38 No. 57 JUSTICE his book of nearly thirty interesting essays makes reading that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally disturbing. Irwin Cotler opens his essay in the book with the dire warning that what has developed in the last 35 years is "a new, sophisticated, globalizing, virulent and even lethal antisemitism, reminiscent of the atmosphere of the 1930s." Yossi Klein Halevi, in his contribution, refers to a cartoon that is perhaps the embodiment of all the elements of modern antisemitism. The cartoon appeared on the front page of the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of terrorists who were holding out in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The cartoon showed an Israeli tank moving towards the Baby Jesus who exclaims "Surely they don't want to kill me again." The title of this collection of essays is perhaps a misnomer. It refers to them as "The Yale Papers," as the project was originally conceived as a project of Yale University's "Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism" (YIISA). Yale, however, closed the Initiative in 2011. Alan Dershowitz commented on the closure that "Yale has a chance to be at the forefront of this study. Instead it has taken a cowardly step away from the controversy."1 Among the reasons given by Yale for closing the "Initiative" was the lack of academic output. I believe this publication refutes that claim as it contains some first class academic studies. The publication throughout refers to "antisemitism" as one word without a hyphen. I believe this is a correct usage and should be adopted generally. The justification is that it refers nowadays not to a general dislike of Semites, but explicitly to hatred of Jews. Antisemitism, like pornography, is not always easy to define, but one can recognize it when one sees it. Hadar Lubin succinctly defines antisemitism as "hatred of Jews because they are Jews." Dina Porat, in her essay, points out that international efforts to define antisemitism routinely failed and it was only in 1994 that the UN Commission on Human Rights acknowledged antisemitism "as a wrong that had to be rectified." This agreement by the Commission to refer to antisemitism was presumably only achieved as the Commission lumped together antisemitism with xenophobia, racial discrimination and Islamophobia. The essays in the book examine the manifestation of classic antisemitism, as well as the newer forms of hatred toward Israel and of Zionism In the former category, there is David Hirsh's essay which traces the various historical manifestations of antisemitism. The Medieval Christian antisemitism "demonized Jews as Christ-killers. It charged them with deicide and with regularly and ceremonially re-performing the crucifixion of Christ on innocent non-Jewish children." "An early left wing form of antisemitism saw Jews as evil capitalists or as greedy money lenders. Right wing antisemitism has often portrayed Jews as embodying the Bolshevik threat." Regarding Israel, there is now a "new antisemitism," which sees Israel as "standing in the way of world peace, of being responsible for stirring up wars, of being uniquely racist or an apartheid state." Hirsh remarks that one source of anti-Israeli feeling is related to those who "had great illusory hopes for Israel" and "who have now swung round in disgust when it turns out that Israel is not a utopian beacon for mankind," and they do this "with all the passion of people who have been made fools of by history and by the crumbling of their own adolescent illusions." Peter Glick, however, sees the source of antisemitism as envy at the socio-economic success of the Jews. T BOOK REVIEWS Reviewed by Robbie Sabel 1. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2200/yale-antisemitism The Yale Papers: Antisemitism in Contemporary Perspective Edited by Charles Asher Small ISGAP - Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (2015) 531 pp. ISBN: 978 1 515057 79 6
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