Delphine Horvilleur, Anti-Semitism Revisited (MacLehose Press, 2021), Translated from the French Edition Réflexions sur la Question Antisémite (Editions Grasset, 2019), pp. 144, ISBN: 978-1529404753

Excerpt

This is a thought-provoking exploration of antisemitism from a perhaps unusual standpoint. Delphine Horvilleur is one of a very few female rabbis in France, with a well-deserved reputation as an engaged public intellectual in a nation with a long tradition in that regard. What is unusual about this work is not just that it insists on looking at antisemitism from a Jewish perspective, but that it links insights drawn from Jewish theology and rabbinical lore with those garnered from some of the more influential philosophers of the past two centuries as well as from psychoanalysis, to illuminate our understanding of a problem that has returned to haunt us yet again. Any optimism that antisemitism is a thing of the past, safely consigned to history, has evaporated in recent years—or at any rate it should have done. One of the many virtues of this stimulating book is that it provides resources for understanding why antisemitism is such an enduring temptation throughout the ages and across the political spectrum. …