Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

238 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:237
Maccoby, Léon Poliakov, Rosemary Ruether, among others). This tradition
is as factually rich, chronologically wide-ranging, and geographically
diverse as it is methodologically complex and is not, therefore, readily
accessible to the lay reader. Hence the concurrent emergence of two modes
of knowledge dissemination, equally abundant in works and authors (with
frequent overlaps): one is strictly academic, the other publicistic and intent
on bringing scholarly research to wider audiences. Phyllis Goldstein’s A
Convenient Hatred (2012) and Steven Baum’s Antisemitism Explained
(2012) are only the most recent in the second group’s list of titles, ranging
from Jules Isaac’s L’Antisémitisme a-t-il des racines chrétiennes (1960) to
Robert Wistrich’s Antisemitism (1994), Paul Giniewski’s La Croix des Juifs
(1994), and James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword (2001). Intensifying in
direct proportion to the vicissitudes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose
flare-ups stimulate anti-Zionist rhetoric in the Western intelligentsia’s discourse
about Jews and Israel, 1 this publishing activity, in both academic and
publicistic modes, functions as a modern-day responsa literature. And like
in the times of the rabbinical responsa to Christian attacks, there are Jewish
voices on the other side of the divide: after all, Noam Chomsky, Judith
Butler, and Naomi Klein trace their pedigree to Jewish converts in centuries
past, whose entry ticket into Christian majority cultures included the public
vilification of their ancestral community and the fabrication of “proofs” in
support of an assortment of fantastic crimes and conspiracies imputed to
Jews (and today to the Jewish state).
But despite the glut of academic and popularizing books about current
attitudes toward Jews and Israel, more volumes continue to appear, their
titles sounding as urgent as they did forty years ago. This fact alone speaks
to the failure of such books to reach a broad audience. The public outreach
project is sapped by two factors—the print medium and the inherent complexity
of the subject matter, which resists popularizing simplification. The
structure of the book market is such that every new work, even when
widely publicized, is noticed or actively sought out by the same group of
readers with a pre-existing interest in its material and argumentation, and
with previous experience of reading similar works (for some examples,
scroll down a page on amazon.com to the section “Customers who bought
this item also bought . . .”). Transition to online distribution and publishing
1. Had our attention span not been shortened by the mass media, we would
recall that every recent book like, say, Robert Wistrich’s A Lethal Obsession (2010)
has counterparts responding to previous waves of anti-Zionism. The Six-Day and
Yom Kippur Wars, for example, gave us Franklin Littel’s The Crucifixion of the
Jews (1973) and Zoé Oldenbourg’s Que vous a donc fait Israël? (1974); and the
First Lebanon War produced Alain Finkielkraut’s La Réprobation d’Israël (1983)
and Paul Grosser’s and Edwin Halperin’s Anti-Semitism (1983).