Vol. 20 · No. 1 · Issue 62 · Spring 2002 · pp. 107-113 (7)

Rachel T. Greenwald

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Abstract

Stephen Eric Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)

Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California, 2000)

Stephen Eric Bronner and Dan Diner in two recent books address the difficulties in writing about antisemitism and the Shoah without creating a contemporary narrative of Jewish exceptionalism. For Bronner and Diner, historians should emphasize Jews as the primary victims of European fears of modernization and Nazi extermination plans. However, both authors believe there is danger in perpetuating the victim status of Jews long after World War II and the founding of the state of Israel. The on-going characterization of Jews as victims lends support to the racial categories of the early twentieth century; moveover, as Bronner and Diner suggest, it has led Jews to create and maintain a form of Zionism that precludes peaceful coexistence with non-Jews. At risk is the preservation of an exclusive ethnoreligious identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan world that rejects the conflation of nationalism and religion.