"Antisemitism in modern history arrives in three major forms: Nazism and the far right; secular leftist attacks on Israel and association of the Jews with a despised capitalism; and Islamist assaults that draw on a distinctive twentieth century interpretation of Islam to attack Judaism, the Jews, and then Israel. In this lecture, I examine key texts of the Islamist face of Jew-hatred during the era of Islamist collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust and in the aftermath in the Arab war of 1948 to destroy the Zionist project in 1948. While reactionary Jew-hatred lost respectability in Europe and the United States in the following decades, it persisted in the Middle East in the Islamist war of religion evident in the Hamas Charter of 1988, and the resulting wars against Israel culminating in the assault of October 7, 2023. This form of antisemitism now constitutes the most dangerous and consequential form of the longest hatred. A significant body of intellectual and cultural history on the subject exists, but there is more to be done."
Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarship examines 20th century German and European history, especially the era of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the memory of the Holocaust in Germany, and the impact of these developments on the Middle East. His publications include Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge UP, 1984); Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Harvard UP, 1997); Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale UP, 2009); Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967-1989 (Cambridge UP, 2016); Israel's Moment: International Support and Opposition for Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, 2022). He is among those few historians who have published works on all three of the major forms in which antisemitism has appeared on modern European and world history. His essay collection Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist was published by in London by Routledge in January 2024. He has published essays on the attack of October 7th in American Purpose, Antisemitism Studies, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Quillette, and in a series of webinars on Hamas and its ideology in conjunction with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in York available here (click link).
Wednesday, February 12 @ 5:00-6:30pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus
RSVP Here.
Hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies and CJS Antisemitism Education Initiative