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Overview
Throughout history, Jews have been turned into demons in the public mind by a miasma of paranoia, millennial fantasy, and sheer political cynicism. Barely fifty years after the Holocaust, antisemitism is back in the news. Just what exactly is this terrible disease of the mind? Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred takes a sweeping look at the phenomenon of antisemitism from its beginnings to the present, tracing this virulent virus from its pagan roots to the Christian charge of deicide and beyond to the massacres of the Crusades and the Inquisition, which heralded later blood libels and fantasies of Jewish conspiracies for world domination. Is there really anything new in the endless accusations that have echoed across the centuries from Haman to Hitler? Is there any meaning to be extracted from the myths, the stereotypes, and the obsessions that have characterized the antisemitic discourse for more than two millennia? Robert S. Wistrich sets out to find the answers in a lucid and timely survey informed by a profound knowledge of history. "Can it happen here?" This question is now being asked with trepidation wherever the poison of antisemitism has made a comeback after having survived intact the near extinction of European Jewry. Charting the course of antisemitism through history, Wistrich focuses on the dramatic reemergence of antisemitism in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the new national hysteria which has set the ground burning under the feet of a still substantial Jewish minority. He provides a country-by-country survey, showing the modern guise of antisemitism as it appears today throughout the world--in Germany, Austria, the United States, Britain, France, Eastern Europe, and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as in the Middle East amid a radicalized Islam.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
An excellent, thoughtful and alarming survey of anti-Semitism's long, ugly history and its contemporary resurgence, this volume accompanies a PBS television series. Wistrich, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Hitler's Apocalypse, traces anti-Jewish hatred from the pagan world's envy of the Jewish diaspora through Christianity's theological polemics against Judaism to the Enlightenment, when Voltaire and Rousseau ridiculed Jews as inherently perverse. The Christian condemnation of the Jews as murderers of God and agents of Satan was later taken up by Nazis, Bolsheviks and Muslims. Wistrich astutely sifts the stereotypes, fantasies and obsessions that have preoccupied anti-Semites for more than two millennia. He tracks the persistent undercurrents of prejudice that have spawned anti-Semitic violence and neo-Nazi or ultrarightist movements in modern Britain, America, Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the Arab world, he notes, anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism command quasi-automatic support under authoritarian regimes. Scores of remarkable illustrations enliven the narrative. (Aug.)Library Journal
Originally published in Italy in 1959, this novel examines the daily activities of Tom maso Puzzilli, who steals, curses, and bul lies his way around the shantytown outside Rome where he lives. He hangs around with kids who defecate beside highways to savor the startled looks of motorists, and together they graduate to robbing gasoline stations and worse. Tommaso serves time in jail, manages to find a decent girl, and finds out at his draft physical that he is tubercular. At the sanatorium Tommaso flirts with communism; soon thereafter, Pasolini's optimism and/or naivete endows him with an 11th-hour heroism when he helps save the victims of a flood. Pasolini himself was not so fortunate with real street kids, having been murdered in 1975 by an unredeemed version of his fictional Tom maso. A minor work by a major literary and intellectual figure.--Jack Shreve, Alle gany Community Coll., Cumberland, Md.Booknews
Reprint of the Metheun (UK) book originally published in 1991 (and by Random House in 1992). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
February 20, 1994
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
341
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780805210149