Antisemitism: the Generic Hatred

Dedicated to the memory of the 'conscience of the Holocaust', Simon Wiesenthal - to whom it offers a number of personal tributes - this book brings together essays by a wide variety of authors on antisemitism and related forms of intolerance, racism, and xenophobia. Starting from the idea that antisemitism constitutes a paradigm case of collective and individual hatred, the book examines some of the reasons why it has prospered over the ages and persists in our time, even after well-nigh universal condemnation of the Holocaust. Some authors see it as a virus, always ready to develop and spread wherever Jewish difference is resented. Others emphasize that the antisemitic myths are not grounded in reality but depend rather on a fabrication, an imagined being to whom every kind of vice and perversion can be attributed. Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, Armenians, Tutsis they can all be made to fit the bill. Simon Wiesenthal believed not in vengeance but in justice for the victims and played a pre-e