February 8, 2010 | Rome, Italy | Partly Cloudy, 2°C
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History

Stalingrad

Beevor's World War II account is so chilling it stops you dead.

The Pirates Laffite

Homeland Security is nothing new, if your consider the pirates of New Orleans.

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

On Central Asia's mysteries, there's nobody better than Peter Hopkirk.

Africa: A Biography of the Continent

John Reader's generous accounting of Africa is both loving and critical.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989

Taylor's brilliant Berlin Wall history evokes the pathos and paranoia of the Cold War.

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews

For James Carroll, Roman Catholicism needs more self-criticism in approaching Jews.

Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive

Into the "realm of Hades" with the story of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes.

Nonfiction

This Peace

Thomas Mann's presaging of cultural laziness and war to come is still stinging.

The Emperor (Downfall of an Autocrat)

Ryszard Kapuscinski's portrait of the rise and fall of Haile Selasie is a masterpiece of first-person journalism.

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

Martin Goodman's account of the Roman-Jewish war gives Tacitus and Pliny their just due.




BOOK REVIEW
Jews and Power
By Ruth R. Wisse
Schocken Books, 2007. 231 pages

This book could alternately have carried the title "Jews Without Power," as it primarily investigates the question, "How did the Jews get to figure so prominently in the sights of precisely those regimes that threaten the rest of the world?"

Wisse prods for answers in the Book of Esther, finding in its notorious lack of any reference to God the kernel of modern Zionism: if Jews are to survive, they'd better take things into their own hands. She doesn't dwell on detail, but rather barrels through the last twenty-five hundred years of history illuminating significant examples of how the Jews survived despite so many adversaries pitted to destroy them. For a nation lacking a country, a means to self-defense and political sovereignty, this was not a simple matter. They had to be useful to those in charge, and they were. But tolerance is temporary, and Jews proved a useful scapegoat whenever one was needed.

The list of pogroms and expulsions is endless, and Wisse finds much to criticize even today among Israel's detractors, who have ensured that the Jewish State assumes the status of — in Alan Dershowitz's phrase — "Jew of the world." By ceaselessly assaulting Israel's legitimacy, they divert attention from their own abuses of power. To scapegoat the Jews is — Wisse reminds us — anti-Semitism, "arguably the most protean force in international politics."