Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives

Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, by Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., Indiana University Press, 2013, 561 pp.Reviewed by Catherine D. ChatterleyToday, more than sixty years after the destruction of European Jewry, antisemitism is a globalized phenomenon and one that appears to be evolving on a number of fronts. Jew-hatred has a millennial history and is one of humanity's most complex imaginative systems. Nonetheless, antisemitism remains a subject that is underresearched in serious scholarly circles and that is understudied on our university campuses.Alvin Rosenfeld's collection of essays, Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives is the first book in a series on the subject to be published by Indiana University Press. book also makes apioneeringcontribution to the burgeoning field of Antisemitism Studies. Composed of nineteen separate essays, the text as a whole identifies antisemitism as a transnational phenomenon, a serious global problem that connects people across cultures and continents. Many of the essays are indispensable to an understanding of contemporary antisemitism and of how these new manifestations are informed and driven by classical themes.To give readers a sense of the wide range of subject matter covered in this collection, the authors can be grouped as follows: Bernard Harrison and Elhanan Yakira provide philosophical-analytical reflections on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism; Alejandro Baer, Zvi Gitelman, Szilvia Peremiczky, and Anna Sommer Schneider address the burdensome weight and contested influence of historical antisemitism on contemporary post-Soviet Europe, Hungary, Romania, and Poland, respectively; Emanuele Ottolenghi and lian Avisar analyze the thorny subject of Jewish participation in anti-Zionist politics; Bruno Chaouat, Paul Bogdanor, and Eirik Eiglad cover the debates about the waning of post-Holocaust taboos and a resurfacing of antisemitism in western Europe; in an attempt to understand the roots of Islamized antisemitism Robert Wistrich, Matthias Kuntzel; Jamsheed K. Choksy, Rifat Bali, and Gunther Jikeli uncover past relationships between Muslim religious and jihadist movements and the influence of western fascist and communist ideologies on each of them; Dina Porat and Alvin Rosenfeld focus attention on the complex and disturbing relationship between the Holocaust and contemporary forms of antisemitism; and, finally, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin theorizes on the relationship between Ethnic Studies and antisemitism at San Francisco State University.Due to space constraints, this review will focus attention on only several of this collection's outstanding contributions.For readers interested in the dynamic of continuity between classical antisemitism and its new variations, Alejandro Baer's work on Spain stands out as a profoundly important commentary on the uniquely persistent andobsessive nature of antisemitism and its roots in the European religious imagination. In an essay entitled, Between Old and New Antisemitism: Image of Jews in Present-Day Spain, Baer argues that the negative religious caricature of Jews remains firmly anchored in Spanish cultural memory through language, literature, and popular tradition, despite the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. figure of The Jew haunted Spanish discourse through the nineteenth century, and themes of alleged Jewish criminality and conspiracy suffused nationalist propaganda during the Civil War (1936-1939) and under Francos dictatorship, which ended in 1975. Biological racism did not operate under Francoist fascism in the same way or to the same degree that it operated under Nazism. Baer notes the strange dichotomized attitude toward Jews under Franco where the regime maintained a traditional hatred of Jews and Judaism and ignored the Holocaust after the war, while at the same time boasted about having saved Jews. Sephardic Jews were allowed into Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, and synagogues were even established, though Spain did not recognize Israel until 1986, making it the last European country to take this step. …