The truth about ‘Jewish lightning’

(RNS) — I grew up in a home and in a family that was — let me coin a phrase — Yiddish deficient. My grandparents, to the best of my memory, never spoke Yiddish, or even used Yiddish expressions. Neither did my parents.

That being said, had they spoken Yiddish, there is a word I know they would have used, one almost no one uses anymore.

The word is “shanda,” referring to something shameful, and in particular, something that would bring shame not only upon the person doing it, but to the entire Jewish people.

They would not be entirely wrong to worry.

This is a touchy subject, especially in the age we are living through, when Jew-haters are eager to weaponize any myth about Jews, including the ones that are not quite myths at all.

Rabbi Jeff Marx has written a new book, “Jewish Firebugs: Arson and Antisemitism from the Civil War to World War I,” and he does something almost nobody has tried before: He tells the story behind the charge that Jews deliberately set fires in order to collect insurance money —or “Jewish lightning.”

In fact, there were real Jewish arsonists who operated in American cities for roughly 60 years, and Jeff tells those stories. He begins with the…