A few months after the October 7 Hamas attacks, Deborah Lipstadt, then the US antisemitism tsar, wryly joked about being in a “growth industry” and how “business is booming”.
When it comes to books about antisemitism, that grim observation rings true. They have never been more needed. And few authors are better placed to tackle the subject than David Harris – once described by Shimon Peres as the “foreign minister of the Jewish people” for his diplomatic work over more than three decades at the helm of the American Jewish Committee.
Since Harris is one of the world’s leading experts on this issue, his book, Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs To Know, does exactly what it says on the tin, explaining what antisemitism is and why it remains so enduringly popular.
While some recent titles lean more towards polemic, using the rise in Jew-hate to diagnose broader Western malaise, Harris, now executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), takes a different approach: clear, methodical and explanatory.
Normally, when people ask me for a beginner’s guide to help explain this mad racism-cum-conspiracy theory – which, as we learn every Passover, arises in every generation – I point them towards Dave Rich’s Everyday Hate. Harris’s book now sits alongside it as an equal favourite.
He systematically examines the different forms of antisemitism. Starting with the thorny question of what antisemitism actually is, he then breaks it down historically: antisemitism in the Christian world, the Islamic world, the Communist world; racial antisemitism; the Holocaust; antizionism; and how and why antisemitism has resurged over the past two decades. Throughout, Harris shows how ideas that are hundreds or even thousands of years old are re-emerging today – whether from Muslim extremists, the far left or the far right.
Within those chapters, complex subjects are tackled in a question-and-answer way, making the book strikingly user-friendly. It works both for Jewish readers trying to understand how this irrational madness is happening again, and for allies grappling with the question that always returns: “Why do people hate Jews?” There is, of course, no concise answer – which is why the book runs to 237 pages.
The breadth of Harris’s knowledge is evident throughout, illustrated with carefully chosen examples. The 2001 Durban conference, Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about the Holocaust, Jeremy Corbyn, Fidel Castro (who, surprisingly, liked Jews), and Martin Luther all make appearances in this comprehensive survey of Jew-hatred.
So is there a cure for this age-old pestilence? Facts alone will not suffice. As Harris quotes Jonathan Swift: “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” Harris readily acknowledges that it would be unrealistic to expect a sudden, magical cure for what has often been described as the world’s oldest hatred, spanning thousands of years.
But in his final chapter, Combating Antisemitism, he examines some of the ways it has been addressed – from education to concrete action. He recounts a striking example from Montana in 1993, when the Ku Klux Klan threw a breeze block into a small child’s bedroom that had a paper menorah in the window. In response, the Christian community, the local newspaper and the police encouraged residents to put paper menorahs in their own windows, in an act of profound solidarity.
We need people to understand antisemitism – and to read books like this – because only together can society hope to combat it.
As Harris puts it: “Maybe the millennia-long search for the end of antisemitism is, in reality, as straightforward as that; communities of goodwill everywhere banding together and saying loudly to the world, ‘Harass one of us and you harass us all.’”
Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs To Know by David Harris is published by OUP
JC Editor Daniel Schwammenthal is in conversation with David Harris at a venue in NW3 on February 23
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