Separation and Its Discontents (review)

166 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 in the text itself. Nevertheless, Antisemitismus in offentlichen Konflikten is an impressive achievement. Therefore, any student ofWest German political culture will have to come to terms with its considerable bulk, substantial price, and extensive footnotes. Wulf Kansteiner History/Judaic Studies SUNY Binghamton Separation and Its Discontents, by Kevin MacDonald. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. 325 pp. $65.00. Separation and Its Discontents is the second volume in a proposed trilogy by Kevin MacDonald, a professor ofpsychology at California State University, Long Beach. The previous volume, A People that Shall Dwell Alone, and the forthcoming final volume, The Culture ofCritique, both share a common theme with the current book-the Jewish practice of eugenics to perpetuate their race and build an ethnic group of superior intelligence. MacDonald argues that Jewishbreeding, educational, and cultural practices have all combined to produce a tightly bounded in-group that draws upon disdain toward outsiders and fear of infiltration by other races. The current volume, with its emphasis on antisemitism, proposes that antisemitic practices by non-Jews are secondary responses to the threatening and competitive strategies employed throughout history by Jewish groups in every part of the world. In responding to this book, I must first point out that I am not a historian, nor am I trained in Judaic Studies. My reaction to this book is based on my training in the same scientific discipline as the author's-psychology. By all scholarly standards ofpsychological research, this book is the worst kind of pseudo-science, filled with logical inconsistencies and tendentious inference. The author offers an oversimplified explanation for persisting currents of antisemitism in three distinct time periods and cultures. Relying almost completely on secondary scholarship to make his case, the author selectively quotes evidence that supports tenets ofhis argument with no consideration ofcountervailing arguments or evidence. There is no evidence ofany careful empirical confrontation ofthe hypotheses he proposes. In fact, anumber ofthese hypotheses, such as Jewish eugenic practices with regard to intellectual superiority and cultural values, he simply states as givens and then builds trains ofinferences from these assertions. In fairness to the author, it is possible that his first book on evolutionary strategies of the Jewish people may provide empirical support for these claims, but he provides no examples of this evidence in the current volume. The book is a work of advocacy, rather than of serious balanced scholarship. In order to build his case for various assertions, he often simply cites the assertions of another writer, as if this citation provides additional evidence beyond someone else's opinion. Even worse, he presents a particular writer's viewpoint about Jewish conduct or the response to Jewish conduct in a particular era (e.g., pre-Revolutionary Russia) Book Reviews 167 and then generalizes this perspective to support his highly speculative ideas about universal Jewish breeding strategies to maintain a competitive advantage over other groups. Ultimately, I believe that this book is written out of a deep and destructive hatred for Jews. In the preface to the book, the author attempts to diffuse any charges of antisemitism with regard to the polemical claims of the book by stating that such charges are simply further evidence of "intellectual defenses" that have supported Jewish "evolutionary strategies" throughout history. This kind ofcircularity is rampant throughout the book and makes its chUms to serious scientific scholarship highly suspect. I question Praeger's editorial policy in bringing a book ofsuch dubious scientific merit to a larger audience and in giving it an air of legitimacy it does not deserve. JeffersonA. Singer Department of Psychology Connecticut College Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England, by Linda Rozmovits. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 166 pp. $29.95. The title ofthis compact and elegant study is misleadingly broad. The first chapter does indeed attest that Shakespeare's moral authority had attained a quasi-religious stature by mid-nineteenth century, but the remaining chapters of the book focus on a single work, The Merchant ofVenice. With a sure grasp ofcultural history, Rozmovits shows how this play, frequently produced on stage and regularly taught in classrooms, helped Victorian England reflect on the roles of...