Blaming the Jews: Politics and Delusion [Hardcover]

In recent years Western countries have seen a proliferation of antisemitic material in social media, and attacks on Jews such as that on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Much of this has stemmed, not from personal hostility to Jews on the part of this or that individual, but from a resurgence in groups at both ends of politics of the ancient delusion that the Jews collectively dominate world affairs and lie at the root of all the world's evils.

InBlaming the Jewsauthor Bernard Harrison, offers a new and unique analysis of this second and far more dangerous form of antisemitism and its persistence as a cultural phenomenon. Questioning the assumption that antisemitism affects or targets only Jews, he demonstrates that, allowed to go unrecognised or unchecked, antisemitism is potentially damaging to us all.

In a world where rhetoric is fashioned on stereotypes and driven by political ideology, Harrison argues it is our responsibility to be vigilant in exposing the delusions of antisemitism and their consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike.

Bernard Harrison is Emeritus E. E. Eriksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Sussex. He is author ofWhat is Fiction For?andThe Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion.

In the carefully explained distinction he draws between social and political antisemitism, and in the painstaking care with which he disposes of all the various main charges against the State of Israel levelled at it by its Palestinian Arab and western anti-Zionist detractors, Bernard Harrison makes an outstandingly important contribution to the fields of study of antisemitism in general and of the Middle East in particular. Harrison is gifted with the ability, singularly rare among academic philosophers today, of being able to expound and discuss abstruse and difficult concepts in the plal#"