A New Era of Anti-Semitism Is Here. Daniel Goldhagen Blames Globalization.

In his new book, the controversial author warns against complacency, saying that prejudice against Jews is uniquely adaptable

By Vox Tablet

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen unleashed a fury of controversy when he published the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he argued that the Holocaust took place not because Germans were especially obedient to authority, or because a few bad apples came into power, but because an eliminationist prejudice against Jews was woven into the very fabric of German culture. Germans “considered the slaughter to be just,” Goldhagen wrote. His book hit a nerve—critics called Goldhagen out for using overly broad generalizations to indict an entire country—but that criticism didn’t hurt the book’s reception; it was a phenomenal success in Germany and around the world.

Nearly 20 years later, Goldhagen has broadened his scope in a new work. The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism offers an in-depth look at anti-Semitism around the world. He argues that it’s an almost pathological prejudice that spans centuries and cultures and therefore is a uniquely destructive force that has redoubled its strength thanks to a new age of globalization and information-sharing. Goldhagen joins Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to discuss why anti-Semitism is distinct from other forms of prejudice, how globalization has contributed to its resurgence, and what we can do to combat this scourge. [Running time: 29:40.]

Click here to listen to interview.

The Ghost Shtetl of Trochenbrod

Once upon a time there was a shtetl named Trochenbrod. In its heyday, Trochenbrod, which is located in Western Ukraine just 30 kilometers northeast of the city of Lutsk, was home to approximately 5,000 Jews, with seven synagogues, and a rich farming culture. In typically frank Yiddish fashion, Trochenbrod means "bread without butter."

And then one day, Trochenbrod was wiped off the map. In 1942, the Nazis liquidated the shtetl, murdering all but 200 of its inhabitants.

Today, Trochenbrod isn't an easy find. It is so elusive, in fact, that Jonathan Safran Foer fictionalized his own journey to Trochenbrod in his debut novel Everything Is Illuminated.

Now author Avrom Bendavid-Val is exploring the place, too—only this time there's nothing fictional about it.

Lost Town, a haunting new documentary, follows Bendavid-Val, whose late father emigrated from Trochenbrod years before the Holocaust, on his voyage to track down his ancestral homeland. On the heels of his 2010 book on the same subject, the film is a poignant journey into the past, bringing Bendavid-Val into contact not only with survivors of the shtetl, but with his own personal history as well.

- Zachary Solomon for Jewniverse

Kosher Pajamas and Cosmetic Surgery in Ritzy Tel Aviv

What do cosmetic shoulder blade surgery, flak jackets made of spider silk, high-end shopping sprees as a stage of grief, and The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling have in common? Nothing, perhaps, but their convergence in Textile, a newly translated novel by celebrated Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom.

Published in Hebrew in 2006, Textile features the quintessentially 21st-century coping mechanisms of the Grubers, a wealthy, anxiety-ridden family falling apart in a new, glitzy suburb of Tel Aviv. Amanda, the matriarch, runs the family kosher pajama factory and shields herself from her son's life as an army sniper by having countless plastic surgeries; Irad, her husband, is a scientific genius obsessed with his own virility. And their 22-year-old daughter Lirit masquerades as a kibbutznik, but would rather be shopping.
With her son on a sniper mission, Amanda undergoes shoulder blade enhancement surgery (which, don't worry, doesn't really exist). Meanwhile, an Israeli expatriate in Ithaca, NY invites Irad to learn top-secret scientific findings in the field they share. In lieu of a redemptive ending, Castel-Bloom maintains this sharp portrait of one family's self-made isolation structuring their ways of love and grief.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

Polish Catholic Brothers and a Village's Unsavory Past

The past might never be dead, but just how deeply can it be buried? That's the question brothers Franek and Jozek grapple with as they uncover the secrets of their rural Polish village 60 years after World War II, in Władysław Pasikowski's controversial film Pokłosie (Aftermath).

Franek returns to Poland from Chicago when he learns that Jozek's wife has left him. In an effort to understand why, Franek discovers that Jozek became a local pariah when he ripped up a road that German occupiers had paved decades earlier—with headstones from a Jewish cemetery.

Franek reluctantly supports Jozek's effort to collect the village's remaining Jewish headstones and erect them in his wheatfield. Villagers who live on formerly Jewish land try to discourage them—most viscerally through defacing their home with a dead dog and anti-Semitic graffiti. As they investigate, the brothers discover that their family's role in the destruction of the village's Jews was greater than they'd thought. The result is an unrelenting, unsentimental interrogation of historical revisionism and the ways grown children try to atone for their fathers – and a fascinating look at contemporary Poland.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse

An Israeli Paratrooper's Path to Extremism and Terror Told in 'Like Dreamers'

How Udi Adiv Veered Far Off Zionist Path

By Yossi Klein Halevi for The Jewish Daily Forward

Yossi Klein Halevi’s new book, “Like Dreamers,” is about seven of the paratroopers who reunited Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Their lives spiraled out from that triumphant moment in dramatically different directions, emblematic of a country that has been stretched between the extremes of right and left over the past 40 years. This week’s excerpt, the second to be published by the Forward, focuses on Udi Adiv, one of those paratroopers, who veered sharply to the left in the early 1970s. This is the story of how Adiv, a kibbutznik and son of kibbutz founders, found himself part of an anti-Zionist terrorist group, trained with militants in Damascus, and was even praised for his militancy by Yasser Arafat from the rostrum at the United Nations. Adiv would eventually repudiate his actions, but not before serving 12 years in an Israeli prison.

Udi walked the cobbled streets of Wadi Nisnass, Haifa’s Arab neighborhood near the docks. Burlap sacks with dried chili peppers and fava beans lined the sidewalks. Workmen’s restaurants served hummus for breakfast. Udi was charmed. He belonged here, he felt, more than among the Jews.

Udi was leading a schizophrenic existence. He was enjoying student life at the University of Haifa, Israel’s most integrated Arab-Jewish campus, and he felt as comfortable there as he could in any Israeli institution. He joined the university basketball team and was rarely without at least one girlfriend. But his political life was drawing him farther toward the fringe. When Naif Hawatmeh, leader of a Marxist faction of the PLO, called for incorporating “Israeli progressives” into the Palestinian war against Israel, Udi was elated.

One of Udi’s regular stops in Wadi Nisnass was a Marxist bookshop run by Daoud Turki, an Arab Israeli who had been expelled from Israel’s Communist Party for supporting terrorism. The corner bookshop was so small, there was scarcely room for a table and chairs. In his early forties, Daoud was a self-taught political theorist. He told Udi about the humiliation of growing up under Israeli military rule, which all Arab

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How Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce Changed Judaism Forever

David Kaufman's Book Revisits the Turbulent '60s

By Seth Rogovoy for The Jewish Daily Forward

Jewhooing the Sixties
by David E. Kaufman
Brandeis University Press

The final week of September 1961 proved to be an auspicious one in American Jewish history — or, at least, in the history of Jewish-American celebrities.

Within a matter of just a few days, Sandy Koufax set his first National League strikeout record; comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges; a then-unknown folksinger named Bob Dylan would play an opening set for the Greenbriar Boys at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village that would capture the attention of a reviewer for The New York Times; and a 19-year-old cabaret singer named Barbra Streisand made her off-Broadway debut.

The rest, as they say, is history, as well as the launching pad for David E. Kaufman’s “Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity.” An associate professor of religion, and the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University, Kaufman suggests that the approximately simultaneous rise to fame of these four third-generation American Jews was “a turning point in the history of both American celebrity and Jewish identity.”

He likens them to postwar American Jewish culture’s “Mount Rushmore of fame,” whose achievements would go on to “reshape the image of the American Jew” for both Jew and non-Jew alike.

These four were by no means the first of their kind. One could easily rattle off several lists of Jewish forebears who blazed trails beforehand, including baseball star Hank Greenberg; comedians including Groucho Marx, Jack Benny and George Burns, to name just a few; musical theater stars Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice; and in music, Benny Goodman and Irving Berlin.

But as Kaufman goes to great lengths to argue, this quartet was more transformational than those who came before, both in their personal identity as Jews and in what they represented to Jews and society at large as Jews.

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"The Lottery" & The Jews

"The Lottery" might be the most famous American short story. Written by Shirley Jackson and published in the New Yorker in 1948, it tells of an unnamed American town where, once a year, residents draw slips of paper from a black box, choosing one person to be murdered by the rest of the village.

Jackson, whose writing wrestles with social propriety and discomfort, hated to comment on her own work. When "The Lottery" was first published, The New Yorker was inundated with thousands of letters, many of which expressed readers' confusion. The magazine had never received so much feedback about any short story. Jackson kept mum. Later, however, she confided to a friend that the story was an allegory for anti-Semitism and violence in the modern world. A fascinating detail, considering the year of its publication.

Jackson's interest in anti-Semitism was personal. Her marriage to a Jewish English professor and jazz critic named Stanley Hyman was a subject of great speculation and controversy for both of their families—and, thankfully, inspired great literature.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse