Overview

On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffith, age 4, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her; several hours into the search, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews. The mayor and local police believed the rumor, and suddenly the allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. Rational people in government and Jewish leaders had to intervene to restore calm once Barbara was found safe and sound. That so many embraced the accusation seems bizarre at first glance— blood libel was essentially unknown in the United States— but a great many of Massena’s inhabitants, Christians and Jews alike, had emigrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe, where it was all too common. The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive cross- cultural exploration of American and European responses to anti- Semitism.

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Reviews

An extraordinary--and timely--story expertly told. Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian of modern Europe, opens up a side of early twentieth-century American history that feels both startling and eerily familiar in its mix of ethnocentrism and political toxicity. A lucid, deeply intelligent, and important book.--Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History This model of micro-history illuminates both the persistence and inconsistency of antisemitism in Western culture through the unlikely prism of an almost forgotten event in a backwater American town during the presidential election of 1928. Berenson's research ranges widely over time and space, and his narrative deftly blends scholarly generalizations with nitty-gritty historical reconstruction. The highly readable result is a tour de force of insight and synthesis.--Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust The Accusation starts with what amounted to an obscure footnote in regional narratives and a minor curiosity in studies of American Jewish history, and builds upon it a very large, important story. In a richly woven tapestry, Edward Berenson examines the many strands that link early twentieth-century Massena, New York, to the Middle Ages, when Jews found themselves accused of using the blood of young Christians to bake matzah, their ritual Passover bread. Deftly connects the very local to the national and to the global.--Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University

An extraordinary--and timely--story expertly told. Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian of modern Europe, opens up a side of early twentieth-century American history that feels both startling and eerily familiar in its mix of ethnocentrism and political toxicity. A lucid, deeply intelligent, and important book.--Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History This model of micro-history illuminates both the persistence and inconsistency of antisemitism in Western culture through the unlikely prism of an almost forgotten event in a backwater American town during the presidential election of 1928. Berenson's research ranges widely over time and space, and his narrative deftly blends scholarly generalizations with nitty-gritty historical reconstruction. The highly readable result is a tour de force of insight and synthesis.--Peter Hayes, author of Why?: Explaining the Holocaust The Accusation starts with what amounted to an obscure footnote in regional narratives and a minor curiosity in studies of American Jewish history, and builds upon it a very large, important story. In a richly woven tapestry, Edward Berenson examines the many strands that link early twentieth-century Massena, New York, to the Middle Ages, when Jews found themselves accused of using the blood of young Christians to bake matzah, their ritual Passover bread. Deftly connects the very local to the national and to the global.--Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University

In an improbable age when chants from Charlottesville, `Jews will not replace us!,' and synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and San Diego evoke darker times of antisemitic violence, The Accusation is a frightful reminder that even in the United States, when the conditions are right, it can happen here. A wonderful and important book that, given current events, leaves its final chapter still unwritten. -- Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What's Right A blood libel in twentieth-century America? In an ordinary American town? In his astonishing study of this tainted fable, Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian with family roots in Massena, New York, uncovers the reason we ought not to be astonished: the blood libel is the lie that never dies. In its multiple mercurial guises, and in the latest headlines, it lives on. The Accusation is not mere history. It is news. -- Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies The Accusation starts with what amounted to an obscure footnote in regional narratives and a minor curiosity in studies of American Jewish history, and builds upon it a very large, important story. In a richly woven tapestry, Edward Berenson examines the many strands that link early twentieth-century Massena, New York, to the Middle Ages, when Jews found themselves accused of using the blood of young Christians to bake matzo, their ritual Passover bread. Deftly connects the very local to the national and to the global. -- Hasia R. Diner, Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University An extraordinary-and timely-story expertly told. Edward Berenson, a distinguished historian of modern Europe, opens up a side of early twentieth-century American history that feels both startling and eerily familiar in its mix of ethnocentrism and political toxicity. A lucid, deeply intelligent, and important book. -- Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History This model of micro-history illuminates both the persistence and inconsistency of antisemitism in Western culture through the unlikely prism of an almost forgotten event in a backwater American town during the presidential election of 1928. Berenson's research ranges widely over time and space, and his narrative deftly blends scholarly generalizations with nitty-gritty historical reconstruction. The highly readable result is a tour de force of insight and synthesis. -- Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust

Author Information

Edward Berenson is a professor of history at New York University. He is the author of Europe in the Modern World and The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story. He lives in Tarrytown, New York, with his wife, Catherine Johnson.

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