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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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The post What I learned about antisemitism from a remarkable new archive about Jewish Civil War soldiers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why The 36 Award
Antisemitism is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the United States and around the world. Jewish people continue to experience harassment, discrimination, and violence. Antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories exacerbate the problem.
Antisemitism does not exist in isolation; it both reflects and accelerates the erosion of democratic norms, institutions, and trust, emerging alongside other forms of hate and prejudice that collectively weaken the social fabric and the shared commitments on which all communities depend.
And while naming antisemitism and its impact is necessary, what truly matters is our shared responsibility to confront it.
This is a moment to push back collectively, within and beyond the Jewish community. No single organization, community, or ideology can meet this challenge alone. The pursuit of solutions requires acknowledging what we do not yet know, remaining open to learning, and committing to the collective effort.
Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) approaches this work as part of a broader justice journey and our commitment to Racial, Economic, and Environmental Justice (REEJ). As an institution rooted in the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world, our commitment to social justice and Jewish values has long guided our work across our focus areas, which includes being in partnership with leaders across REEJ.
We believe that our pursuit of justice is incomplete if it does not also address antisemitism. Antisemitism is oppression and is inseparable from broader struggles against bigotry, exclusion, and threats to democratic life. Addressing it strengthens movements, deepens solidarity, and reinforces the conditions necessary for collective progress.
Recognizing and engaging this challenge is essential to building a more just, inclusive, and democratic society and advancing our pursuit of REEJ.
With all of this in mind, NCF, in collaboration with the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable and supported by a growing coalition of partners across the country, created The 36 Award. The award takes its name from a powerful concept in Jewish tradition: the belief that in every generation there are 36 righteous individuals whose actions help sustain the world.
Across the country, there are people confronting antisemitism in ways that do not always attract headlines. They are building relationships across lines of race, faith, geography, and ideology. They are helping communities navigate difficult conversations. They are creating new models, narratives, and pathways toward understanding. In many cases, they are demonstrating that combating antisemitism and advancing broader justice are not competing goals but mutually reinforcing ones. The 36 Award is designed to find those individuals and elevate and support their work.
The challenges before us are significant. Yet history reminds us that lasting progress often begins with people willing to see possibilities others overlook. The search for those people is what The 36 Award truly represents.
We believe that new ideas matter and that solidarity can be built through courageous leadership, which often emerges where few are looking. We are excited to announce the inaugural winners of The 36 Award. Please visit 36award.us to learn about these inspiring individuals.
Sincerely,
Rey Ramsey, President & CEO
Amy Sorensen Ben-Dov, Chair, Board of Trustees
Nathan Cummings Foundation
The post Why The 36 Award appeared first on The Forward.
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The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism
Myrieme Churchill, Executive Director of Parents for Peace (P4P), has been named an inaugural recipient of The 36 Award, honoring a decade of work building what may be the first confidential intervention program in the world focused specifically on antisemitism.
Churchill leads P4P, a national public health organization serving families, schools, and communities across the United States and Canada. Through its Antisemitism Intervention and Recovery (AIR) Program, P4P brings together licensed psychologists, peer interventionists, and a team that includes former neo-Nazis and former jihadists. Its central argument once sounded unlikely to many in the field: extremism is not just a security issue, but a public health crisis that demands early intervention, education, and community-based support. The need has grown sharply. P4P says it saw a steep rise in anti-Jewish hatred after October 7, 2023, both in its own caseload and across society. In 2025, 70 percent of its helpline cases involved antisemitism, spanning far-right white nationalism, jihadist networks, and far-left movements.
Churchill’s path to this work began in Morocco. The daughter of a Black Moroccan Muslim father and a white French Christian mother, she grew up biracial and rarely felt she belonged anywhere. As a child, she was excluded and targeted by other children who misidentified her as Jewish and often used the word “Jew” to insult her.
“That history gives me a deep appreciation for how identity, exclusion, and belonging shape people’s lives,” Churchill said.
Those early experiences left her with questions that have stayed with her ever since: Why do people hurt one another? Where does hate come from? Why have Jews so often been made the scapegoat? The questions led her to a career as a therapist. Her early work took her to the streets of Marseille, where she worked with young immigrants targeted by traffickers, and later to Boston, where she treated people with mental illness and addiction. Both jobs, she said, taught her how vulnerable people are at risk for abuse, self-destruction, and harming others.
Over years of clinical work in addressing addiction, Churchill began to notice a pattern. For some people, extremism seemed to work the way a drug does, offering relief from pain along with a sense of identity and purpose. People could get hooked on hate the way others get hooked on substances.
That insight became the foundation of the P4P model. Rather than treating extremism of any kind, including antisemitism, as a set of beliefs to argue with, the organization treats it as a maladaptive way of coping with grievance, isolation, and trauma. In P4P’s framing, extremism works like a psychological addiction, offering belonging at the cost of truth, safety, and humanity. Instead of relying on shame, public condemnation, or debate, P4P helps families recognize warning signs and assess escalating behavior, and helps their loved ones build healthier sources of identity, belonging, and purpose, while working with public safety resources when necessary. The goal is to replace hate with resilience, education, and genuine connection.
AIR, which P4P bills as the world’s first antisemitism helpline, builds on the organization’s existing public health approach and helpline model. It offers free, confidential support from trained interventionists to worried families, educators, and community members, as well as to people who are trying to step away from anti-Jewish beliefs themselves. P4P is also developing trainings for families, schools, and religious organizations on recognizing early warning signs, navigating online risks, and responding with evidence-based intervention.
The model was tested on the very first call to the AIR helpline in 2016. A mother had found several rifles under her son’s bed, along with a manifesto describing his plan to attack a synagogue. She was terrified and reluctant to contact law enforcement. Churchill stayed on the line and worked to earn the mother’s trust enough that she would call 911. The FBI later confirmed that the guns had been confiscated and that the young man had been hospitalized for treatment of psychosis.
“Courage sometimes means entering the worst moment of someone’s life and not looking away,” Churchill said.
P4P says its early intervention work has since helped prevent potential attacks on synagogues and violence against Jews, and has helped hundreds of people repair relationships, return to school or work, and rebuild lives no longer governed by extremist ideology.
Sagit Sade Attia, a member of the P4P board, described that work as a deliberate moral choice. “Rather than writing off people consumed by hate as beyond redemption, Myrieme has chosen the far more difficult path of engaging directly with individuals and families affected by radicalization, while never losing sight of the needs and safety of those targeted by hate,” she said.
The choice has not always been easy to explain. When Churchill first began describing extremism as an addiction, she recalled, people looked at her as if she had three heads. Public health framing has since moved closer to the mainstream, but an approach that begins with compassion for people who hold antisemitic views can still invite skepticism at a moment when Jewish communities feel under threat. Churchill answers by pointing to outcomes like the hundreds of families supported.
P4P doesn’t do this work alone. It has partnered with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the ADL, the American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as Bangladeshi and other immigrant communities. It has worked with the Harvard School of Public Health and Georgia State University to evaluate its work and to train former extremists as interventionists. Churchill has spoken at Eradicate Hate following the 2018 Tree of Life shooting, briefed Congress as part of a bipartisan effort, and testified before the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, where she urged antisemitism trainings in schools. Churchill puts it simply: “Antisemitism is not a Jewish problem alone; it is an all-of-us problem, and everyone pays the price when it spreads.”
The post The 36 Award Winner: Building a Public Health Response to Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism
David Brody, founder of the Alliance of Jewish Americans, has been named an honorable mention for The 36 Award in its inaugural year. Brody has spent his career in courtrooms and coalitions confronting hate, and he believes Jewish safety in the United States depends on standing with every community that white nationalism targets.
Brody traces his commitment to his family and to the South. “As a Jew from Georgia, my Jewish identity was defined against the backdrop of the Black-Jewish shared struggle in the South,” he said. His great-grandmother fled pogroms, arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor with no English or education, and became a union organizer. His father registered voters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spent four decades researching how poverty and discrimination affect the health of rural Black families. “My family taught that being Jewish in America means fighting for social justice,” Brody said.
Before launching the Alliance in 2026, Brody founded and led the Digital Justice Initiative at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the first tech policy program at a legacy racial justice organization. There, he built the first case applying public accommodations law to online harassment, representing Taylor Dumpson, the first Black woman to serve as student government president at American University, against a neo-Nazi website’s publisher who targeted her. Brody co-led the team representing Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., in its case against the Proud Boys after the group vandalized the church. He helped draft and championed what became the AI Civil Rights Act of 2025, which more than 80 civil rights, privacy, consumer, and labor groups have endorsed. His nominator, Erin Simpson of the Ford Foundation, said Brody coined the phrase “privacy rights are civil rights” at a time when many did not yet see the connection. She described him as “the engine that powered an entire community of racial justice and technology policy organizations.”
Brody said Jewish civil society is robust but has lacked a dedicated national legal organization, similar to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or Lambda Legal. The Alliance is meant to fill that gap. It uses open-source investigative techniques to collect and preserve evidence of civil and human rights violations and white nationalist threats, with the goal of making that evidence admissible in court.
From his years litigating against white supremacists, Brody saw that few organizations take on litigation against white nationalism systematically, and that most investigative work in the field produces research reports rather than evidence that can stand up in a legal proceeding. He argues that white nationalism, which has motivated deadly attacks ranging from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 to a Buffalo grocery store in 2022, poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety in the United States in generations.
The Alliance’s work includes both near-term and longer-term legal investigations. Part of this work involves leveraging AI tools responsibly, such as using them to accelerate needle-in-a-haystack investigations of white nationalist activity or other threats that would not be cost-effective for human researchers. Other work is meant to provide evidentiary foundations for long-term efforts to research, document, and seek accountability for rights violations in the U.S. Brody said he is focused on what the field needs now and what it will need in five years.
Brody’s approach to coalitions is grounded in patience. He spent six years drafting model bills, persuading allies with different priorities, and testifying twice before Congress in support of privacy protections. In 2024, when a bipartisan privacy bill in Congress was stripped of its civil rights protections, Brody gathered signatures from more than 50 organizations on an opposition letter in under 24 hours, and the bill died. “Those groups did not sign because I told them what to do,” he said. “They signed because I spent years working with them, earning their trust, and advocating for their interests.”
Brody credits the courage of his clients for putting their names and faces on high-profile cases against violent white supremacists. He arranges his work so that, by the time a moment of risk arrives, “we have friends at our side.” He resists the idea that this takes a special method. “Building bridges does not require a special approach,” he said. “One should show up for everyone, listen with empathy, and do the work.”
The post Building the Legal Case Against White Nationalism appeared first on The Forward.
