Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Dennis Prager, Joseph Telushkin

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Theology, Sociology

272 pages, published August 12, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth?  In Why The Jews, authors Dennis Prager and  Joseph Telushkin answer the question of why the Jews have been persecuted throughout history, from the ancient world to the Holocaust to the current crisis in the Middle East.  The authors also look at the replicating of Nazi antisemitism in the Arab world, the pervasive anti-Zionism/antisemitism on university campuses, the rise of antisemitism in Europe and why the United States and Israel are linked in the minds of anti-Semites.

My Take

I am a big fan of Dennis Prager, having listened to him for years and consider him to be one of the wisest people in public life.  In addition to being a nationally syndicated Talk Radio Show Host, a prolific author, the force behind the tremendous website Prager University, he is a serious religious scholar specializing in Judaism.  On his radio show, he often mentions his book Why The Jews.  Having heard a lot about this book, I was very interested in reading it.  I was not disappointed, but I was very saddened at the horrendous treatment of the Jewish people throughout history.  Prager and  Joseph Telushkin offer the following explanations for our world’s history of anti-Semitism:

– 1600 years of Christian hatred of Jews culminated in the Holocaust … Christianity did not create the Holocaust … but without Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust would have been inconceivable.

– Jews, merely by continuing to be Jews, threatened the very legitimacy of Christianity … if Judaism remained valid, then Christianity was invalid … therein, from the days of the founding of Christianity, lie the origins of Christian hatred of Jews … Christianity had no choice but to deny the validity of Judaism.

– the mere existence of Jews is a threat to the prevailing order of the societies in which Jews live … Judaism is an existential threat to the core values and beliefs of others … living with this threat often aroused deep and lasting hatred.

– Jews allegiance to the biblical commandments of God, Torah and Israel have made Jews outsiders who challenge the validity of the non-Jew’s gods, laws, and national allegiance.

– economic factors, the need for scapegoats, resentment of Jewish affluence, ethnic hatred … these have all exacerbated antisemitism but do not explain its genesis.

– any group acting so differently from the majority culture is bound to elicit hostility … by observing Kashrut, a Jew can eat little at a non-Jew’s house … observing the Jewish Sabbath increases the otherness and isolation of Jews.

– Nazi Jew-hatred was an end, not a means to an end … Nazism was a vehicle for antisemitism, not the reverse … Hitler used war as a means of killing Jews on a larger scale than he could do in peacetime.

*** Nazi antisemitism was based on hatred of the Jewish character, not hatred of Jews’ non-Aryan blood … the Nazis hated the challenges to their view of the German world posed by Jews and Jewish values.