A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism by Phyllis Goldstein
A Convenient Hatred chronicles a very particular hatred through powerful
stories that allow readers to see themselves in the tarnished mirror of
history. It raises important questions about the consequences of our
assumptions and beliefs and the ways we, as individuals and as members
of a society, make distinctions between us and them, right and wrong,
good and evil. These questions are both universal and particular.
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg
This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism
to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning
and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to
the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more
critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western
imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and
Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of
modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world.
The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a
danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated.
The intersections of these ideas with the world of power―the Roman
destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German
Holocaust―are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies
can be found at the very foundation of Western history.
Antisemitism: A History by Albert S. Lindemann and Richard S. Levy, eds.
Antisemitism: A History offers a readable overview of a daunting topic,
describing and analyzing the hatred that Jews have faced from ancient
times to the present. The essays contained in this volume provide an
ideal introduction to the history and nature of antisemitism, stressing
readability, balance, and thematic coherence, while trying to gain some
distance from the polemics and apologetics that so often cloud the
subject. Contributors grapple with the use and abuse of the term
'antisemitism', which was first coined in the mid-nineteenth century but
which has since gathered a range of obscure connotations and confusingly
different definitions, often applied retrospectively to historically
distant periods and vastly dissimilar phenomena. Of course, as this book
shows, hostility to Jews dates to biblical periods, but the nature of
that hostility and the many purposes to which it has been put have
varied over time and often been mixed with admiration - a situation
which continues in the twenty-first century.