‘Firstly what a pleasure to read something so perfectly in the best tradition of political and cultural pamphleteering. When vital ideas need to be presented and disseminated, this form of writing knocks (for all their virtues) the online Medium, Patreon, Quill models into cocked hats. Kudos to Stig Abel and the TLS for this fine initiative.
Jews Don’t Count is a supreme piece of reasoning and passionate, yet conotrolled, argument. From his first sentence, the energy, force and conviction of Baddiel’s writing and thinking will transfix you. Perhaps too rueful and wise to be called straight hostile polemic, there is as much sorrow here as anger. The main conclusion drawn — that anti-Jewish sentiment, language and behaviour somehow aren’t in the mainstream considered as much of a scandal, affront or abuse as all other kinds of racism and minority prejudice — seems to me impossible to refute.
I cannot overpraise Baddiel’s skill in marshalling his huge store of evidence and example without ever, as it were, letting us lose sight of the ball. Despite its depth and reach, Jews Don’t Count is as readable as an airport thriller. It is a rare gift, this ability to keep complex ideas in focus and to deconstruct discrepancies and inconsistencies without once losing the thread — or more importantly — losing the reader.
Bust as a Jew, or a half Jew, myself — I want to thank him for expressing a truth that most of us are too ashamed, or embarrassed, or afraid to name. The world is increasingly full of anti-Semitic words and actions and — while much is sly, implicit and perhaps unconcious — this hurts and frightens us.
In short Jews Don’t Count is in its own way a masterpiece.’
Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight, by Lyn Julius.
(Top) 1940s Egyptian film star ‘Camelia’, real name Liliane Levy Cohen. (Bottom) Refugee arriving in an Israeli tent camp from Iraq, 1950.
From the book jacket…
Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were the relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? What lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? Lyn Julius answers all these questions and more in Uprooted.
Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years. Yet, in just 50 years, their indigenous communities outside Palestine almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. The same process is repeating with Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East.
Before the Holocaust Jews in Arab countries constituted 10 percent of the world’s Jewish population, and now over 50 percent of Israel’s Jews are from Arab and Muslims countries, mostly refugees or their descendents.
Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Antisemitism & Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich, by Tudor Parfitt.
From the book jacket…
Hybrid Hate is the first book to study the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. As objects of racism, Jews and Blacks have been linked together for centuries as peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In this book, Tudor Parfitt investigates the development of anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, and race theory in the West from the Renaissance to the Second World War.
Parfitt explains how Jews were often perceived as Black in medieval Europe, and the conflation of Jews and Blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of Black Jews in Loango in West Africa in 1777, and later of Black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the notion of multiracial Jews was born. Over the following centuries, the figure of the hybrid Black Jew was drawn into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. Parfitt analyses how Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse from the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, as the two fundamental prejudices of the West were combined. Hybrid Hate offers a new interpretation of the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism in Europe, and casts light on contemporary racist discourses in the United States and Europe.
A timely analysis of the new antisemitism, by the historian who defeated Holocaust denier David Irving in court.
What is antisemitism? Does it come from the right or the left? Is anti-Zionism the same as antisemitism? Are there different kinds of antisemites? And what can be done to combat this extremely damaging racist ideology?
Antisemitism has been on the rise worldwide for the last ten years. From violent white-nationalist protests in Charlottesville, USA, to attacks on synagogues across Europe and the US, and from the targeting of Jewish students at American universities to the antisemitism row raging in the British Labour Party, does this resurgence of anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence mark a return to the brutality of the 1930s?
In this penetrating and provocative analysis, Deborah Lipstadt connects distinct currents in contemporary culture, such as the resurgence of racist right-wing nationalisms, left-liberal tolerance of hostility to Jews, the plight of the Palestinians, and the rise of Islamic extremism, to explore how contradictory forces have found common scapegoats.
Lucid and convincing, Antisemitism will calm the fearful, rouse the complacent, and demand a response from readers.
Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, by Daniel Gordis.
From the book jacket…
Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world’s attention, aroused its imagination, and lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future?
We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel’s people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though Israel’s history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people’s story and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse—but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long history of Israel’s deepening isolation.
With Israel, public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and rigorous, Israel sheds light on Israel’s past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn.
