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What I learned about antisemitism from a remarkable new archive about Jewish Civil War soldiers
(JTA) — Max Glass, a recent immigrant from Hungary, had an unhappy Civil War.
Tricked out of his enlistment bonus when he joined the Eighth Connecticut Infantry — recent arrivals were soft touches for scam artists — Glass was then “abused for reason [sic] that I never understand” by men in his regiment. “It may have been,” he speculated,
becaus I did not make them my companions in drinking, or as I am a Jew. If I went in the street or any wher I was called Jew. Christh Killer & such names. I also had stones, dirt thrown at me.
He complained to his commanding officer, begging to be transferred, because “no man that had feeling could stand such treatment,” but to no avail. Finally, Glass fled his regiment, hoping to receive better treatment if he enlisted in the Navy. Instead he was tried as a deserter and sentenced to hard labor.
Glass was not the only Jewish soldier to be cruelly mistreated when serving in the Union Army. But as the new Shapell Roster of Jewish Service in the Civil War demonstrates, his experience was far from typical.
I explored the Shapell Roster while working on my new book, on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army. What I learned from the vast collection of documents and data was that indifference, benign curiosity and comradeship appear to have been much more common than conflict for the majority of Jewish soldiers in the Union army.
For every Max Glass there was a Louis Gratz. Born in Posen, Prussia, Gratz scraped by as a peddler before the war. Enlisting in April 1861 — just days after the war started — he took to military life. By August he had become an officer. As he proudly wrote to his family,
I have now become a respected man in a respected position, one filled by very few Jews. I have been sent by my general to enlist new recruits so I am today in Scranton, a city in Pennsylvania only twenty miles from Carbondale, where I had peddled before. Before this no one paid any attention to me here; now I move in the best and richest circles and am treated with utmost consideration by Jews and Christians.
In contrast to Max Glass, his letters whisper not a word about prejudice. As my new book on the experience of Jewish soldiers in the Union army demonstrates, Gratz’s experience was not unusual.
Max Glass ultimately escaped his sorry start in the army through the intercession of General Benjamin Butler. After reading Glass’ tale of woe, the general pardoned the hapless Hungarian. In doing so, Butler seemingly followed Abraham Lincoln’s lead when confronted by antisemitism within the Union army. The president, after all, had quickly countermanded Ulysses S. Grant’s General Orders Number 11 expelling Jews from the districts under his command, the “most notorious anti-Jewish official order in American history,”
But alas this story does not have a redemptive ending. Beyond the rank and file, Jews felt the sting of prejudice. The damage done in wartime left a legacy of antisemitism that continues to this day.
For even as General Butler was pardoning Max Glass, he was locked in a heated public exchange that reveals how wartime warped attitudes towards Jews. The imbroglio began when Butler took special note of the fact that a small group of smugglers, recently detained by the Union army, were Jewish. When challenged, the combative general refused to apologize. Instead, he countered that deceit and disloyalty were among the defining characteristics of Jews, and that avarice was a particularly Jewish avocation. According to his logic, Jews could never become loyal Americans because they preferred profit to patriotism.
An 1877 cartoon from the satirical newspaper Puck illustrates the antisemitic practices of the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. The cartoon compares the corrupt gentile clients favored by the hotel, center, with respectable (albeit stereotypical) Jewish figures, including Jesus. (Library of Congress)
Butler’s corrosive claims reflected a steady drip of acid on the home-front that began in 1861. In the first year of the war, Jews felt the sting of prejudice as the “shoddy” scandals captured the public imagination. Military contractors were publicly accused of fleecing the army by supplying substandard uniforms and gear, even as soldiers shivered in the field for want of decent clothing.
In seeking to explain the profiteering and corruption that attended the rush to war, the press summoned the specter of the venal and disloyal Jew. Cartoonists delighted in identifying Jews as the archetypal cunning contractors, who not only refused to enlist but also actively undermined the war effort. Jews were also imagined as the speculators who profited at the expense of the common good and as smugglers who traded with the enemy. Butler, in other words, was drawing on calumnies that became common currency during wartime.
The contractor, smuggler, speculator and shirker, however, were more than just figures of scorn. Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” came to be seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the new economic and social order produced by the war. This “shoddy aristocracy” — whose morals and manners marked them as undesirable, whose profits were ill gained, and whose power derived from money alone — was imagined to lord it over a new and unjust social heap summoned into being by the chaos and disruption of war.
Even as the heated rhetoric of the war years receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed for action. They were returned to service in the Gilded Age.
It was no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as initiating modern antisemitism in America — the exclusion of Joseph Seligman by Henry Hilton from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs on May 31, 1877 — had at its center a man who had made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the Civil War. Seligman, a friend of President Grant, was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was remaking America.
Henry Hilton slandered Seligman as “shoddy—false—squeezing—unmanly,” a social climber who “has to push himself upon the polite.” Hilton drew upon themes familiar from wartime antisemitism: the Jew as speculator who trafficked in credit and debt; the Jew as obsequious ingratiator who attached himself to the powerful; the Jew as profiteer who advanced by improper means; the Jew as vulgarian who flaunted his (and her) obscene wealth and did not know his (or her) place; and the Jew as overlord whose money allowed him (or her) to displace others. In short, the “Seligman Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.
In an age of inequality and excess, the antisemite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was wrong with American capitalism. And during an age of mass immigration from Romania and the Russian Empire, they soon added another theme familiar from General Butler’s wartime diatribe: The Jew could not be trusted to become fully American.
Sadly, even as Louis Gratz, Max Glass and many other Jewish soldiers became American by serving in the Union army, the Civil War produced a range of pernicious ideas about Jews that have proven remarkably durable. We have escaped the everyday torments that afflicted Max Glass, but are still haunted in the present by the fantasies of Benjamin Butler and Henry Hilton.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
The post Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so. appeared first on The Forward.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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