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Jews Make the Best Demons: 'Palestine' and the Jewish Question
Is it time for Jews to leave Europe? cover stories in Atlantic and Commentary magazines have asked. Hitler didn t finish the job! a mob at San Francisco State University screamed at pro-Israel students. Agitators at the University of Texas forced a visiting Israeli professor to go about in disguise. Progressive students at Oberlin College dismissed the Holocaust as merely white-on-white crime. Such examples proliferate as an anti-Zionist/antisemitic indoctrination intensifies. Israel is the only Western-style democracy in the greater Middle East, a world-leader despite its small size in medicine, science and technology and is the effective first-responder in many global humanitarian relief efforts. Yet international public opinion surveys find it ranked as one of the chief threats to world peace; 20 percent of Europeans wish their countries were free of Jews. What happened to the post-1945 world of Never Again! ? In Jews Make the Best Palestine and the Jewish Question , to be published this October by New English Review Press, Eric Rozenman examines how we got here, the danger posed not only for the Jewish state and Jews everywhere but also for the United States and the rest of the self-doubting liberal West. He outlines what must be done to halt the post-modern propagation of pre-modern beliefs. Theodore Herzl and the other founders of political Zionism expected their Altneuland , the old-new Jewish state, to at long last normalize the status of the Jewish people, so often in their 2,000-year statelessness marginalized and massacred. Instead, Rozenman shows, antisemitism resurrected through anti-Zionism has made Israel the Neualtjude , the new-old Jew, in the process indicting the Jewish people not as demonic Christ-killer but rather as demonic nation-killer of the Palestinian Arabs. The new blood libel, cloaked in the Palestinian narrative, is as false as the original and no more likely to be defeated primarily by facts. Jews Make the Best Demons concludes that what is required first of all is a psychological transformation, the one pointed to by psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. It is a rejection of George Orwell s streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets and embrace of Frankl s race of the decent, shunning all the indecent who seek a final answer to the question of Palestine, which in reality is the question of Israel, the age-old Jewish question.
358 pages, Paperback
Published October 22, 2018
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April 12, 2020
Jews make the Best Demons
Eric Rozenman has a point of view; he sees Jews as being the screen on which other people project their own illnesses. The book does a reasonable job of recounting the various libels and of connecting present day anti-Zionism to antisemitism. It’s not meant to be a balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian question and there are other books to read for the Palestinian perspective.
There is perhaps an over reliance on secondary sources. One small but noticeable mistake occurs when recounting how an UNRWA official, ‘Ralph Galloway’ once called out the way Arab states treated the Palestinian Arab refugees. Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky’s ‘Tale of Two Galloways’ provides the corrected history of Lt General Alexander Galloway and honors a man unafraid of speaking his mind.
Eric Rozenman has a point of view; he sees Jews as being the screen on which other people project their own illnesses. The book does a reasonable job of recounting the various libels and of connecting present day anti-Zionism to antisemitism. It’s not meant to be a balanced account of the Israeli-Palestinian question and there are other books to read for the Palestinian perspective.
There is perhaps an over reliance on secondary sources. One small but noticeable mistake occurs when recounting how an UNRWA official, ‘Ralph Galloway’ once called out the way Arab states treated the Palestinian Arab refugees. Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky’s ‘Tale of Two Galloways’ provides the corrected history of Lt General Alexander Galloway and honors a man unafraid of speaking his mind.
Displaying 1 of 1 review