Jews Make the Best Demons:’Palestine’ and the Jewish Question by Eric Rozenman

New English Review Press is pleased to announce the publication of our twenty eighth book, Jews Make the Best Demons:’Palestine’ and the Jewish Question by Eric Rozenman.

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

At the University of Texas, a visiting Israeli professor had to go about campus in disguise. At Oberlin College, progressive students dismissed the Holocaust as “white-on-white” crime. Such examples proliferate.

Israel is the only Western-style democracy in the greater Middle East, a world leader in medicine, science and technology, a first responder in international humanitarian relief efforts. Yet public opinion surveys find it ranked as a chief threat to world peace.

The post-1945 world of “Never again!” is gone. In Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question, published October 22 by New English Review Press, Eric Rozenman examines the post-modern propagation of pre-modern beliefs and the danger not only for the Jewish state and Jews everywhere, but the entire liberal West.

Theodore Herzl expected Zionism’s Altneuland, the old-new Jewish state, to at long last normalize the status of the Jewish people. Instead, Rozenman shows antisemitism resurrected through anti-Zionism has made Israel the Neualtjude, the new-old Jew. In the process, today’s Israelis, today’s Jews have been indicted not as demonic Christ-killers but rather as demonic nation-killers of the Palestinian Arabs.

Jews Make the Best Demons illuminates how:

· “The Jewish question” has troubled Western intellectuals from the Enlightenment on;

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

· Kaiser Wilhelm II in World War I and Hitler in World War II successfully sponsored anti-British, anti-French and anti-Zionist Muslim extremists who would lead directly to today’s Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Iranian leadership;

· The Soviet Union continued what the Kaiser and der Fuhrer had begun, ultimately recruiting the Arab League in support of Moscow’s infamous 1975 U.N. Zionism-is-racism resolution;

· As a result, the medieval blood libel against the Jews has been revived in “water-theft” and “organ-stealing” guises and repeatedly in its original form as part of the “Palestine narrative”; and

· Twentieth century Palestinian terrorism, tolerated when largely targeting Israelis and Jews, became the gateway drug for 21st century Islamist terrorism.

Western academics, in deconstructed hostility to objectivity and factual history, have enabled the return of Jew-hatred from the fringe to the mainstream. As French President Emmanuelle Macron, among others, has declared, anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

Rozenman, a former editor of Washington Jewish Week and B’nai B’rith’s International Jewish Monthly, argues that the anti-Zionism/antisemitism 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, humanity’s perpetual enemy. That it does so with early Bolshevik categories like “racist, imperialist and colonialist” amounts to newer bottles for a 2,000-year-old wine.

The renewed blood libel, cloaked in the “Palestinian narrative,” is as false as the original and no more likely to be defeated only with facts. Jews Makes the Best Demons concludes that what also is required is a psychological transformation, the one pointed to by psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. It is a rejection of George Orwell’s “streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets” coupled with an embrace of Frankl’s “race” of the decent, shunning the indecent who still seek an answer to “the question of Palestine,” in reality the question of Israel, the age-old Jewish question.

Of Jews Make the Best Demons, historian Daniel Pipes, publisher of Middle East Quarterly, has written: “Rozenman’s cry from the heart establishes the clear connection between the old antisemitism and the new anti-Zionism. Only the blind or the wicked can deny his truth, proven by exemplary research: everyone else will learn from him.”