“When was this? What were the policies?”
There was a lot of discrimination against Jews. I think the movie “Gentleman’s Agreement” is about that. But someone will correct me if I’m wrong.
"School Ties" (with Brendan Fraser) was an updated version of this, I think.
You are not wrong. I was raised in villages throughout western upstate New York, not large enough to have any Jewish component, so I had no indoctrination into antisemitism. But in my early adult life, I lived in/near towns and cities large enough to have a minyan of bar-mitzvahed males (hence one or more synagogues/mikvahs), and I began to see the negative sensitivity to a Jewish culture amongst the non-Jewish segment.
At first, it was a puzzle to me. When I went to Syracuse U, I liked to date Jewish girls, because they seemed to be warmer and less phony. But I also felt a lot of resistance among my citified fraternity pals toward this preference of mine.
In the end, I had to recognize the injustice of discrimination, to stand on principle, and to act vocally to bring several of the brothers into chagrin and shame-faced compliance for trying to blackball a couple of Jewish pledges. The success in lecturing that meeting into fairness broke the unspoken (but always present) inflexible bar to enrolling Jewish pledges.
Out of those first two, one "brotherized" pledge became a fellow National Guardsman patriot, and the other an internationally known media personality, unique in his fairness to Islamists. For that stance on behalf of those two, I was mocked rest of my college stay in the fraternity that claimed brotherly love and truth in human dealings to be its founding principles.
No, you were not wrong. But I think the photographs in the original article here could be seen as a metaphor of the effect of Hollywood, radio, and TV in bringing a greater interweaving of Jewishness into the tapestry of American history.
But it is true that the rejection of Jews came largely through their clannishness and rejection of assimilation, a very biblical foundation of their uniqueness. While one may contemplate cultural blending using terms like "European-American" or "African-American," etc.; there is no such definition for an individual of Hebrew extraction. You may encounter an American Jew, but there is no such entity as a "Jewish-American."
And the rest of the American "melting-pot" hoi polloi doesn't like the attitude of Jews who neither wish to merge or share their cultural basis.