Iran uranium plan concerns IAEA

International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Yukiya Amano said he was concerned over Iran's plan to produce higher enriched uranium. (AFP) February 8, 2010

A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism Then and Now 

 

A discussion and Q&A conducted by the  Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars .  Online at http://fora.tv/2010/01/04/A_Lethal_Obsession_Anti-Semitism_Then_and_Now

 

Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Robert Wistrich and University of Maryland, College Park professor Jeffrey Herf trace the history of anti-Semitism from its earliest recorded roots through the present.  Furthermore, they discuss the potential impacts of its modern-day resurgence. 

Herf reviews Wistrich's "A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad."

From Jeffrey Herf's book review of Robert Wistrich's "A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad." 

 "Wistrich is certainly aware that not all criticism of Israeli policy is inspired by hatred of the Jews and Judaism, but the “logic” and the structure of influential arguments attacking Israel have been ominously identical to the imputations of vast power and enormous evil attributed to “world Jewry” by European anti-Semites of old. 

"The “lethal obsession” of the recent past, according to Wistrich, has been a melange of the old conspiracy theories of that infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,with Marxism-Leninism, secular third worldism, and Islamism. In this period, the center of gravity of anti-Semitism has shifted from Europe to the Middle East and Iran."

Jeffrey Herf teaches Modern European History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009).

An additional review of Wistrich's book by Walter Laquer.