Jews Make the Best Demons: 'Palestine' and the Jewish Question

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

Hitler didn t finish the job! a mob at San Francisco State University screamed at pro-Israel students. Agitators at the University of Texas forced a visiting Israeli professor to go about in disguise. Progressive students at Oberlin College dismissed the Holocaust as merely white-on-white crime. Such examples proliferate as an anti-Zionist/antisemitic indoctrination intensifies.

Israel is the only Western-style democracy in the greater Middle East, a world-leader despite its small size in medicine, science and technology and is the effective first-responder in many global humanitarian relief efforts. Yet international public opinion surveys find it ranked as one of the chief threats to world peace; 20 percent of Europeans wish their countries were free of Jews.

What happened to the post-1945 world of Never Again! ? In Jews Make the Best Demons: Palestine and the Jewish Question, to be published this October by New English Review Press, Eric Rozenman examines how we got here, the danger posed not only for the Jewish state and Jews everywhere but also for the United States and the rest of the self-doubting liberal West. He outlines what must be done to halt the post-modern propagation of pre-modern beliefs.

Theodore Herzl and the other founders of political Zionism expected their Altneuland, the old-new Jewish state, to at long last normalize the status of the Jewish people, so often in their 2,000-year statelessness marginalized and massacred. Instead, Rozenman shows, antisemitism resurrected through anti-Zionism has made Israel the Neualtjude, the new-old Jew, in the process indicting the Jewish people not as demonic Christ-killer but rather as demonic nation-killer of the Palestinian Arabs.

The new blood libel, cloaked in the Palestinian narrative, is as false as the original and no more likely to be defeated primarily by facts. Jews Make the Best Demons concludes that what is required first of all 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 and embrace of Frankl s race of the decent, shunning all the indecent who seek a final answer to the question of Palestine, which in reality is the question of Israel, the age-old Jewish question.

Eric Rozenman's career has included work as a reporter for Ohio Scripps-Howard Newspapers, a congressional staffer, and editor of Washington Jewish Week and B'nai B'rith's International Jewish Monthly. His commentary and analyses have appeared in publications including The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Jerusalem Post, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism and Journal of International Security Affairs.