Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld (review)

This collection of essays is an analysis of the new shapes that antisemitism has been taking since the last decades of the twentieth century, after having gained an unsavory reputation during the first decades after World War II.

In 1948 Georges Bernanos thought that “Hitler has discredited anti-Semitism once and for all” (p. 122). He was wrong. The current resurgence is partly stimulated by the exhilaration of breaking a taboo, yet it is also a polygenetic phenomenon, largely colored by the specific historical contexts in Spain (the essay by Alejandro Baer), in Hungary and Romania (Szilvia Peremiszky’s essay), Poland (Anna Sommer Schneider), Turkey (Rifat N. Bali), Iran (Jamsheed K. Choksy), and different Western European countries. Its proportions and outreach are so vast that it has already become the subject of several book-length studies, by scholars such as Pierre-André Taguieff, Ron Rosenbaum, Bernard Harrison, Robert Wistrich, Anthony Julius, and Denis Mac Shane. Its discourse ranges from knee-jerk responses among young European Muslims (surveyed in Gunther Jikeli’s illuminating sociological article) to sophisticated postmodernist philosophy. Confronting it is not merely an ideological imperative but also an intellectual challenge. Accordingly, the articles in the present collection are not making-a-case rhetoric but well-informed and well-documented academic analysis.

Reflecting on the cumulative material of the book, one can delineate three osmotically connected channels of the resurgence of antisemitism: (1) the crisis of the communist ideology, (2) the Arab–Israeli conflict, and (3) the side effects of the international institutionalization of the memory of the Shoah.

(1) In his 2006 book The Resurgence of Antisemitism, British philosopher Bernard Harrison suggested that such “rising from the muck” (to quote the English title of Taguieff’s book) is associated with the post-1991 crisis of “the messianic left.” This view finds further support in several articles in The Resurgent Antisemitism, in particular those by Eiglad, Peremiczky, Sommer Schneider, and less directly, Robert Wistrich. Collapse of a social ideology often leads to different forms of nationalism or of religious reorientation (including acts like the communist Roget Garaudy’s and the ultra-left terrorist Carlos’s conversions to Islam). And yet nationalism is also a handy charge to be brought up against Jews in general and Israel in particular, a charge transformed into that of “racism” and often combined with seemingly disinfected replays of the Elders-of-Zion calumny of the Jewish striving for world domination. In Norway, the Maoist left viewed Zionism as an expression and an instrument of imperialist expansion—and easily aligned itself with political Islam in vilifying Israel and passing from a deliberate vagueness about “exactly when and how Israel crossed the line of legitimacy” to the conclusion that this happened “the very moment [Israel] came into existence” (pp. 157—Eiglad).

The mechanics of an analogous transformation in the French intellectual discourse of the new millennium is traced in the article of Bruno Chaouat. The article discusses, among other sources, the pamphlet Indignez-vouz! by Stéphane Hessel and some of the works by Alain Badiou, which create a plethora of sophistical reversals: “Jews are the Nazis, Israel is an anti-Semitic country, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is a Nazi film, the true Jews are those who give up the name Jew and so on” (p. 135). According to the analysis of Danny Trom, used by Chaouat (pp. 133–34), again and again Jews emerge as an obstacle to any totalizing vision, including contemporary multiculturalism that is a priori hostile to a nation state. The paradox is also noted by Dina Porat: Jews “who have always hoisted the flag of universalism and universal human rights, are depicted in the post-Holocaust period as fostering a backward particularity that goes against many of the current convictions of people who regard themselves as progressive” (p. 474).

The fall of the communist regimes has also let another jinn out of the assorted bottles. In the article “Comparative and Competitive Victimization in the Post-Communist Sphere,” Zvi Gitelman, an...