An Interview with Author Phyllis Goldstein

The question is not really ‘Why the Jews?’ but ‘What keeps hatreds alive and why do they persist in spite of incredible efforts that people went to overcome them or wipe them out?’”

September, 2011, Brookline, MA

“You never find answers in research,” said Phyllis Goldstein, Facing History and Ourselves’ senior associate for curriculum, research, and development. Phyllis was seated in a quiet office in the organization’s headquarters here. It was a quiet summer morning, interrupted only occasionally by the shouts and screams of students from the next door St. Mary of the Assumption School playing at recess.  As she spoke about research – the favorite part of her work process, she said – Phyllis got a twinkle in her eye. “What you find,” she explained, “are more questions.”

Phyllis, who recently completed a book for Facing History that takes a comprehensive look at the history of antisemitism worldwide, is, of course, being a bit modest. The Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, resident answered more than a few questions during the five-plus years she spent researching A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism, an effort for which she traveled to New York and Israel, holed up in some of the best libraries and institutes in the world, and picked the brains of top scholars in various fields, from noted journalist Sir Harold Evans, who wrote the book’s forward, to Dr. Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, who among his many accomplishments was the deputy director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust under Jimmy Carter, and Reverend John K. Stendahl, pastor at a Lutheran church in Massachusetts.

Set to be published in December from the Facing History and Ourselves Original Trade Paperback imprint, A Convenient Hatred is unique to the organization’s history. Billed as “an accessible history of antisemitism,” the 400-page book spans 2,500 years and, unlike most Facing History publications, is not a resource book. It is meant to be read cover to cover.

When Phyllis said that she found no answers during her writing and researching process, what she really meant is that she found new questions – questions that debunked those she had started with when she first grew curious about the history of antisemitism, shortly after September 11, 2001.

“In the beginning, my question was, ‘Why the Jews?’,” she said. “I mean, people were forever saying it. And I discovered, as I was going through this, that it’s the wrong question. The right question was really, ‘What keeps this hatred alive?’ Because, in fact, nothing about antisemitism explains Jews. It doesn’t. That it shaped or misshaped Jewish history, there’s no question of that. But if it hadn’t been the Jews, it would have been another group. This filled a need within a particular society at the time that evolved, and it has continued to fill a need over time. So the question is not really ‘Why the Jews?’ but ‘What keeps hatreds alive and why do they persist in spite of incredible efforts that people went to overcome them or wipe them out?’”

Phyllis traces her interest in the history of antisemitism to the days, weeks and months following the September 11 attacks in New York City.

“After 9/11, (Facing History) asked me to write a series of lessons for the web on antisemitism,” Phyllis said. “For me, that was a kind of wake-up call on the topic, because I hadn’t thought a whole lot about modern antisemitism before then.”

To Phyllis, “modern antisemitism” means the series of events that occurred in the wake of the 2001 attacks: the beheading of Jewish American journalist Daniel Pearl, the murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi, outbreaks of violence on college campuses across the United States. As she wrote her guides, she came to see the need for a more comprehensive study on the subject.

Around the same time, philanthropist Leonard Stern approached Facing History about writing a book that would trace the history of antisemitism from ancient times to today.

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Though Phyllis developed a renewed academic interest in the subject later in life, she also has a personal history with antisemitism that goes back to her childhood.

Raised in the 1950s and ‘60s, in northwest Indiana, Phyllis is the daughter of parents who both immigrated to the United States as children – her father, from Poland, was an engineer working in the steel industry, and her mother, from Lithuania, stayed at home with her three children.

“In the 1920s, Indiana was a Ku Klux Klan state,” said Phyllis, who grew up in the small town of Hammond. “The Klan controlled the entire state, the government and a good part of where I grew up. It was within my mother’s memory.”

Her mother, also raised in Hammond, told her daughter stories of a high school English teacher who, as a way of introducing William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” talked about Jews in certain areas of Chicago and, in Phyllis’ words, “how they loved money.” Years later, Phyllis had the same teacher.

“She seated kids according to social status,” she recalled. “Jews, blacks and Hispanics sat in back. Anglo-Saxon protestant kids sat in the front.”

Eventually, Phyllis left Hammond to attend the University of Chicago where she studied political science and history. She later pursued her master’s degree in education at Harvard University.

Why education? “Part of it was just the way girls were,” Phyllis said. “My father was a great believer, having grown out of the Depression, that you should always have some job that you could fall back on and he listed about 30 that he could do in a pinch. He felt that, for women, that job was teaching. You could always get a teaching job, he used to say.”

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Phyllis’ path to Facing History, where she has worked for the past 17 years, was a winding one. She taught history for a number of years at the middle school level, but eventually left the classroom to pursue a career in educational publishing, working a series of jobs that landed her in cities like Skokie, Boston, and Cleveland.

It was while Phyllis was living in Cleveland that she first came into contact with Facing History. The organization was going through the process of putting out a second edition of its Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior resource book and needed an editor. The organization heard of Phyllis and phoned her in Cleveland with the job offer. Phyllis took it, and continued to do freelance work for the organization until, after a move to Boston in the early ‘90s, she came aboard full-time in 1994.

During her time at Facing History, Phyllis has lent her sharp mind and unwavering curiosity to a number of the organization’s publications, from The Jews of Poland and Race and Membership in American History to classroom resource guides on the award-winning film “Schindler’s List” and the Chinese immigration experience in America. She has written for the web, for print, and for use in the classroom.

In 2006, she turned her total attention at work to researching antisemitism for what would eventually become A Convenient Hatred.

“My charge was to cover the scope of that history in a way that was interesting,” Phyllis said.

Among the challenges inherent in this charge was sticking to the topic at hand.

“I thought it was important to focus only on antisemitism, as opposed to trying to bring in other hatreds, which I could have easily done,” Phyllis said. “But it would have compromised the integrity of the project itself, which was to look solely at this particular history.”

An additional struggle was putting aside the fact that, for Phyllis, the topic of her research was not only world history, but her own history as well.

“Part of the challenge of writing the book was to keep a tone that was not writing from pain or from fear, but really writing from, ‘How did this happen?’,” she said. “These were not terrible people who did this stuff. Some of them were, but certainly not all Christians were evil. Not all Muslims are out to destroy Jews. So that’s the challenge. When the history because personal, it’s really hard to maintain the kind of distance that you need to do that kind of writing. And some of this stuff really gets to you.”

Certain topics that Phyllis came across in her research proved harder to digest than others. “I had a hard time with the concept of kiddush hashem,” she said. “It’s where, during the Middle Ages, but at other times in history, Jews committed suicide rather than allow themselves to be forced to convert to Christianity. That I had a really hard time with, because not only did they kill themselves, but they killed their children. And understanding it took awhile.”

Though she readily admits that the project unlocked a Pandora’s Box of questions, after five years of research and writing, Phyllis is armed with some thought-provoking answers.

 “One of the things that has made antisemitism unique is that it was sanctioned by religious and political groups,” Phyllis explained, reflecting on the answer to one of the book’s central questions: What makes antisemitism different from other types of prejudices. “There are very few other hatreds that have had that kind of religious sanction and the political along with it.”

 “Hatreds are very convenient for leaders, for rabble-rousers, for all kinds of individuals and groups in a society,” Phyllis continued, in a nod to the book’s title. “It’s so much easier to say ‘blame them’ than it is to confront a plague and what’s really causing it, than to deal with the incidents or the injustices that started a war. It’s just so much easier to turn attention away from your own shortcomings to somebody else’s.”

Hatreds are very convenient for leaders, for rabble-rousers, for all kinds of individuals and groups in a society. . . It’s so much easier to say ‘blame them’ than it is to confront a plague and what’s really causing it, than to deal with the incidents or the injustices that started a war. 

“Antisemitism is on the rise again and that’s real,” Phyllis said, citing studies from groups like the European union, the United States State Department, and Israel’s Roth Institute. “The world is really changing in ways that are leaving lots of groups of people out. Globalization hasn’t really benefited everybody everywhere and some of the changes are really frightening to people. And I think (antisemitism) is a familiar thing to go back to. It is convenient.”

She wants readers – the book is intended for audiences in high school, college and beyond – to come away with a sense of the danger that antisemitism holds worldwide.

“I hope (readers) see that it’s more complicated than we tend to think it is and that it shapes the modern world in ways we don’t like to think about so much,” Phyllis said. “The fact that we keep going back to it suggests that it’s really in the water. That it is a part of our culture.”

So is there hope for a world devoid of antisemitism?

“I don’t know that you overcome hatred,” Phyllis said. “No hatred is inevitable and certainly hatreds are not inbred, they’re learned. So it’s in that learning process that we have to look. I think we’ve begun to take steps. Even the people who wring their hands over antisemitism today and claim that it is as bad as it was in the ‘30s are wrong. It’s not. We had a State Department in the ‘30s and ‘40s that discriminated against Jews, that refused to help. That wouldn’t happen today. So change is possible. But one of the things we teach at Facing History is that change is rarely simple and it rarely takes place in a single generation. It is something that you have to work at.”