While engaging in this lesson, my understanding of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was further increased and I realized how discrimination specifically against Jews was still relevant today. I have always known about the KKK and understood that they were a hate group that focused on White American supremacy with racist ideologies and have an extremely violent history of primarily targeting black Americans, but also other minority groups like Jews, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ community and even Catholics. In lesson 4.3, I got to understand their justification for wanting a Protestant White America; they utilized their found knowledge of Protestantism to form a group of people in the twentieth century in hopes of keeping America “pure” from other ethnic groups.
At the time, there was a massive surge in immigration from economic hardships, persecution, and social and political disorder which led to millions of Jews coming from Europe. In Mika Ahunvia’s article, we see that even the most influential book in the world, the Bible, explains antisemitism as wrong and paints them in a negative light. Jews were deemed as a threat to America according to the KKK’s values because of their religion and in the given articles for this lesson there were occurrences where Jews are considered as “Christ-killers and children of Satan.”
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