Book Description: Goldberg, Ury, Weiser (eds): Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism

Bibliographic Information:
Goldberg, Sol, Scott Ury, and Kalman Weiser, eds., Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
ISBN: 978-3-030-51657-4

Summary

Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism will be a valuable tool for educators and others who wish to learn about the field. The text is written by scholars and for scholars and their students. It is a collection of fifteen to twenty page essays, each covering a concept important to contemporary research and academic discourse about antisemitism. The twenty-two topics include essays on the blood libel, historiography of antisemitism, conspiracy theories, anti-Judaism, anti-Zionism, gender, ghetto, Jewish self-hatred, pogroms, and so on) The topics are well chosen. The essays, overall, are well written.

Context

Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism fills a need for a resource that can discuss concepts basic to current scholarly understanding of the field. Several of the essays seem highly concerned with issues that may or may not continue to be priority issues in field. The concern to show the vitality of Diaspora Jewish life is an important corrective to the “lachyrmose” tendency in Jewish historiography, but it can become imbalanced in its own right.

Style

While the essays are generally well-written academic articles, they tend toward dense reading, like much academic writing, full of references internal to the field. Educators will want to use Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism carefully. Teachers of high school or college undergraduate college courses may find that they need to provide considerable background to the individual essays before they can fully use them. Otherwise, because of the sometimes closed academic background of the essays, they may seem a bit like the apocryphal essay that determined that Shakespeare’s works were not produced by William Shakespeare but by another English writer of the same name who lived in England at the same time.

Classroom

Educators will want to use Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism carefully. Teachers of high school or college undergraduate college courses may find that they need to provide considerable background to the individual essays before they can fully use them. Otherwise, because of the sometimes closed academic background of the essays, they may seem a bit like the apocryphal essay that determined that Shakespeare’s works were not produced by William Shakespeare but by another English writer of the same name who lived in England at the same time.