Rachel Maddow in Conversation with Steven J. Ross — The Secret War Against Hate
Rachel Maddow joins historian Steven J. Ross to discuss his new book on American resistance to antisemitism and white supremacy after WWII.
Why we picked this
Ross's book upends the comforting myth that postwar America turned tolerant — hate groups doubled in the years after V-E Day. Maddow's instinct for political narrative makes her the right interlocutor for a historian who writes like a thriller author.
Americans like to believe the end of World War II ushered in a new era of tolerance. Historian Steven J. Ross argues the opposite: antisemitism and organized racism surged in the years immediately after 1945, with the number of hate groups more than doubling between 1940 and 1946 as violence broke out in cities across the country. His new book, The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, is the story of what ordinary Americans did about it — the spy networks, legal strategies, and civic coalitions that pushed back against the worst of it, and what that resistance can teach us now.
Rachel Maddow, whose own work has consistently examined the deep roots of American authoritarianism, is an ideal conversation partner for Ross’s revisionist history. The questions his research raises are not merely historical: how have organized hate movements been stopped before, at what cost, and by whom? The mechanisms Ross uncovers — infiltration, litigation, coalition-building — bear an uncomfortable resemblance to strategies being debated in the present.
This is the kind of 92NY evening that earns the institution’s reputation: a serious scholar with a genuinely surprising argument, in conversation with someone smart enough to push it.