Blood Libel in America

On Saturday, September 22, 1928, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths strayed into the woods surrounding Massena, New York, the small upstate village where Edward Berenson was born decades later. By nightfall, she hadn’t come back. After a fruitless search for the missing child, someone—we don’t know who—launched the rumor that the Jews of the town had kidnapped and killed Barbara in a sick religious ritual to harvest her blood. This was the only full-fledged “blood libel” in American history, a terrible antisemitic accusation common in Europe but essentially unknown until then in the United States. This lecture tells how and why the accusation occurred and what it says about the Americans past—and perhaps the future as well.