Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

244 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:237
Gibson and Desmond Tutu, or Vanessa Redgrave and Pat Buchanan. It is
true that Judeophobia does not roll off the tongue as easily or pack the same
rhetorical punch as the more familiar antisemitism. As an analytical tool,
however, it is more precise than the phrase new antisemitism. There is nothing
new about the monomaniacal singling out of Israel for denunciation by
international bodies (the UN, Human Rights Watch) and the left-wing press
(The Guardian, Le Monde diplomatique), or about the outright denial to
Jews of the universal right to national self-determination by self-professed
Western anti-Zionists. These practices are best understood not as qualitatively
new but as the most recent manifestations in a long historical series
of such discriminative Judeophobic practices. There is no novelty whatsoever
in Britain’s present-day leftist demagogues like George Galloway or
Ken Livingstone, who are able to translate Jew-hatred, thinly veiled as anti-
Zionism, into the same vote-winning political formula as their right-wing
predecessors Adolf Stoecker and Karl Lueger, who invented that formula
over a century ago, riding to electoral success in fin-de-siècle Germany and
Austria on the wave of Judeophobia in the then shiny new guise of
antisemitism.
These methodological considerations explain the course’s chronological
framework, which, as far as the modeling of the Jewish Other is concerned,
does not go beyond The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Otto
Weininger’s Sex and Character—that is, the first decade of the twentieth
century, when Europe’s imaginary Jews received their last conceptually
important updates. All that comes afterward are variations at the crossroads
of the Protocols’ conspiracy theories and Weininger’s racial metaphysics,
with the politically expedient passing of the baton from the right to the left
and back: from Henry Ford’s and Alfred Rosenberg’s “International Jew”
to Joseph Stalin’s “Rootless Cosmopolitan”; and from the neo-conservative
Jewish cabal haunting Berkeley’s left-wing radicals (on the facing page is a
poster I collected, in 2006, in The People’s Park) to Stephen Walt’s and
John Mearsheimer’s Israel Lobby.
Thus, rather than spend any more of precious class time on the
depressingly predictable modern permutations of anti-Judaism, Judeophobia/Judeophilia,
and antisemitism, I prefer to leave this subject as an
option for individual research projects. About half of the students in each
class indeed prefer to go outside of the course’s chronological framework
and material, focusing on a broad range of more recent topics and sources—
from Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda to Jewish representation in North
American cinema; to the impact of Christianity’s Jewish Other on Israeli art
and thought; and to the European imaginative roots of Muslim anti-Zionist
rhetoric. For my pedagogical purposes, the choice of individual topics is not
as important as the evidence that the students leave the course equipped