Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison

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       BLAMING THE JEWS

      STUDIES IN ANTISEMITISM

       Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor

       BLAMING THE JEWS

      Politics and Delusion

       BERNARD HARRISON

      INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

      This book is a publication of

      Indiana University Press

      Office of Scholarly Publishing

      Herman B Wells Library 350

      1320 East 10th Street

      Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

       iupress.org

      © 2020 by Bernard Harrison

      All rights reserved

      No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Harrison, Bernard, 1933- author.

      Title: Blaming the Jews : politics and delusion / Bernard Harrison.

      Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2020] | Series: Studies in antisemitism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2020007441 (print) | LCCN 2020007442 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253049902 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253049919 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253049926 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism—History—21st century. | Arab-Israeli conflict—Influence.

      Classification: LCC DS145 .H376 2020 (print) | LCC DS145 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/40905—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007441

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007442

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       For Alvin H. Rosenfeld

      Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.”

      —INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE ALLIANCE (IHRA) DEFINITION OF ANTISEMITISM

       CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART I. Varieties of Antisemitism

1.Hamas Addresses the Jewish Question

2.“Profiting” from the Holocaust

3.Questions of Definition

PART II. Why the Jews?

4.The Disease Metaphor

       5.An Obstinate People

       PART III. Is Israel an “Illegitimate” State?

       6.Accusation and Narrative

       7.Narrative and Reality

       8.The Legacy of 1967

       9.Is “Anti-Zionism” Antisemitic?

       10.Israel, the Left, and the Universities

       PART IV. Judaism Defaced

       11.A Primitive Religion?

       12.Mitzvah and Moral Theory

       13.What’s Wrong with Universalism?

       PART V. Antisemitism as a Problem for Non-Jews

       14.Jew Baiting on Campus

       15.Defamation Disguised

       16.Judgment Unhinged

       Selected Bibliography

       Index

PREFACE

      A DECADE AGO, RAEL JEAN Isaac published a review of an earlier book of mine on antisemitism. Her review was generally approving, though it also contained some sharp and well-deserved criticisms, with which I now find myself wholly in agreement. Isaac’s (2009) review concludes:

      Harrison focuses on today’s left wing, and does a fine job of showing how it has come about that “the ‘anti-racist’ liberal left finds itself currently up to its neck in the oldest form of racism.” But at the end of the day we are left with the larger question—one hopes Harrison will one day turn his formidable analytic talents to it—“Why, over time, do so many different roads, left, right, religious, anti-religious, lead to anti-Semitism?” If nothing else it speaks to the poverty of the human imagination that it comes back endlessly to the same imaginary demons and, impervious to reason or logic, sinks into the same familiar collective madness.

      The present book is my attempt, more than a decade later, to do what Isaac asked of me: to answer the above taxing but entirely legitimate question. I have returned, in this new book, to many of the issues of contemporary antisemitism that dominated the first. But this time, I have tried to set them in the wider context of a new account of what antisemitism is, of the functions it serves in non-Jewish politics and culture, and of why it has enjoyed the protean power it has displayed over the centuries to continually re-create itself in an extraordinary variety of political and religious contexts.

      A non-Jew such as myself would have found it difficult to even address these questions without an immense amount of sympathetic help from friends and colleagues, Jewish and non-Jewish. Those from whom I have learned most include Edward Alexander, David Conway, Anthony Julius, Lesley Klaff, Michael Krausz, Matthias Kuentzel, Deborah Lipstadt, Kenneth Marcus, Cynthia Ozick, Alvin Rosenfeld, Abigail Rosenthal, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, and Kenneth Waltzer. The critical comments of my wife, Dorothy Harrison, who read the final version of the manuscript in its entirety, led me to excise a number of tediously overwritten passages, which must once have seemed good to me but no longer did so when seen through her eyes. Others from whose advice the book has gained much include Jonathan Campbell, Amy Elman, the late Ilan Gur-Zeev, David Hirsh, Alan Johnson, Peter Hacker,