Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between medieval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, this book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.

The articles collected in this Spring 2009 (VII, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge entitled “Historicizing Anti-Semitism” were part of an international conference entitled, “The Post-September 11 New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” organized by Lewis Gordon and Ramón Grosfoguel at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 29–30, 2007. Part of a series inaugurated by a discussion on Islamophobia, they brought a majority Jewish group of scholars together in the hope of bringing to the forum a critical exchange and conversation among the participants. The articles gathered here do not represent a unified voice but those often unheard in discussions of anti-Semitism. The focus on anti-Semitism in this collection raises the question of how ancient and Medieval versions of anti-Jewish practices should be interpreted, especially since even the term “Semite” came about as an effort in eighteenth-century French and German scholarship to organize Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew under a single linguistic nomenclature, which was crystallized in the nineteenth century in the work of the French scholar Ernest Renan. Contributors include: Lewis R. Gordon (also as journal issue guest editor), Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Eric Mielants (also as journal issue guest editor), David Ost, James Cohen, Santiago E. Slabodsky, Rabson Wuriga, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Marc H. Ellis, Etienne Balibar, Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Martine Chard-Hutchinson, Michael Löwy, Jean-Paul Rocchi and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

This set gathers together a collection of out-of-print titles, all classics in their field. Reissued for the first time in some years, they offer an insightful reference resource to a variety of topics. From Professor Colin Holmes’s groundbreaking studies of racism in British society, to Professor Kitchen’s analysis of the rise of fascism in pre-war Austria, these books shed much light on society’s recent dark past.

The first book to bring together three decades of Edward Said's essays and articles on music.

Often perceived as being removed from the rough-and-tumble world of male politics, women involved in relief during World War I and the 1920s found themselves grappling daily with questions of ideology, nationalism, and political statehood. Participation in large-scale relief work provided Jewish women with a firm sense of their own capabilities and contributed to their heightened sense of gender consciousness. Their experience provides powerful evidence that women activists in the post-suffrage period sustained a notable degree of separation from men even as they propounded gender equality, thereby facilitating American Jewish women’s entrance into the public realm without their having to sacrifice commitment to either Jewish or women’s issues. Gendered and separatist strategies enabled women to bring their concerns into the public sphere, affect the course of American Jewish history, and shape modern American Jewish identity. "The Whole Wide World, Without Limits" explores the international relief activities of three American Jewish organizations during this period: the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America), and the Workmen’s Circle. Women in all three organizations vigorously raised money for Jews in the war zones and continued to help them after the armistice. Author Mary McCune demonstrates the significance of the work of each group while analyzing the interactions between class, ethnicity, religion, and gender consciousness, both inside the Jewish community and in the broader American context. McCune looks at a wide variety of Jewish women—Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular, capitalists and socialists, wealthy and working-class—and sheds light on the myriad ways that personal identity shapes public activism. More importantly, this book reveals how women’s charity work and their use of gendered strategies exerted influence over seemingly unrelated political events.

Responding to the increasingly influential role of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy in recent years, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Total Domination: The Holocaust, Plurality, and Resistance, critically engages with Arendt’s understanding of totalitarianism. According to Arendt, the main goal of totalitarianism was total domination; namely, the virtual eradication of human legality, morality, individuality, and plurality. This attempt, in her view, was most fully realized in the concentration camps, which served as the major "laboratories" for the regime. While Arendt focused on the perpetrators’ logic and drive, Michal Aharony examines the perspectives and experiences of the victims and their ability to resist such an experiment. The first book-length study to juxtapose Arendt’s concept of total domination with actual testimonies of Holocaust survivors, this book calls for methodological pluralism and the integration of the voices and narratives of the actors in the construction of political concepts and theoretical systems. To achieve this, Aharony engages with both well-known and non-canonical intellectuals and writers who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Additionally, she analyzes the oral testimonies of survivors who are largely unknown, drawing from interviews conducted in Israel and in the U.S., as well as from videotaped interviews from archives around the world. Revealing various manifestations of unarmed resistance in the camps, this study demonstrates the persistence of morality and free agency even under the most extreme and de-humanizing conditions, while cautiously suggesting that absolute domination is never as absolute as it claims or wishes to be. Scholars of political philosophy, political science, history, and Holocaust studies will find this an original and compelling book.

This volume is designed to assist university faculty and students studying and teaching about antisemitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice. In contrast with similar volumes, it is organized around specific concepts instead of chronology or geography. It promotes conversation about antisemitism across disciplinary, geographic, and thematic lines rather than privileging a single methodological paradigm, a specific academic field, or an overarching narrative. Its twenty-one chapters by leading scholars in diverse fields address the relationship to antisemitism of concepts ranging from Anti-Judaism to Zionism. Each chapter not only traces the history and major scholarly debates around a key concept; it also presents an original argument, points to avenues for further research, and exemplifies a method of investigation.