Between Nativism and Biopolitics: Eugenics and Anti-Semitism in the United States
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Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which antisemitism was adopted by eugenic discourses, thereby institutionalizing prejudice against Jews, a process intensified in the United States by nativist reaction. The central hypothesis holds that, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, American antisemitism was not merely the expression of racial or religious prejudice, but became integrated into modern biopolitical rationality, shaped within the theoretical framework of eugenics. It was primarily through eugenic anti-immigration laws that popular antisemitism converged with the interests of eugenics, which construed Judaism as a biopolitical problem. From a cultural-historical perspective that emphasizes contemporary antisemitic imaginaries, eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Madison Grant will be analyzed in order to examine the relationship between science, the state, and right-wing extremism in the production of an “applied” antisemitism, particularly through migration policies.
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