Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different, and How to Fight It

by Kenneth S. Stern

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0874951402
• ISBN13: 9780874951400
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: American Jewish Committee
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and informative volume

In this fascinating and informative volume, Kenneth S Stern analyses and exposes the realities of AntiSemitism in the 21st century. Stern provides a working definition of AntiSemitism: " AntiSemitism is hatred towards Jews and is directed towards the Jewish religion, Jews as a people, and more recently the Jewish state. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with aspiring to harm non-Jews and is often used to give an explanation for why things go wrong. It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and actions, and regularly employs stereotypes". He outlines the three major categories of AntiSemitism: Religious AntiSemitism: Both Christian and Islamic. Race-based antisemitism: Mainly originating from far-right White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi organizations, but also increasingly strengthening in the Moslem and Arab domain. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the author points out, is "...readily available and promoted among the Arab and Moslem countries in the Middle East and was even popularized in a TV series in Egypt. In the United States the Nation of Islam not only sells the book, it peddles it's own version, 'The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews' which is a functional rewrite designed to paint the history of slavery as a Jewish operation against Black people". Political Anti-Semitism: Known as Anti-Zionism. The author points out that "Zionism is the belief that Israel has the right to exist as a homeland for Jews. It says nothing about the policies or programs of the state, merely that it has a right to exist. There are left-wing Zionists and right-wing Zionists, and many in between. Some Zionists are harsh critics of Israeli policies; others are supportive. Anti-Zionists, on the other hand, treat Israel more harshly and by a different standard than they would treat any other state on the globe. They frequently demonize it, and essentially believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, regardless of it's policies, its leaders, or how the society is run." As Abba Eban put it: " Classical antisemitism denies the rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to it's lawful sovereignty within the community of nations...All that has happened is that the discriminatory principle has been transferred from the realm of individual rights to the realm of collective identity". Stern points out that holocaust denial is one form of anti-Semitism that is played out differently by different types of anti-Semites. Left-wing political anti-Semites would not object , for example, if the Jews of present-day Israel were slaughtered, but will not do anything to minimize the perception of the crimes of the fascists during World War II. Left-wing Israel haters however frequently compare Israelis to the Nazis and Israel's leaders to Adolph Hitler in a particularly grotesque equation aimed at using the Nazi Holocaust to justify the slaughter of Jews today, and prepare the wo