77 Winter 2025 Islamists and jihadists (green), who unite in their denial of the legitimacy of the sole Jewish State. Herf’s significant archival research into the relationship between the Nazi regime and Islamists similarly provides insight regarding the persistence of antisemitism in the Middle East today. In “Nazi Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust,” Herf explains that the rabidly antisemitic former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Husseini and a group of proNazi Arab exiles found refuge in Berlin. There they collaborated with the Nazi regime’s propaganda office to produce antisemitic Arabic language broadcasts directed at the Middle East and North Africa. Although Herf is not a scholar of Islam, he perceptively notes that the Islamist antisemitic ideology promoted by Al-Husseini and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna are not only based on Nazi antisemitism but Islamist interpretations of Islam’s sacred texts which predate Nazism. Herf observes that “Islamic antisemitism shared with its Nazi counterpart the tendency to read sacred texts in a way that accentuated, but did not invent out of thin air, long-standing stereotypes, prejudices, and hatreds about Judaism and the Jews in both Christianity and Islam” (p. 79). Herf’s observations are eerily resonant for today, as reflected in his more contemporary essay “Antisemitism and the Academy Since 9/11.” Following the 9/11 AlQaida attacks on the U. S. in 2001 and a horrific wave of deadly Palestinian jihadist suicide bombings against Israelis in 2002, Herf notes the extraordinarily shocking reaction of liberal and leftist intellectuals. Rather than cast a firm gaze at the ideological fanaticism inspiring the terrorists, a mood spread among prominent liberal and leftist intellectuals that the cause of the terror, whether secular or Islamist in inspiration was to be found in a combination of the policies of the State of Israel, its sheer existence, or the economic problems of the Arab and Muslim world, presumably caused by the Western democracies (p. 227). Herf’s book is enlightening, informative and thought provoking. He reminds us that despite the fall of Nazi Germany and the Soviet bloc states, their respective ideologies still persist in the convergence of antisemitism that continues to be manifest in far right, far left and global Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and Western countries today. n Yehudit Barsky is a Middle East counterterrorism specialist and serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. She previously served as Director of the Division on Middle East and International Terrorism at the American Jewish Committee.
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