ABSTRACT
Since Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the members of the Institute of Social Research had been preoccupied with the idea of the defeat of German fascism and the reconstruction of a post-Nazi society. Yet strangely enough, a study of anti-Semitism and its relationship to Nazi ideology and the Nazi regime was strikingly absent from the institute’s projects in the 1930s, after the institute had gone into exile. Though one of the arguments of the founders in the 1920s to persuade Hermann Weil to endow the institute had been the need to study anti-Semitism in Germany, it was not until 1943 that the institute launched such a study which, oddly enough, was concerned with anti-Semitism in the United States rather than in Germany.1
