JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

Jihad and Judaism . . . The New Incivility
David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil:
Anti-Semitism and Nazism to Islamic Jihad
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 312 pp., $27.99
Steven K. Baum*
Of his thirty books, this may be David Patterson’s best book to date.
For those who are new to Dr. Patterson’s work, he is the Hillel Feinberg
Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and generally
writes in the humanities on subjects ranging from philosophy to education.
He now turns his attention to the jihad.
The first three chapters of A Genealogy of Evil are spent laying the
foundation for his case for Islamism as an ideology of hate. The case is
compelling and well organized, focusing correctly by Chapter 3 on the key
Islamist ideologues—al Banna, Qutb, and Maududi. The Muslim Brotherhood
becomes the pivot point for the next chapter, which is incredibly
timely as we watch the Arab Spring unfold in Egypt with questions of how
and where the Brotherhood will affect the burgeoning democracy. Their
influence for the jihad may be a fait accompli. According to a 2011 Pew
Research Center poll, only 36% of Egyptians would maintain a treaty with
Israel, while 82% of Egyptians view the United States unfavorably.
The remaining chapters document the activities of Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and the Sudanese National Islamic Front. It is interesting that Dr.
Patterson separates out the religious (Hezbollah, al Qaeda, Islamic Revolu-
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