Author Talk with Clay Risen: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America

Explore the history and current relevance of the mid-20th century Red Scare. Learn about this dark period, which particularly affected civil rights activists, teachers, Hollywood stars, and DC’s federal workers, including many Jewish figures. Author and New York Times reporter Clay Risen will be in conversation with Capital Jewish Museum Executive Director, Bea Gurwitz.

Presented in partnership with the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies.

ABOUT THE BOOK: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America by Clay Risen

From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses” (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

“Thorough, impassioned…detailed, [and] tension-packed” (Los Angeles Times), Red Scare reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of illiberal conspiracy-mongering and political and cultural backlash that speaks directly to the antagonism and divisiveness of our contemporary moment.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Bea Gurwitz is Executive Director of the Lillian & Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum. Prior to joining the Museum in 2024, she served as the deputy director of the National Humanities Alliance—an organization dedicated to bolstering the humanities on college campuses, promoting public engagement with the humanities, and increasing funding for humanities organizations. Additional career highlights include consulting with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Department of State. She has also taught at the University of Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley, and in the New York City public school system. Gurwitz’s academic work focuses on the history of Jewish communities and other ethnic groups in Latin America, and she is the author of Argentine Jews in the Age of Revolt (Brill, 2016).