Book Reviews

A Scholar’s Example

Martin Kramer chairs the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Department at Shalem College, having recently completed a seven year stint as president there. A scholar of the Middle East, Kramer is perhaps best known as a sharp critic of the…

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Er ist wieder da! Nein, er ist immer noch da!

„Zum Einzigartigen, das mit dem Namen Hitlers verbunden ist, gehört seine unverminderte Gegenwärtigkeit“. (Joachim Fest, 1995) Die Deutschen kommen von Hitler nicht los! Dabei hatte Hitlers Herrschaft und sein 12 Jahre währendes  „3. Reich“ eine bis dahin nicht gewesene Bilanz…

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Review of Jews against themselves

Every Anglophone reader, Jew and non-Jew, owes it to him or herself to read Jews against Themselves. And every non-Anglophone country that aspires either to establish or maintain democracy owes itself a good translation. Rarely has a book so thoroughly…

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Defining anti-Semitism

Academics concerned about both anti-Semitism and the free exchange of ideas have at least two worries. On the one hand, anti-Semitism is one of few forms of prejudice that require a high standard of proof in the academy. Attend a…

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Review of Jews Against Themselves

Among the lamentably small coterie of Jewish intellectuals and academics who defend Israel against the anti-Zionist tirades of its legions of liberal and leftist Jewish critics Edward Alexander ranks high. His new collection of essays, Jews Against Themselves (Transaction Publishers),…

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Rock Steady, but Keep Fretting

   Jonathan Rynhold’s The Arab-Israeli Conflict in American Political Culture is a welcome and important scholarly corrective to what passes for serious commentary on how Americans see Israel. Consider one specimen of that commentary. This May, Haaretz published a piece…

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Climate of Opinion

Last year, the British scholar Alan Johnson spoke up against a resolution to boycott Israel at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As he recounts the experience, “Anti-Israel student activists tried to break up the meeting by banging on the…

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