The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and the Representation of Evil

Abstract

Fifty years after the Holocaust, anti-Jewish myths and sentiments are gaining momentum in Europe, the Islamic world, the Americas, and even in Japan. Why ? Does hate spring eternal ? Seeking an answer to this question, the author develops a seven-part argument. His aim is to advance what can reasonably be called a social constructionist perspective on the kind of antisemitic demonology that is now gaining worldwide currency. His method is to seek clarity by evaluating varying kinds of constructionist claims. Both the strengths and weaknesses of these claims are illuminating for my purposes, as he tries to show in connection with writers including Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Daniel Goldhagen, and Pierre-Andre Taguieff. His conclusion is that we can best understand antisemitism as an instance of what historian Gavin Langmuir calls chimeria. Interpreted in the spirit of certain classic texts (by Sartre, Adorno, and Samuel), this notion offers a powerful starting point for further inquiry. To illustrate the promise of this approach, he closes with an interpretation of the current, global antisemitic revival as an expression of anti-Jewish chimeria

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.