisemitism even five years ago. This is not a post-October 7th moment by any means. It erupted after October 7th, after the massacre of 1200 Israelis and the seizing of 251 hostages in a terrorist attack, but this has been underway for a really long time. And what makes this moment different is I would say the coalescence of different reasons for hating Jews and also that many of them have taken violent expression. And I'll give you three examples. I mean, you started with the Charlottesville and the Tree of Life. Those have become shorthand for the white nationalists marching in Charlottesville across the University of the Virginia of campus, arms outstretched Nazi salutes, yelling, Jews will not replace us.

In Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue in October of 2018, a year after that Charlottesville march, the white nationalists who hated immigrants and hated Jews burst into a synagogue on a Sabbath morning and murdered 11 people who were at prayer. So that's led to white nationalist violent antisemitism. But the other thing that we've also seen is we've seen violent antisemitism bursting out from the left, from those who don't hate Jews because they're not Christian, who don't may necessarily see the Jews as a different racial group, but instead those who blame Jews for Israel and who are anti-Zionists.

Reza: One of the feces of this podcast is that this kind of discrimination against religious minorities, certainly anti-Jewish sentiment falls into that category is a recurring feature of American life. And so what we talk about a lot with our guests is how religious freedom isn't something that was sort of given to us by our founding documents. It wasn't something that we achieved. It's something that had to be seized. It's something that had to be fought for. It's something that had to be constantly defended. And so I suppose looking back on the history that you've outlined, the history that comes right into the shores of the present, what would you say that history teaches us about what it actually takes to sustain pluralism, religious pluralism in the US, not just in theory, but in actual practice?

Pamela: First of all, I so agree with thesis of the podcast. I imagine you're talking to people who talk about anti-Catholic hatred, that you're talking to people who looked at anti-Mormon hatred, and we've already talked about the Quakers, that this is a recurring theme of American life, the effort to establish some kind of uniform Christian society that would also exclude Catholics and Jews and Mormons and Muslims and so many others. What it takes, I think, is that to sustain religious pluralism and to understand that all faiths in America are on an equal footing. What I think it takes is the, first of all, building alliances. And when I think about alliances, I think first of all, sort of vertical from the ground up, the Jewish community was very successful in doing this as it fought alongside Martin Luther King Jr. It fought for civil rights. Those civil rights ended discriminations against African Americans in American society in terms of employment and housing and Jews also benefited from that because all of a sudden those signs we talked about before, Christians only, they had to disappear.

So I think it's those vertical alliances to local, state and federal government were absolutely crucial and remain crucial. What is so critical is building those, not vertical alliances, but the horizontal alliances. I recently spoke to a very large gathering of rabbis in the United States, and so many of them came up and told me about the alliances they have with the clergy in their communities and how they exchange pulpits, how they study together, how they teach each other's congregations because we need ... This is about bridge building between human beings. And if we can keep those bridges not only built, but open and we can keep running across them, we're going to be in much better shape.

Reza: This is the final question that we kind of ask all of our guests. If you can rewrite the American story in a sentence or two and replace the idea that we are naturally a haven of religious freedom as we like to present ourselves, what would you say instead?

Pamela: What I would say instead is that we celebrate religious freedom. We tout the First Amendment. We celebrate liberty of consciousness, but the reality is that we have very powerful countertraditions in the United States that would like to tamp down on those liberties and religious freedoms and have done so in eras in the past. And I think perhaps we're in a moment where they're trying to do it again.

Reza: Pamela Nadell, thank you so much. We are so grateful for your voice on this podcast.

Pamela: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Kim: And that does it for another episode of our seven neighbors. So happy you joined us and special thanks to our host, Reza Aslan. Join us next time for another conversation around religion and resistance in America with the Interreligious Institute at Chicago Theological Seminary.