Jews Make the Best Demons: 'Palestine' and the Jewish Question

Is it time for Jews to leave Europe? cover stories in Atlantic and Commentary magazines have asked.

“Hitler didn’t finish the job!” a mob at San Francisco State University screamed at pro-Israel students. Agitators at the University of Texas forced a visiting Israeli professor to go about in disguise. Progressive students at Oberlin College dismissed the Holocaust as merely “white-on-white” crime. Such examples proliferate as an anti-Zionist/antisemitic indoctrination intensifies.

Israel is the only Western-style democracy in the greater Middle East, a world-leader despite its small size in medicine, science and technology and is the effective first-responder in many global humanitarian relief efforts. Yet international public opinion surveys find it ranked as one of the chief threats to world peace; 20 percent of Europeans wish their countries were free of Jews.

What happened to the post-1945 world of “Never Again!”? In Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question,” to be published this October by New English Review Press, Eric Rozenman examines how we got here, the danger posed not only for the Jewish state and Jews everywhere but also for the United States and the rest of the self-doubting liberal West. He outlines what must be done to halt the post-modern propagation of pre-modern beliefs.

Theodore Herzl and the other founders of political Zionism expected their Altneuland, the old-new Jewish state, to at long last normalize the status of the Jewish people, so often in their 2,000-year statelessness marginalized and massacred. Instead, Rozenman shows, antisemitism resurrected through anti-Zionism has made Israel the Neualtjude, the new-old Jew, in the process indicting the Jewish people not as demonic “Christ-killer” but rather as demonic “nation-killer” of the Palestinian Arabs.

Jews Make the Best Demons illuminates how:

*From the Enlightenment on “the Jewish question” troubled Western intellectuals;

*The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, despite early exposure as a czarist forgery, became the mother of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, widely distributed by Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler and today across the Middle East;

*The classical and medieval blood libel against the Jews has been incorporated, in newer “water-theft” and “organ-stealing” guises and repeatedly in its original form as part of the anti-Israel “Palestinian narrative;

*Twentieth century Palestinian terrorism, especially as tolerated by the West when largely targeting Israel and Jews, served as gateway drug to twenty-first century Islamist terrorism;

and

*Post-modern, secular fundamentalist Western academics, in their deconstructed denial of objectivity, empiricism and factual history itself, have enabled the return of Jew-hatred from the fringe to the mainstream. As Enlightenment intellectuals tarred the Jews as unassimilable reactionaries, contemporary post-modernists—anti-nationalist, anti-religious and anti-liberal—have demonized Israel. In doing so they’ve reopened, with malevolent force, the Jewish question. Jews Make the Best Demons recalls journalist Jonathan Rosen’s realization, post 9/11, that people again were asking, “What, are you Jews still here?”

Rozenman, a former editor of the Washington Jewish Week and B’nai B’rith’s International Jewish Monthly magazine, argues that this merger seeks to make of the Jewish state and people what the medieval Church, Marx and Hitler ultimately made of the stateless, oppressed, “wandering Jew”—the Devil incarnate, mankind’s perpetual, demonic enemy

Eric Rozenman's career has included work as a reporter for Ohio Scripps-Howard Newspapers, a congressional staffer, and editor of Washington Jewish Week and B'nai B'rith's International Jewish Monthly. His commentary and analyses have appeared in publications including The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Jerusalem Post, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and Journal of International Security Affairs.