The “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye” ad debuted 50 years ago this year. Of course, you also don’t have to be Irish to march at the front of the official St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Unlike David Dinkins in 1993 and Bill de Blasio this year, New York’s Jewish mayors have never boycotted the Parade despite the running controversy over its exclusion of organized gay participants. Irish-Jewish relations in New York City, this time of year—and not only this time—are usually bathed in a hue of shamrock-colored bagels and nostalgia. Relations between Irish and Jews in the old country also have their stock repertoire of feel-good images, including two father-and-son Jewish lords mayor of Dublin, nineteenth-century “Liberator” Daniel O’Connell’s declaration that “Ireland is the only Christian country I know of unsullied by any act of persecution against the Jews,” Home Rule Crusader Michael Davitt’s journey to Czarist Russia in 1903 to expose the Kishinev Program, Ze’ev Jabotinsky journey to Ireland to model his movement to drive the British out of Palestine on the IRA, and Yitzhak Shamir the taking the guerrilla code name “Michael” after the Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins. Even so, the Irish—including Irish Jews—have long memories. Even if it were not for the anti-Israel bias of the IRA and former Irish President Mary Robinson, Irish Jews would remember the Limerick Pogrom of 1904, supported by Sein Fenn founder Arthur Griffith, and Irish President Éamon de Valera’s signing of the official book of condolence on Hitler’s death on May 2, 1945, despite de Valera’s prewar friendship with Chief Rabbi of Ireland (and later Chief Rabbi of Israel) Isaac Herzog. The remarkable thing is how quickly the equally problematic history of Irish-Jewish relations in the U.S. has disappeared from the popular and, even to some degree, the scholarly imagination. In 1963, the first edition of Nathan Glazer’s and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “Beyond the Melting Pot” appeared. It was still written under the shadow of Irish-Jewish conflicts in New York City dating back to the 1930s and before. By 1970, when the second edition appeared, this earlier history of Irish-Jewish conflict was entirely overshadowed in the book by Black-Jewish conflict erupting in 1968’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville “community control” of schools dispute pitting Jewish teachers against African American activists. To sum up some of the unhappy historical relations of Irish and Jews in New York City: • In 1850 on Yom Kippur Eve, in the first example of the blood libel hysteria in the U.S., a mostly Irish Brooklyn mob of 500, including policemen, wrecked a Jewish home and adjoining synagogue because of rumors that Jews had killed a Christian girl for her blood. • In 1870, the “Irish World” published a cartoon showing Baron Rothschild dressed as Shylock and wielding a knife. • In 1902, heavily Irish workers rained down bricks, then popularly called “Irish confetti,” on the 25,000 East Side Jews marching Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph’s funeral procession, while the Irish police—rather than repressing the anti-Jewish violence—joined in with their billy clubs. • In 1927, in response Warner Bros.’ “Irish Hearts” and MGM’s “The Callahans and the Murphys,” Irish Catholic newspapers equated Hollywood’s “Jewish Trust” with “perverts and pimps” for making fun of the Irish or—worse yet—picturing Jewish boys marrying Irish girls; they also incited violent attacks on Jewish theater managers. • In the late 1930s, longstanding gang battles between Irish and Jewish youngsters (with the Jews mostly on the receiving end) were ominously politicized by fascist “radio priest” Father Charles whose “The Christian Front” organized anti-Jewish boycotts, incited street violence, and (according to the FBI) inspired a fringe element that planned to bomb Jewish institutions and assassinate prominent Jews. In New York as well as Boston, such fascist-tinged attacks on Jews persisted into 1943. What happened after World War II was a some ways paradoxical improvement in Irish-Jewish relations. The end of Depression era economic tensions helped, but many Jews continued to suspect that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade, heavily supported by the American Irish, was anti-Semitic. Yet McCarthy—who immunized himself partly immunized himself by appointing Roy Cohn as his right-hand-man—managed to convince even Seymour Martin Lipset that anti-Semitism had very little to do with his witch hunt. Then, the Kennedy clan—who were doubly suspected by Jews for Joe Sr.’s Isolationist and sometimes anti-Semitic views and for Robert Kennedy’s association with McCarthy—did what was necessary to convince American Jewish contributors and voters that JFK deserved the benefit of the doubt. Remarkably, he received a slightly higher percentage in 1960 of the Jewish vote than the Irish Catholic vote. After the 1960s, and despite the Kennedy cult, “typical” Irish Americans were still often stereotyped by media and academe as underachieving “Archie Bunkers” (the reactionary antihero of Norman Lear’s sitcom who was portrayed by Lear—playing it safe—as Protestant not Catholic Irish). As the late priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley showed, these stereotypes were increasingly out of touch with trends that made third- and fourth-generation Irish more-and-more successful and moderate in their political ideology and voting habits. Indeed in New York City—as Jewish voters moved from the left toward the center while Irish voters moved toward the center from the right—differences began to blur. Another complicating factor was the emergence of a new influx of immigrants from Ireland including many “illegals” who had overstayed their visas. Viewed from a twenty-first century perspective, one can view the mug of Guinness as either half full or half empty. On the one hand, current St. Patrick Day effusions of good feeling between Irish and Jews in New York obscure an ugly history of conflict. On the other hand, the fact that so much bad feeling has been forgotten over the course of a generation or two causes one to hope for the future: perhaps forty years from now, African Americans and Jews may forget ugly tensions escalating between them in the 1960s, and once again fondly look back on their relationship as “We Shall Overcome” marches and collaborations in popular music.