October 2009 -- September 2010

update  2009

A LETHAL OBSESSION

Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad

By Robert S. Wistrich

On Sale January 5, 2010 | Random House Hardcover

 Anti-Jewish violence is on the rise.  In June 2009, a white supremacist opened fire inside the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In the Arab world, Mein Kampf has been a major bestseller and in Iran, President Ahmadinejad refers to the Holocaust as a “myth.” Scholar Robert S. Wistrich’s powerful study of the bimillennial scourge of anti-Semitism could not be timelier. In A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House; On Sale January 5, 2010), Wistrich, widely known as the “dean of historians of anti-Semitism,” provides a disturbing examination of this fatal and seemingly inexplicable phenomena, from the first recorded pogrom in ancient Alexandria to its resurgence today.

 Anti-Semitism has accompanied Jewish history for more than two thousand years, though only in the past century did its potentially lethal aspects lead to a scientifically planned effort by a powerful modern state to annihilate the entire Jewish people. Yet it turns out, even the Holocaust that decimated two-thirds of European Jewry did not discredit anti-Semitism. Wistrich powerfully portrays key moments in anti-Semitism, such as the creation of the fateful tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion, commissioned by Russia’s tsarist secret police at the end of the nineteenth century and the Soviet Communist Party’s campaign between 1948 and 1953 to weed out and purge unwanted Jewish personnel.

 Since the beginning of the 21st century, the scourge of exterminatory hatred of Jews has once again returned to plague humanity – now often masked, even in America, as Anti-Zionism or one-sided attacks against of the State of Israel. Wistrich explains how anti-Semitism has been revived with new force in an age of globalization and instant communications.  Stereotypical and hateful images focusing on bloodsucking, greedy, and all-powerful Jews are rampant on the internet, as well as being common currency in the visual and verbal incitement that has become normal in the Arab Middle East. In the concluding chapters of A Lethal Obsession, Wistrich warns of a possible nuclear “Final Solution” at the hands of Iran, a land in which a formerly prosperous Jewish community has declined in freedoms and Holocaust denial has even become a quasi-official state doctrine.

  A LETHAL OBSESSION: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad

By Robert S. Wistrich • A Random House Hardcover • On Sale: January 5, 2010

Price: $40.00 • ISBN: 978-1-4000-6097-9 • www.randomhouse.com

 Ships from and sold by Amazon.com pre-order: $26.40

Research Seminar:

Mr. Karl Pfeifer (Austrian Jewish Journalist)

Reports From the Battle Front:

A Lifetime of Combating Antisemitism

The meeting will be held on Monday, October 19th 2009, at 10:30 in room no. 400 at the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry (the Gaster Building), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus. 

The lecture will be held in English.

Research Seminar:

Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld

Samson as a Suicide Bomber: A Contemporary Case Study in Cultural Antisemitism

The meeting will be held on Monday, December 21^st, 2009, at 10:30 in room no. 400 at the Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry (the Gaster Building), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus. 

The lecture will be in English.  

Research Seminar:

 גב' מרטינה וייס

על גבולות וגשרים:  ספרד, ישראל ומדינות ערב

יו"ר: פרופ' רוברט ויסטריך

מנהל המרכז הבינלאומי לחקר האנטישמיות ע"ש וידאל ששון