The best books on antisemitism

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest turned journalist and novelist, delivers a powerful indictment of the politicized religion that from the time of Constantine the Great persecuted heretics, non-Romans, and, most of all, Jews. Carroll’s historical account is colorful and accurate, but what this book mostly does is exorcise a demon that plagued the author personally for years: his shared responsibility as a Catholic believer and official for an anti-Semitic tradition that helped generate the Holocaust. This is a stirring job of writing that looks forward to Carroll’s later work as a novelist, including his lovely take on the story of  Abelard and Heloise, The Cloister (Anchor, 2019).     

Even after years of studying the Holocaust, I remain overwhelmed by the enormity of the horrors, and there are still times when I find my faith in humanity wavering and all I can think to ask in anger and confusion is “Why?” I know I’m not alone. Peter Hayes’s masterful book is the result of an entire career centered on asking that very question.  The outcome is an incredibly readable, insightful, and thought-provoking account of the Holocaust that doesn’t shy away from answering the big questions. After reading it, one might still ask “why,” but it won’t be out of frustration, anger, and confusion, but rather out of a desire to keep learning more about one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of humanity.

Crump was a Christian theologian (Calvin University) for many years whose passion for justice took him to Israel/Palestine on numerous occasions. He not only studied the issues surrounding this conflict, but he immersed himself, living in a refugee camp during some of Israel’s most severe periods of occupation. But behind America’s support for Israel is often a less-understood set of doctrines called Christian Zionism. This book is the premier explanation of this movement and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the American church sends millions of dollars to Israel every year.

Focus was the sole novel written by acclaimed playwright Arthur Miller. And while Miller would go on to be known primarily as a dramatist, Focus is an exceptional novel with a timely and engaging premise. 

The protagonist is a somewhat introverted man (Lawrence Newman) who is moderately successful in his field, working in New York City, while residing in Queens. Set in 1945, Focus is set during a particular time of unrest, especially in New York City, where many are resentful of the U.S.’s involvement in WWII. This resentment comes to a head when Lawrence needs to be fitted for glasses due to his developing near-sightedness. 

Yet as a result of how he looks with his glasses, people start to assume that he is Jewish, even though he is not. This misidentification not only leads to him being the unwilling recipient of anti-semitism but also leads to his own resentment… show more.

This is a through-the-looking-glass journey into the darker side of British politics. Grundy’s parents were violently anti-Semitic and obsessed with Oswald Mosley, and he himself became active in Mosley’s post-war Union Movement, before turning away from Fascism. It is surreal, scary, and hilarious by turns. It also gives important insights into the origins of today’s Far Right politics.

Nine years is quite the slowburn. That’s how long it takes Sheldon Horowitz to achieve revenge for his father’s murder in Derek B. Miller’s dark comedy thriller How to Find Your Way in the Dark.

Of course, a lot of other things happen throughout the course of what is arguably more of a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of World War II than “YA,” but what hooked me in this story was Sheldon’s tenacity as he grows up, doggedly determined to find out who killed his father and why. The misadventures he gets into as a result, along with his cousins and best friend, are simultaneously bumbling and thrilling.

This is Eliot’s last novel about an ostensible British aristocrat’s journey to uncovering his real identity. Often referred to as Eliot’s “Jewish novel,” it reflects her unerring ability to empathize with the Other. It is very long but also un-put-downable, with two interwoven plots that complement each other masterfully. It’s at once a conventional 19th-century novel and an entirely original and surprising take on the genre. As a Jew with a love of nineteenth-century British novels, this one spoke to me most powerfully.

Some people might not think writing a letter is a tremendously brave act, but it is if you are a young woman who knows in her heart that she needs to challenge a very famous and beloved author – a man even she admires! I had never heard of Eliza Davies and her letters to Charles Dickens and was captivated by the story. Davies wrote to Dickens protesting his stereotypical and harmful depiction of Jewish people in Oliver Twist. And she made a difference! I love how the story teaches kids that they, too, can make a difference and that activism takes many forms, in this case, letter-writing. Added bonus: the book contains quotes from Eliza’s actual letters, which appeals to me immensely as a history geek. 

This is the most important book people have never heard of. It was immensely popular in the Middle Ages – 300 manuscripts survive in nine languages (Beowulf, another monster tale, survives in one copy). The probably-fictional “John Mandeville, knight, though I am not worthy” sets out from England in 1332, travels the known world on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and continues all the way to India. He encounters wondrous places, people, and beasts. The book is fundamentally flawed, with rampant racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and on, but this is why it matters. Mandeville was Columbus’s reading on his voyage to “the Indies,” and encouraged him to see indigenous populations as monstrous. It is terrible, and terribly important. Bale’s excellent introduction and translation are the best of many versions.

I had never heard of Zygmunt Bauman when I picked up this book, but then I couldn’t put it down. By the time I had finished reading it, I was filled with the deepest appreciation and respect for both the man, and his biographer. Bauman’s life spanned almost a hundred years and his story is also the story of Europe, from 1925-2017.

Izabela Wagner has done monumental work to produce a biography worthy of its subject. Her loving respect for Bauman is tangible and adds greatly to the pleasure of reading the story of this extraordinary man’s life: Polish Jew, refugee, soldier, sociologist; an intellectual who spent his life reflecting on what he saw, and speaking and writing about it with pristine clarity.

Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot. 

People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.

T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.

Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.

This early 20th-century courtroom drama, set in late imperial Kiev, is a truly satisfying read: suspenseful and riveting, yet also persuasive as a scholarly work.

I have rarely come across an academic book on the Russian Empire so difficult to put down, with virtually every chapter ending on a cliffhanger.

Telling the true story of a ritual murder charge against a Jewish factory clerk in 1911, his sufferings, and ultimate acquittal, the book is a meticulously researched and deeply captivating story of desperation and hope.

I might disagree with some of its claims about the judiciary, and yet, with its multitude of Jewish, Russian, and Ukrainian actors and ever more unexpected twists, the story told is as multilayered and diverse as the late imperial court system as a whole. 

If you want to understand why everything you think you know about the Middle Ages is (probably) wrong, go pick up a copy of The Devil’s Historians, which chronicles how everyone from the Brothers Grimm and George R. R. Martin to ISIS and Donald Trump have invented a medieval past that reflects their own ideological preoccupations rather than historical reality. With chapters on nationalism, gender, race, and religion, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant’s book sharply contrasts the one-dimensional Middle Ages found in pop culture and political propaganda with the more complicated, even contradictory, medieval world revealed by contemporary scholarship. 

Arendt’s three-part masterwork had the same US editor as 1984 and can be read as the non-fiction equivalent. While scholars have subsequently questioned aspects of her grand theory of totalitarianism, much of it holds up. Her commanding, aphoristic prose has made this one of the most widely quoted books of recent years, especially on the subject of power creating its own alternate reality: “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time… think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Kershaw’s double biography of the Nazi leader (the second part, almost entirely about World War II, is called Hubris) is a classic, and remains the best, most approachable look at the unusual upbringing of a young boy from provincial Austria who once wanted to be an artist, and felt in debt with the Jewish doctor who (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) treated his mother’s cancer. Hubris is most remarkable for the glimpses it provides of a different fate for that young boy Adolf: how he was scarred by family tragedy and by failure at multicultural Vienna, and how the Great War gave him an opening to become the worst possible version of himself.

What kind of people participated in the greatest conflict the world has ever known? Were the Allies really that different from the Axis soldiers? This book gives you the opportunity to look into what individuals on different sides of World War II were doing before they were trying to kill one another. You find yourself understanding what ignited one German’s initial patriotism, one American’s attempts to avoid the draft, and another’s struggles with antisemitism within his own ranks as well as the enemies. Above all though, it is the madness and futility of war that stays with you when the last page is turned.  

I have used this book as a reference for all my novels that deal with Nazi Germany. It is a thick, coffee-table-sized book, that, by chance, I found years ago on the “reduced” shelf in a local bookstore. The chronicle isn’t for the faint of heart. It explains the rise of National Socialism and the ensuing Holocaust in graphic words and pictures, and will leave its indelible imagery firmly entrenched in your memory. It takes you from the roots of the Holocaust to its disturbing aftermath, years after the war. 

Wiemer is the type of storyteller who makes you think at every turn of the page. The Assignment looks at the world of discrimination and antisemitism as it is handed out in a classroom assignment by a teacher we're left wondering about from the beginning. What makes you brave under the pressure of your peers, and what makes you crumble? Wiemer will give you insight into that through this stirring tome.

If McWhorter focuses on how woke ideology harms Blacks, Bernstein shows how it harms Jews and inevitably fosters antisemitism.

Like McWhorter, Bernstein provides very specific examples of wokeness in action, both on and off campus. Jews were asked to leave an LGBT Pride event because their flag – a Pride flag with a Star of David on it – “made people feel unsafe”; a Jewish organization that issued a public statement condemning George Floyd’s murder was lambasted because the statement had not been drafted by a person of color; and more.

Bernstein and I are both liberal Jews, but we both fear the consequences of an ideology that divides the world into the non-privileged oppressed and the privileged oppressors – Jews, by virtue of their current success, are automatically considered privileged oppressors despite the long worldwide history of antisemitism.

Plenty of Resistance activity in the Lot, certainly, but it was also the home of the vicious anti-semite Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who rounded up many Jews to their deaths on behalf of the Vichy Government. Years later, Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, was seeking psychiatric help when she came across his daughter Anne, a psychiatrist, who had been abandoned by her despicable parents.

It was Anne’s death by suicide that set Callil off on a stunning attempt to track the life of Darquier, a drunkard, a rapist, and a man of few if any redeeming features. He disgraced his family and native town, where his father was mayor of Cahors, capital of the Lot. He was sentenced to death but, protected by Franco, died a free man in Spain.

“Only lice were ever gassed at Auschwitz” was his mantra as he sent children off to the gas chambers.