by Bonny V. Fetterman

What is new about the “new antisemitism” that has emerged since the 1970s? “Hitler gave antisemitism a bad name and there is widespread reluctance on the part of even the most severe critics of the Jews to accept this label,” writes Walter Laqueur, director of the Wiener Library in London, a leading institution for the study of antisemitism. Today’s antisemitism is couched in the language of movements against globalism, colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. “But whatever terminology used,” he maintains, “there is no reason to believe that the last chapter in the long history of antisemitism has already been written.”

Laqueur presents a concise and comprehensive history of antisemitism, along with his own cogent analysis of its current manifestations. He focuses on two current sources—the New Left and Islamic fundamentalism, the latter responsible for demonizing Jews throughout the Arab and Muslim world. By the middle of this century, it is estimated that between one-quarter and one-third of the population of France, Germany, and other European countries will be Muslim or of Muslim origin. “Even at the present time, the Muslim vote is significant in scores of British and French constituencies, and this will increase very quickly in the future,” he predicts. “Given the anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim communities, the policy vis-à-vis Israel will be affected but also, inevitably, the position of local Jews.”

While Laqueur himself is critical of some policies of the Israeli government, he nevertheless sees troubling elements in leftist and antiglobalist criticisms of Israel. “Is the argument that the state of Israel is the greatest danger to world peace and has no right to exist anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, or antisemitic?” he asks. “If it is based on the assumption that nation-states in general have caused more harm than good and should be dismantled, such a proposition cannot be considered antisemitic. But few of those who insist on the liquidation of the state of Israel share the conviction that all nation-states should be done away with. They believe that other states, not being such a danger to world peace, do have the right to exist.”

One feature of antisemitism has apparently not changed: the Jews—and the State of Israel, where half the world’s Jews live—continue to serve as lightning rods for pent-up feelings of rage at intractable problems easier to attribute to “conspiracies” than solve.



The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World by Michael Karpin
(Simon & Schuster, 404 pp., paperback $15)

In April 1963 President John F. Kennedy asked Israel’s Defense Minister Shimon Peres: “Are you making an atom bomb?” Peres replied, “Mr. President, Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” This deliberately ambiguous phrase—in the context of Israel’s refusal to sign a nuclear non-proliferation agreement—has characterized Israel’s policy to this day. While Israel has never admitted to an arsenal of nuclear weapons or nuclear testing, neither has it denied possessing “a nuclear capability.”

Israeli journalist Michael Karpin explores this policy of ambiguity as he reveals the development of what he calls “the bomb in the basement”—a nuclear option developed as a last resort to an existential threat. “When historians look back,” Karpin asserts, “they will conclude that Israel’s nuclear capability was the decisive element in persuading the Arab world that the Jewish presence in the narrow strip of land at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea was a permanent reality.”

David Ben-Gurion committed himself to acquiring a nuclear option for Israel when he visited European concentration camps after WWII—and resolved that Jews would never be as vulnerable again. In 1958 he created RAFAEL, an agency charged with basic nuclear research funded by American Jewish millionaires and kept secret even from Israel’s state and defense departments.

Initially France played a major role in helping Israel build a reactor in Dimona, in return for Israel’s support in the Middle East. The American reaction to Israel’s development of a nuclear option was more complex; the United States finally dropped its demands to monitor Israel’s research sites in the 1970s under President Johnson, who regarded Israel as America’s only reliable ally in the region. During the Yom Kippur War, America supplied conventional weapons to Israel without restrictions, in part to forestall Israel’s use of its “nuclear option.”

In light of the current tensions over nuclear proliferation, the question emerges: why are some countries justified in developing nuclear weapons and others not? Although this book is a political history, not a polemic, the answer is implicit: it lies in the difference between Israel’s development of an ultimate deterrent and Iran’s stated goal of destroying the Jewish state. A concluding chapter deals with the ramifications of Iran becoming a nuclear power in the future.


Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir by Martin Lemelman
(Free Press, 218 pp., $19.95)

Graphic storytelling—stories told in sequential illustrations—is an art form that has grown in popularity since artists Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman began to apply it to serious nonfictional themes. Martin Lemelman’s work breaks new ground, using the genre to recreate his mother Gusta’s telling of her own story of Holocaust survival. Lemelman combines charcoal illustrations with original photographs—because “I want readers to understand that what happened in Mendel’s Daughter happened to real people.” Gusta recounts the fate of her family after the Nazi invasion of Poland and how she survived with three siblings in a living grave hidden in the Polish woods. Lemelman presents this story with loving respect for the generation that witnessed the cataclysm and continues to live with its memories and losses.

Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.