Mikael Shainkman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the marg... more T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the margins of public discourse. In the general atmosphere of increasing tolerance and fight against all kinds of prejudices and increased protection of minorities, Jews lived in security and even started to take that state of affairs for granted. Following the Holocaust, no one who wanted to be taken seriously in the Western world would accept the epithet antisemite. Prejudice and hatred against Jews, based either on ancient Christian anti-Jewish teachings or nineteenth-century racist theories about the inferiority of Jewish blood, disappeared together with their most vociferous propagators in the Third Reich. Anyone still clinging to the beliefs that the Jews controlled the world via a stranglehold on the media, the financial markets, and politiciansbe it on Capitol Hill, in Whitehall, or in the Kremlin-had to either hide those beliefs or express them only behind closed doors to avoid running the risk of social ostracism. The populist lies blaming the Jews for all the ills of the world lost much of their mass appeal when Allied soldiers threw open the gates of German concentration camps and revealed the unspeakable atrocities that were the outcome of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. 1
T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the marg... more T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the margins of public discourse. In the general atmosphere of increasing tolerance and fight against all kinds of prejudices and increased protection of minorities, Jews lived in security and even started to take that state of affairs for granted. Following the Holocaust, no one who wanted to be taken seriously in the Western world would accept the epithet antisemite. Prejudice and hatred against Jews, based either on ancient Christian anti-Jewish teachings or nineteenth-century racist theories about the inferiority of Jewish blood, disappeared together with their most vociferous propagators in the Third Reich. Anyone still clinging to the beliefs that the Jews controlled the world via a stranglehold on the media, the financial markets, and politiciansbe it on Capitol Hill, in Whitehall, or in the Kremlin-had to either hide those beliefs or express them only behind closed doors to avoid running the risk of social ostracism. The populist lies blaming the Jews for all the ills of the world lost much of their mass appeal when Allied soldiers threw open the gates of German concentration camps and revealed the unspeakable atrocities that were the outcome of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. 1