The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism

Review by Michael N. Dobkowski for JewishBookCouncil.org

In this rich and provocative book, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen examines the worldwide resurgence of anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century. Its reach is unparalleled, both historically and today and hundreds of millions of people have been exposed to it, especially in the internet and satellite television age. It is practically an article of faith in much of the Arab and Islamic worlds which subscribes to the foundational anti-Semitic paradigm that holds Jews to be essentially different from non-Jews and dangerous. But it also exists in subdued forms among Christians. The range of people spreading and believing in anti-Semitism is unusually broad. From common “folk” to university professors and political leaders, from people on the political right to those on the left, from the secular to the devout believers in God—all sectors of society have been moved by its associated passions, including hatred and violence. One of the most effective and disturbing arguments Goldhagen musters is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism over the past decade or so is shock­ing because it does not seem to shock. The horrific calumnies leveled against Jews in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa seem to be accepted without challenge by the masses, opinion makers and elites alike. This has a self-reinforcing dynamic of persuading more and more people of anti-Semitism’s claims.

Goldhagen makes a strong case for anti-Semitism’s unique and enduring character. It has the ability to change and mutate over time, rendering it continuous with earlier forms and yet substantially new. It is more dangerous than at any time since the Holocaust, threatening politically and physically Jewish communities around the world, includ­ing Israel’s very existence. He is particularly cogent in his nuanced treatment of the issue of criticism of Israel and when it slides into anti-Semitism. He exposes the historical and intellectual weaknesses of comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and the hypocrisy of academics and leaders who judge Israel by different standards.

This is an important book providing a comprehensive catalogue of “globalized anti-Semitism.” Unfortunately, however, the book is long on denouncing and short on evaluating. His criticism of other religions, particularly Islam, is excessive and borders on the conspiratorial. The fact that much of his research comes from the web and public opinion surveys makes his book less appealing than the more scholarly ap­proaches to anti-Semitism offered in recent works by David Nirenberg, Anthony Julius, Alvin Rosenfeld, and Robert Wistrich. The writing is often dense and repetitive and the tone is occasionally shrill and hector­ing, with some of his points bordering on hyperbole—yet the message is compelling and important. Anti-Semitism is back and we need to be concerned.



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Joyce Carol Oates in Conversation with Alan Cheuse

On November 14, Moment fiction editor Alan Cheuse spoke with fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates at the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest awards ceremony at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. This interview is adapted from that conversation. To read the full text and watch the video, visit momentmag.com.

Cheuse: How did you begin writing?

Oates: I was very interested in literature and was reading ever since I was eight or nine when I was given Alice in Wonderland. I had tablets that I drew pictures on a little bit like Lewis Carroll’s, and then I graduated to the typewriter about the time I was in ninth or tenth grade, when I was reading Hemingway and tried to write Hemingway-inspired stories. My grandmother gave me the typewriter, which at the time was an astonishing thing. I was sure I was the only one in the whole county with a typewriter.


Cheuse: Did your friends know what you were doing?

Oates: No, but I gave some of these stories to my teachers. I also had phases in which I was influenced by Faulkner and Fitzgerald. I was like an apprentice to these great writers. I remember how exciting that was, pretending I was a real writer, typing away.


Cheuse: Your family encouraged you to write at a rather early age.

Oates: My grandmother encouraged me—I had a Jewish grandmother. We didn’t know she was Jewish. She was from a family that came from Germany in the 1890s, and they disguised their identity and came to western New York. Why anybody would willingly go up there where it’s so cold, I’ve got no idea. We lived out in the country and it was relative wilderness. This part of the family didn’t want to say they were Jewish. They just had a kind of amnesia. My grandmother never talked about her background at all. She was the person who bought books for me and took me to the library in the city. I was her favorite, and I think I’ve become a writer because of her. She was always giving me books. So I came away with a false idea of reality. I thought my grandmother was someone whom I knew. I didn’t know her. I only knew a grandmother. I knew somebody who was playing a beautiful role with her family, but she must have gone home and she must have been really lonely. But the German-Jewish strain, and here I’m sorry to talk in clichés, but this is the intellectual strain. I think, “Why do I read books and why do I love books?” I think it’s probably that inheritance. There is something about Jews who revere books and education and language and art and music in a very wonderful way.


Cheuse: Your teachers must have encouraged you greatly.

Oates: I was very lucky to have teachers who were encouraging. I went to a one-room schoolhouse out in the country, and it was very rough and kind of primitive. It was one large room, one teacher and eight grades. I’ve written a lot about that school because it was such an interesting experience, and people don’t have any idea what it’s like today. Books were so prized and valuable—and in my household there were so few of them—that to me, the book was an aesthetic object. It had a sort of magical value, whereas I think younger people today, who may just be reading online, don’t have that same feeling for the aesthetic properties.

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'Tiger Mom' Amy Chua Roars Again

By Elissa Strauss for The Jewish Daily Forward

Jewish husband Jed Rubenfeld and in it she looks at the parenting practices of six cultural groups who, she claims, create more successful people. These include Indians, Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerians, Cuban Exiles, Mormons and, you got it, Jews.

Her thesis in “The Triple Package” is that all these cultures have a competitive edge because they impart on their children feelings of superiority, insecurity and impulse control, which push their children to do better in America than others in terms of income, test scores and occupational status.

The book, which I haven’t read yet, has already ignited a backlash from those who see a little too much overlap between Chua and Rubenfeld’s superior cultural groups theory and the racist social philosophy of eugenics. I too feel uncomfortable with the essentialization of certain groups and am no fan of Jewish exceptionalism, or how it can backfire, either.

Still, there is one more thing that bugs me about this new book and it is the way Chua and Rubenfeld have hijacked the Jewish mother stereotype.

Not that I love stereotypes any more than I like the idea of making a list of superior races, but if we are going to be trading in stereotypes about Jewish mothers can we please go back to the old one because she is so much more likeable.

“The Triple Package” mother sounds like a cold and stern task-master who imparts upon her children a feeling of inferiority, chosenness and discipline. Yuck. The stereotypical Jewish mother is an endlessly doting, food-pushing, busy-body who wants their child to succeed, but not if it takes them too far away or makes them unhappy. She may not be the most open-minded woman, nor is she necessarily calm under-pressure, but she can be relied on for love, and unconditionally.

Of course most Jewish mothers are not either of these, but if one stereotype about Jewish mothers is being promoted out in the world I much prefer the loving one. And, for whatever its worth, I imagine that that love and the sense of security it provides is a factor in creating well-adjusted children, even if Chua and Rubenfeld left it off the list.





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Anti-Semitic Hatemail Never Looked This Good

Hatemail is probably the most bizarre book to ever grace a coffee table. Oversized, gorgeous, and with vivid and full-color matte printing, it's packed with turn-of-the-century art and extensive scholarly commentary...about anti-Semitic picture postcards.

There's an 1899 German postcard that depicts a trio of "Glucksschwein," Jews dressed up as pigs, which is a visual pun on the meaning of the word (it means "lucky charms" and "lucky pigs"). A 1907 cartoon touts the "competition of fierce animals, division of misers, first prize" to an effeminate-looking mouse that bears striking similarity to Art Spiegelman's creation.

Some of these items you can easily picture people laughing at, like a novelty postcard in a downtown dollar-store today. Others, like a Jew using a machine to squeeze money out of gentiles, are more sinister. And some are out-and-out propaganda, like a 1910 nursery-rhyme—a long nursery rhyme—about a Jewish boy who begs his father for an umbrella, then is horrified that they must pay for it. As a historical document, Hatemail is rare, surreal and valuable.

But we're still not sure we'd want it in our living rooms.

- Matthue Roth for Jewniverse

The People of the Book vs. The People of the Kindle

What happens when our libraries are purged from our homes, replacing spines with screens?

By Ann Marlowe for Tablet Magazine

The other day, my friend John said he was getting rid of almost all his books. By the time I visited his apartment, he’d already pruned his library by a quarter, dumping most of it in the garbage. “I read everything on Kindle now,” he explained, a trifle defensively. The immediate cause of his decision was his impending move to a starkly minimalist apartment with spectacular river views—and room for bookshelves, had he wanted them.

What led to John’s decision was a disgust at the accumulation of things that I partly understood. I had even recently told a non-Kindle-owning friend that I didn’t understand why one-fifth of my house was taken up by a library I rarely entered. And I find myself very impatient with people who say they refuse to get a Kindle because they love the physicality of books. These are people who don’t produce culture, I thought. It’s just a consumer preference. They’re the same people who go compulsively to the theater and see rubbish because it’s “theater.”

Of course, minimalism dates at least to Le Corbusier, and it was possible to purge one’s library before Kindle, but then it meant relying on public libraries. Now, if you have the money to re-purchase on Kindle everything you want to own, you can have those bare white walls and still read. My editor has suggested to me that book-purging is an essentially Protestant impulse, which solves a particularly Protestant problem, in which personal reading of the Bible must be reconciled with a ban on the worship of objects. There’s something to this, particularly when you think of the interiority of the Kindle, which is a personal space much as one’s Bible was for, say, a Puritan in Boston circa 1640. Jews and Muslims, meanwhile, both venerate the physical version of their holy books: We all know what an outcry Quran-burning causes, while Jews actually bury Torahs that are deemed to be too damaged to use.

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My Crazy Century: A Memoir

Review by Annette Gendler for the Jewish Book Council 

The 500 pages covering internment in the Nazi concentration camp Terezín and persecution under the Communist regime of Czech writer Ivan Klíma’s memoir My Crazy Century could be intimidating, but it isn’t. Klíma guides the reader steadily, hurtling through events from the 1930s to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It is his story, and the story of Czechoslovakia and its writers.

Mainly, My Crazy Century is the story of a writer: discovering the power of storytelling at Terezin; getting the idea for his first allegorical play, The Castl; editing a literary magazine; publishing his work only abroad and in a clandestine magazine typed up with friends during the twenty years they are banned from publishing at home. While Klíma details the harassment and persecution his friends and family suffer, he neither rages nor dwells. Oddly, for a Holocaust survivor, he is unperturbed when, in the late 1940s, a neighbor in Prague disappears. “He was a bougie,” his father, an ardent Communist, explains. When his beloved father is later imprisoned for “sabotage,” Klíma displays remarkable nonchalance. He worries about his first love, being a good member of the Communist Party, and providing for his family, rather than about his father’s fate. Disappearances are not seen as the alarming hallmark of a totalitarian regime but rather as the way things are. Perhaps, sadly, that is a survival skill learned in Terezín.

Being classified as Jewish by the Nazis comes as a surprise; Klíma had been raised entirely secular. He remains so, exhibiting bemused indifference toward all things Jewish, despite his Jewish wife’s interest in Judaism. She initiates, for example, their visit to an Israeli kibbutz in the early 1960s. There he is more interested in the Kibbutzniks’ successful experiment in communal living than in the realization of the Jewish state.

Klíma finds himself in London and later at the University of Michigan as a guest lecturer when the Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring. Nevertheless, Klíma decides to return. Thankfully, he addresses why: “For me, the only meaningful work was writing, telling stories that were somehow connected to my life, and this was interwoven with my homeland. The thought of writing in a foreign country about things that deeply touched me but with which I had cut off all ties seemed foolish.” Thus, My Crazy Country is an illuminating account of what it meant to be a Czech writer in the twentieth century.

A Great Jewish Novel, Out of South Africa

 Jews spend a lot of time thinking about "what if?" What if you fall and break your neck, God forbid? What if God had brought us out of Egypt but never given us the temple, huh? What if every great American immigration novel was set in Africa instead?

Johannesburg-born writer Kenneth Bonert's debut novel, The Lion Seeker, borrows from American Jewish masters of the novel to create a story of Jewish immigration and assimilation that's uniquely South African. His hero, Isaac Helger, together with his mother and sister, joins the family patriarch in Joburg from Dusat, Lithuania, to grow up against a backdrop of pre-WWII politics, changing technologies, and ugly race relations.

Recalling in equal parts David Schearl from Henry Roth's classic and Augie March, Isaac vows to be a success for the sake of his mother, who aches for family left behind in Lithuania. Amid doomed business ventures and girl-chasing, though, Isaac realizes that what he loves is fixing cars. This pursuit becomes a metaphor for Isaac's exploration of his family's troubled past. After all, he learns in this absorbing tale, it only takes a second to smash something to bits, but lots of careful work to make it new again.

- Leah Falk for Jewniverse