Now this is the kind of historical journalism we need to be reading about!
Imagine, a U.S. Presidential candidate having to swim upstream against allegations of anti-Semitism . . .
Sounds like President Barack Obama, but lo and behold, it was Ulysses S. Grant.
I do not think that Grant was an ani-Semite, of course. On the contrary, he was as an even-minded man who pushed for civil rights more than the Democracy of the latter 1800's.
I do not think that the Jews of Grant's day learned the best lesson following their en masse demonstration against the Union General's order. The government, more often than not, has been the source of persecution for the Jewish people, not their assistant. In the extreme cases, National Socialism created the death campus and the Holocaust, while Tsarist Russia had pogroms and Stalinist Soviet Union has purges, many of which afflicted the Jews.
Look at the current Chief Executive, a politician who is so attached to the notion of liberal internationalism, that he went around to Arab countries throughout the Middle East to apologize. He has also pushed Benjamin Netanyahu into some tight spots, forcing the Israeli Prime Minister to lecture our Constitutional scholar/Commander-in-Chief on the incompatability of "land swaps." Our president has done more to throw Israel under the bus than any president prior.
On another note, I think that this country could do with a history lesson on Haim Solomon, the banker who supported the American Revolution during its lowest ebb, supplying some much-needed cash for the starving and bedraggled patriots.