Special Issue Convergence And Divergence Anti Semitism And Anti Zionism In Historical Perspectives

Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Israeli History, this book presents the reflections of historians from Israel, Europe, Canada and the United States concerning the similarities and differences between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism primarily in Europe and the Middle East. Spanning the past century, the essays explore the continuum of critique from early challenges to Zionism and they offer criteria to ascertain when criticism with particular policies has and has not coalesced into an "ism" of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Including studies of England, France, Germany, Poland, the United States, Iran and Israel, the volume also examines the elements of continuity and break in European traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism when they diffused to the Arab and Islamic. Essential course reading for students of religious history.

Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Israeli History, this book presents the reflections of historians from Israel, Europe, Canada and the United States concerning the similarities and differences between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism primarily in Europe and the Middle East. Spanning the past century, the essays explore the continuum of critique from early challenges to Zionism and they offer criteria to ascertain when criticism with particular policies has and has not coalesced into an "ism" of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Including studies of England, France, Germany, Poland, the United States, Iran and Israel, the volume also examines the elements of continuity and break in European traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism when they diffused to the Arab and Islamic. Essential course reading for students of religious history.

Crossovers compares Jewish anti-Zionism and Palestinian anti-Semitism from political and philosophical points of view. The authors' goal is to expose what is unique about these phenomena, and what they share, so that both ideologies and their practical impact can be better understood. The authors identify a symbiotic relationship between anti-Semitic Palestinian doctrines and those Jews who are anti-Zionists. There has been a great deal of research on these as separate phenomena, but there has thus far been no research that has noted their similarities. Palestinian anti- Semitism and Jewish anti-Zionism may stem from different sources, but they have similar consequences. Palestinian views derive from religious Islamic as well as nationalist- Arab roots, while the views of anti-Zionist Jews grew out of an ideological-Marxist-Trotskyite background. But both share a common goal: the destruction of the Jewish-Zionist nation, and a common strategy, to achieve a bi-national state as a first stage in the march to this goal. Jewish history is replete with examples of how Jews have ignored repeated threats and acts of violence against them. That characteristic of Jews reflects their Messianic belief, but it lacks a basis in history. That belief has resisted change even in the face of threats that were obvious and that have endangered Jewish lives in the past. Contemporary anti-Zionists share this optimistic outlook. Paradoxically, while the Jewish-Zionist State of Israel contends in public that another Holocaust will not happen and is patently impossible, the lesson of recent Jewish history is that a Holocaust can happen again. This work is unrelenting in its criticisms and tough minded in its assessments of the future. It merits careful, serious reading.

One-volume comprehensive collection of new articles on the history, literature and philosophy of antisemitism, for students and non-experts.

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between medieval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, this book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.

Conceptualizing Mass Violence draws attention to the conspicuous inability to inhibit mass violence in myriads forms and considers the plausible reasons for doing so. Focusing on a postcolonial perspective, the volume seeks to popularize and institutionalize the study of mass violence in South Asia. The essays explore and deliberate upon the varied aspects of mass violence, namely revisionism, reconstruction, atrocities, trauma, memorialization and literature, the need for Holocaust education, and the criticality of dialogue and reconciliation. The language, content, and characteristics of mass violence/genocide explicitly reinforce its aggressive, transmuting, and multifaceted character and the consequent necessity to understand the same in a nuanced manner. The book is an attempt to do so as it takes episodes of mass violence for case study from all inhabited continents, from the twentieth century to the present. The volume studies ‘consciously enforced mass violence’ through an interdisciplinary approach and suggests that dialogue aimed at reconciliation is perhaps the singular agency via which a solution could be achieved from mass violence in the global context. The volume is essential reading for postgraduate students and scholars from the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology, World History, Human Rights, and Global Studies.

Through a qualitative analysis and broad historical contextualization of personal interviews, The New Zionists shows how American Jewish “Millennials” who are not religiously orthodox approach Israel and Zionism as galvanizing solutions to the thinning of American Jewish identity, and (re)root themselves through “Israeliness”—an unselfconscious and largely secular expression of national kinship and solidarity, as well as of personal and communal purpose, that American Judaism scarcely provides.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself. Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism. As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.