Denis MacShane

Denis MacShane

In today’s Ha’aretz, Britain’s’s former Minister for Europe, Denis MacShane, pens a trenchant critique of English anti-Semitism, bitingly entitled: “Wake up to the anti-Semitism, you complacent British middle classes.”  MacShane has seen hard times recently, but today’s intervention demonstrates that he is still a vital voice on the global scene.  In this new piece, MacShane castigates the English middle classes, as well as the U.K. Employment Tribunal, and calls for a thorough review of strategies to combat anti-Semitism. (more…)

Jan Ass

Jan Assmann

An archetypal joke of the second half of the twentieth century is that Germans (or Europeans) will never forgive the Jews—for the Holocaust.

When I think about the historiography of modern anti-Semitism, I think of two odd bookends: the historian Martin Jay—whose claim to fame is a book on the Horkheimer-Adorno Frankfurt School, but whose more recent jag is the claim that Jews themselves (because of Zionism, etc.) are the primary cause of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism and Albert Lindemann whose “Esau’s Tears” (1997) argues that Jews (because of their “pushy” entry into the professions, etc.) were the primary cause of pre-Holocaust anti-Semitism.

It was probably inevitable that the empty space between these bookmarks would be filled—or the capstone of the intellectual arch completed—and now this has been done by a formidable intellectual and cultural historian: Jan Assmann. In “The Price of Monotheism” (2010) (followed by his “Cultural Memory and Early Civilization” [2011])—Assmann, an Egyptologist who’s branched out into European history, argues in broad strokes that “the gift of the Jews”—monotheism—is the root cause of modern intolerance including the Nazi genocide. (See Richard Wolin’s “Biblical Blame Shift” in the “Chronicle of Higher Education.”) (more…)