Given that charges of anti-Semitism, racism, and the like continue to be potent weapons of moral and intellectual critique in our culture, it is important that we work toward a clear understanding about just what sorts of conduct and circumstances constitute these moral offenses. In particular, can criticism of a state (such as Israel), or other social or political institution or organization (such as the NAACP), ever amount to anti-Semitism, racism, or other bigotry against the people represented by or associated (...) with it, even if no explicit denigration of them occurs? That a renowned scholar of rhetoric and philosophy takes up the challenge of answering such a question would seem to be cause for optimism, but the recent attempt by Judith Butler turns out to be subverted by faulty logic and blatant misreading. As a result, it obfuscates the issue, and wrongly suggests that expressive acts cannot be blameworthy on grounds of bigotry if they are not intentionally designed to serve such purposes. (shrink)

Ziege’s book focuses primarily on the two main empirical studies carried out by Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research during its exile in the United States in the 1940s: a relatively unknown and never-published study of anti-Semitism among American workers and the much better known, five-volume Studies in Prejudice. Ziege poses and successfully answers the question of why the Institute began to focus more on empirical studies and anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Her thorough archival research illuminates as never before the (...) Institute’s relations to the main organizations that funded its ambitious empirical projects during this time: the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. She also provides the richest existing account of how the experience of American exile affected the Institute’s theoretical premises and empirical work. By distinguishing between the Institute’s ‘esoteric’ theoretical assumptions, which maintained a large degree of continuity with its earlier work, and a willingness to work at the ‘exoteric’ level with many scholars who didn’t share these assumptions, Ziege explains how the Institute made certain concessions to mainstream American academic culture without ever abandoning the radical intentions of Critical Theory. (shrink)

The article examines the transformation of the understanding of humanism from the Renaissance to the modern era, focusing on the mechanism of exclusion that defines the key framework of social action, including in the present day. This social mechanism pushes declared values beyond observable reality, generates cognitive paralysis, and ultimately points to the existence of an alternate reality that dominates a morally depleted society. The replacement of reality with constructs fabricated by various doctrinal groups is identified as a major delusion (...) of our times, luring people into self-deception, seducing them with illusory values, and confusing the noble with the ignoble. The mechanisms of exclusion serve as the essential foundation for excluding thought, values, and ideals from everyday social life. This exclusion is evident in ancient democracy, which despised slaves; in Russian literature, which flirted with serfdom; and most notably in modern autocracy and liberalism, which focus solely on their own kind. The article takes as its starting point the transitional state of society where, under the conditions of the Reformation, Renaissance values understood as humanism are reduced to post-Renaissance “humanism.” From this perspective, the treatise of F.I. Niethammer is analyzed for its contribution to the modern understanding of humanism in contrast to the educational philanthropinism of J.B. Basedow. The article reveals the connection between the term “humanism” and German anti-Semitism, showing that humanism, as conceived in the German context, was intended for ethnic insiders and educationally stood as an antithesis to the Frankfurt Philanthropin, the largest German educational institution opened in a Jewish ghetto for children from poor families. The author concludes with historical parallels and findings that identify the characteristics of modern societies shaped by the discussed mechanism of exclusion. (shrink)

This chapter discusses and revisits the question of anti-Semitism as it emerges especially in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, articulates the history of figuration in which domination takes place, tracing the politicoeconomic forces of fascism and capitalism to a mode of representation that is the condition for their emergence as historical possibilities in the first place. The case of anti-Semitism is exemplary in this history and in the dialectic of individuals and social and cultural forces. As Max (...) Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno explain, anti-Semitism condemns individuals as Jews, in effect denying them their individuality, and yet condemns Jews because of their individuality or particularity. The potential for freedom from anti-Semitism thus lies in a strategic deployment of the position of this particularity. (shrink)

This book investigates the anti-Semitic foundations of Nazi curricula for elementary schools, with a focus on the subjects of biology, history, and literature. Gregory Paul Wegner argues that any study of Nazi society and its values must probe the education provided by the regime. Schools, according to Wegner, play a major role in advancing ideological justifications for mass murder, and in legitimizing a culture of ethnic and racial hatred. Using a variety of primary sources, Wegner provides a vivid account of (...) the development of Nazi education. (shrink)

This book articulates a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Jew hatred as a metaphysical aspect of the human soul. Proceeding from the Jewish thinking that the anti-Semites oppose, David Patterson argues that anti-Semitism arises from the most ancient of temptations, the temptation to be as God, and thus to flee from an absolute accountability to and for the other human being.

During my preparations for this lecture, I realized that the German Coordinating Group had already sponsored a lecture with the title “On the struggle against Anti-Semitism today” in 1962.1 At that time they invited a more prominent speaker—a person whom I esteem and admire, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno's suggestions for combating anti-Semitism remain relevant today, a point to which I will return later. Anti-Semitism itself, however, which at that time Adorno attributed to an “excessive nationalism,” has changed its form of (...) appearance. First of all, hostility against Jews today is directed less against the Jewish minority in Europe and more…. (shrink)

The literature on Adorno and anti‐Semitism presents a somewhat curious state of affairs. On the one hand, concern with anti‐Semitism is presented as pivotal to his views and major works, at least post‐1940. On the other hand, the account of anti‐Semitism offered by Adorno – and Horkheimer – faces trenchant criticisms for failing to do justice to the complex phenomena at issue. In this Chapter, I re‐examine and re‐evaluate this account. In particular, I argue that they navigate (...) well two central dilemmas intrinsic to any endeavor of making sense of anti‐Semitism and the events for which the name “Auschwitz” stands. (shrink)

How did the levels of anti-Semitism in the 1930s compare to those of earlier decades? Did anti-Semitism vary in content and intensity across societies? In other words, were Germans more anti-Semitic than their European neighbors, and, if so, why? How does anti-Semitism differ from other forms of religious, racial, and ethnic prejudice? In this 2003 book, William I. Brustein offersa truly systematic comparative and empirical examination of anti-Semitism within Europe before the Holocaust. Brustein proposes that European anti-Semitism flowed from religious, (...) racial, economic, and political roots, which became enflamed by economic distress, rising Jewish immigration, and socialist success. To support his arguments, Brustein draws upon a careful and extensive examination of the annual volumes of the American Jewish Year Books and more than 40 years of newspaper reportage from Europe's major dailies. The findings of this informative book offer a fresh perspective on the roots of society's longest hatred. (shrink)

In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the (...) civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies. (shrink)

According to Trawny, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks show that he turned away from any National Socialism in 1938 and that his thinking could be “contaminated” by National Socialism and anti-Semitism only between 1931 and 1944/1945. However, in this paper it is argued that already in Being and Time Heidegger had made a case for National Socialism; that he discovered in 1938 the “true” National Socialism, and that Trawny’s main criterion regarding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is false. Heidegger’s case is compared with Max Scheler, (...) who, because of Hitler, turned from the right to the centre. In addition, alternatives to Trawny’s detailed interpretations of three of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks are offered, it is shown that Trawny misconstrues Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, and the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s history of Being are presented. (shrink)

ExcerptThe debate about persecutory Fascist legislation, in its anti-Jewish and racial-colonial1 articulation, has represented one of the most innovative branches of historical research in Italy in the last twenty years.2 In 1988, the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the promulgation of anti-Jewish legislation marked the symbolic beginning of fruitful studies on the racial character of Fascism. It allowed the integration, development, and refinement of the research carried out for a long time only by Renzo De Felice and Meir Michaelis.3The (...) actual enforcement of persecutory legislation, especially against the Italian Jewish minority, has been an object of detailed study…. (shrink)

This is a critical review of David Patterson's book Anti-Semitism and Its Metaphysical Origins (2015). In this review, I present the author's new explanation of the roots of anti-Semitism, which he finds in the anti-Semite's desire to become like God himself. Patterson's explanation makes an anti-Semite of all those who partake in the "Western rationalist project," especially philosophers (including Jewish philosophers such as Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, and Marx), but also Islamists and anti-Zionist Jews. I criticize Patterson on two fronts: First, (...) his "metaphysical" explanation relies on a petitio principii. Second, he should have argued his stance against that of Zeev Sternhell's thesis, according to which Western anti-Semitism is rooted, not in Western rationalism, but rather in the Western anti-rationalist (anti-Enlightenment) movement. (shrink)

This book reflects on the role that the opposition to anti-Semitism has been playing in shaping political philosophy after the Holocaust. Its premise is that in post-Holocaust philosophy anti-Semitism has become a paradigm of evil ideology or politics, a negative Politeia. The analysis proceeds through critical readings in prominent political philosophers, from Adorno, Horkheimer, Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt, to Alain Badiou and most recently Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as the debates and contemporary scholarship around them. Through these readings the (...) book develops a critical observation, demonstrating how post-Holocaust philosophy has identified the fundamental, epistemological evil of anti-Semitic thought not in thinking against Jews, but in thinking of Jews. In other words, so the book’s claim, what philosophy has been denouncing as anti-Semitic is the figure of “the Jew” in thought. The book thus reveals how it is paradoxically the opposition to anti-Semitism that has been generating in post-Holocaust philosophy a rejection of Jewish thought. With respect to this rejection, this book makes two claims: first, that in rejecting Jewish thought the opposition to anti-Semitism comes dangerously close to anti-Semitism; second, that at work in this rejection is a problematic understanding of the relations between politics and thought, i.e. a problematic “political epistemology”. It is the critique of this political epistemology, as foundational for contemporary political thought, which is the ultimate aim of the book. The book’s original contribution consists in offering the first systematic analysis of the contemporary philosophical problem of anti-Semitism and the opposition to anti-Semitism. It intervenes in current conversations on the relations between Western philosophy, anti-Semitism and Jewish thought, the relation between politics and truth, and the relations between religion and race, among others in the context of the critiques of orientalism and secularism as well as post-colonial theory. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's work inspires many to stand in solidarity against authoritarianism, racial or gender-based violence, climate change, and right-wing populism. But what if a careful analysis of her oeuvre reveals a darker side to this intellectual legacy? What if solidarity, as she conceives of it, is not oriented toward equality, freedom, or justice for all, but creates a barrier to intersectional coalition building? In Arendt's Solidarity, David D. Kim illuminates Arendt's lifelong struggle with this deceptively straightforward yet divisive concept. Drawing (...) upon her publications, unpublished documents, private letters, radio and television interviews, newspaper clippings, and archival marginalia, Kim examines how Arendt refutes solidarity as an effective political force against anti-Semitism, racial injustice, or social inequality. As Kim reveals, this conceptual conundrum follows the arc of Arendt's forced migration across the Atlantic and is directly related to every major concern of hers: Christian neighborly love, friendship, Jewish assimilation, Zionism, National Socialism, the American republic, Black Power, revolution, violence, and the human world. Kim places these thoughts in dialogue with dissenting voices, such as Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, James Forman, and Ralph Ellison. The result is a full-scale reinterpretation of Arendt's oeuvre. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the War on Terror, Israel has become increasingly salient to imperial strategy and ever more aggressive in its policies toward the Palestinians. In this context, a key ideological weapon is the cynical accusation of "anti-Semitism." For historical reasons, this has been deployed most forcefully in France, and Alain Badiou and Eric Hazan caustically demolish the "anti-Semitism is everywhere" allegation, used to bludgeon opponents of the Israeli state and those who stand in solidarity with the banlieue youth. (...) Ivan Segre undertakes a meticulous deconstruction of a rampant "reactionary philo-Semitism" that identifies Jewish interests with the "democratic West.". (shrink)

Nevertheless, Marx's essay ["On the Jewish Question"] has a profound bearing upon The Jew of Malta; their conjunction enriches our understanding of the authors; relation to ideology and, more generally, raises fruitful questions about a Marxist reading of literature. The fact that both works use the figure of the perfidious Jew provides a powerful link between Renaissance and modern thought, for despite the great differences to which I have just pointed, this shared reference is not an accident or a mirage. (...) "On the Jewish Question" represents the nineteenth-century development of a late sixteenth-century idea or, more accurately, a late sixteenth-century trope. Marlowe and Marx seize upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshalling deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but, in less "pure" form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally incidental in these works, Marx's as well as Marlowe's, except insofar as they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-century polemicist.1 · 1. Anti-Semitism, it should be emphasized, is never merely a trope to be adopted or discarded by an author as he might choose to employ zeugma or eschew personification. It is charged from the start with irrationality and bad faith and only partly rationalized as a rhetorical strategy. Marlowe depicts his Jew with the compulsive cruelty that characterizes virtually all his work, while Marx's essay obviously has elements of a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background. It is particularly tempting to reduce the latter work to a dark chapter in its author's personal history. The links I am attempting to establish with Marlowe or the more direct link with Feuerbach, however, locate the essay in a far wider context. Still, the extreme violence of the latter half of Marx's work and his utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates undoubtedly owe much to his personal situation. It is interesting that the tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the Jews. Stephen J. Greenblatt is the Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and the editor of a collection of essays, New World Encounters. (shrink)

The Gaza War is a watershed moment not only in the Middle East. It has also increased political divisions in Germany, where Israel’s security and the fight against anti-Semitism are part of its historical legacy and political and moral identity. Incidents of anti-Semitism have increased dramatically, as have overdrawn accusations of it. An analysis of controversies about the definition of anti-Semitism, about the use of the term apartheid for the situation in the West Bank, of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, (...) Sanctions), and particularly the characterization of Israel as a settler-colonial state shows how difficult it has become to maintain a fair, honest, and frank discussion considering different points of view. The current crisis should be used as an opportunity for Germany to, on the one hand, face the unavoidable contradictions in its responsibilities stemming from the crimes of its Nazi past and, on the other hand, come to grips not only with Arab and Iranian terrorism and eliminationist rhetoric but also with the deficiencies in Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Germany’s new leitmotiv ought to be: ‘Between the River and the Sea, Jews and Arabs should be free.’. (shrink)

In the course of 20th-century European history Jews and Arabs, as well as Jews and Muslims, were put in the position of a ‘civilizational’ conflict that is not only political but also quasi-metaphysical. This article examines an impact of the conflict on the attitudes towards anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and considers Islamophobic implications of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ discourse. A thesis of the text is that both the struggle against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and the one against the mechanism creating, in certain circumstances, (...) a kind of negative feedback loop between them requires not only opposing the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudices, but also a deep, critical reconsideration of the concepts of Europeanness that lie at their foundation. The author suggests that a good starting point for this reconsideration might be the postcolonial reading of the Jewish intellectual tradition, especially the one focusing on the figure of the Mizrahi Jew. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the antithesis between Athens and Jerusalem in the work of Karl Marx. Starting from an exploration of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, the essay attempts to situate Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ within a longer history of philosophical writings about Judaism. It argues that, like previous writers, Marx depicts the Hellenic world as an implicit Other to Jewish modernity. Marx’s writings about Greece are heir both to the tradition of German philhellenism reaching back to (...) Schiller and to the insights into antiquity arising from the development of historical scholarship. While Marx’s writings have been instrumental in moving away from the Christian worldview, he has also played a contested and ambivalent role in the development of modern anti-Semitism. By exploring the representation of Greeks and Jews in Marx and Feuerbach, this article will trace how the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem played a crucial role in the shift from Christian anti-Judaism to secular anti-Semitism. (shrink)

Hertzberg develops his daring thesis that the "modern, secular, anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and Revolution themselves." He finds that modern anti-Semitism owes less to Christian theological mentality than to doctrinaire libertarianism of figures such as Voltaire, d'Holbach, Diderot, and Marat.

The first comprehensive account of Nietzsche's views of Jews and Judaism For more than a century, Nietzsche's views about Jews and Judaism have been subject to countless polemics. The Nazis infamously fashioned the philosopher as their anti-Semitic precursor, while in the past thirty years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The increasingly popular view today is that Nietzsche was not only completely free of racist tendencies but also was a principled adversary of anti-Jewish thought. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem offers (...) a definitive reappraisal of the controversy, taking the full historical, intellectual, and biographical context into account. As Robert Holub shows, a careful consideration of all the evidence from Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings and letters reveals that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem demonstrates how this is so despite the apparent paradox of the philosopher’s well-documented opposition to the crude political anti-Semitism of the Germany of his day. As Holub explains, Nietzsche’s "anti-anti-Semitism" was motivated more by distaste for vulgar nationalism than by any objection to anti-Jewish prejudice. A richly detailed account of a controversy that goes to the heart of Nietzsche’s reputation and reception, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem will fascinate anyone interested in philosophy, intellectual history, or the history of anti-Semitism. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 1938, when anti-Jewish Racial Laws were passed in Italy, Pope Pius XI and Mussolini went through a long confrontation on the racial problem: for the Duce of Fascism, anything related to racial policies fell within the competence of the Italian government and had nothing to do with religion, hence the Vatican had no authority to intervene; conversely, for the Pope, racism was a dangerous heresy and, as such, had to be condemned by the Catholic Church. This confrontation was harsh (...) and would continue until the death of Pius XI in February 1939. But did the Italian Church sustain the…. (shrink)