Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world - only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time - was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946. Jan Gross's Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation? Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war's aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder - and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland's Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state. For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.

Today's antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it does not come dressed in a Nazi uniform and it does not openly proclaim its hatred or fear of Jews. This book looks at the kind of antisemitism which is tolerated or which goes unacknowledged in apparently democratic spaces: trade unions, churches, left-wing and liberal politics, social gatherings of the chattering classes and the seminars and journals of radical intellectuals. It analyses how criticism of Israel can mushroom into antisemitism and it looks at struggles over how antisemitism is defined. It focuses on ways in which those who raise the issue of antisemitism are often accused of doing so in bad faith in an attempt to silence or smear. Hostility to Israel has become a signifier of identity, connected to opposition to imperialism, neo-liberalism and global capitalism; the 'community of the good' takes on toxic ways of imagining most living Jewish people.

In this intensely passionate and compelling book, the best-selling feminist and Jewish writer Phyllis Chesler demonstrates how old-fashioned anti-Semitism has become newly fashionable, even politically correct, and how this plague threatens the Jews of the world, America, and Western civilization. A dangerous, worldwide coalition of Islamic terrorists, well-intentioned but profoundly misinformed students, right wing fascists, left-wing ideologues, pious academics, feminists, opportunistic European politicians, and sensation-seeking international media have joined together to once again blame the Jews and the Jewish state for the current world crisis. Today, lethal activism against the Jews often takes the form of anti-Zionism. Osama Bin Laden, for example, blamed the 9/11 World Trade Center attack on U.S. government support for Israel. Since then, hundreds of synagogues have been burned, cemeteries and destroyed, and Jews threatened, boycotted, beaten, and killed. Jews have been blamed for huge stock market losses and for the decline of the world economy. The long-ago disproven Protocols of Zion, which accuse the Jews of an alleged world-conspiracy to conquer and control the world, have been revived and promulgated in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. So what must we do? "Fight against the Big Lies," Chesler says. (No, the Jews do not control the world's money and media, and the Jews did not kill Christ.) Avoid rigid, dogmatic ideologies. Focus on the world's real problems (disease, poverty, illiteracy, violence) instead of scapegoating the Jews and demonizing the Jewish state. Be fair to Israel. Form Jewish-Christian, Jewish-Muslim, and Jewish-Palestinian alliances. Restore campus civility and above all, Jews must stop fighting among themselves.

It is late 1903, and Rachel and her family are leaving Russia to escape the murderous riots against Jews. They travel cross country on the Trans-Siberian Railway to the coast and board a ship for Shanghai. China offers refuge, but life for them there is difficult and strange. The opportunity to write for a Jewish newspaper may help Rachel ensure her family's survival while not giving up her dreams for her future. Still in Russia, Rachel's friend Sergei leaves home for a factory job in St. Petersburg, soon joining the rebelling workers, but realizing he has traded one source of danger for another. Separated by so much, the two teenagers try to make their way in the turbulent political times of the early twentieth century--their only connection the letters they write, and their fierce hope for the future.

Presents an inventory of the images of the Jew, mainly in Romanian culture. Focuses on popular beliefs, while illustrating ties with more elite political imagery. Groups anti-Jewish stereotypes into various "portraits": physical, occupational, moral and intellectual, mythical and magic, and religious. Some physical images of the Jew, like red hair and "Jewish" freckles were associated with the devil. Another negative feature, one not exclusive to Romanian folk culture, was a belief in the existence of an unplesant Jewish smell considered to be a punishment for deicide that could be, alleviated only by the blood of Christians. Occupational stereotypes often related to materialism and dishonesty, contrasting the Jewish tradesman with the nature connected Romanian peasant. Jewish tavern-keepers were also associated with the devil. Characteristics that could be viewed as positive, like intelligence, were often linked to negative Jewish stereotypes, like craftiness. Some anti-Jewish stereotypes derived from early Christian views, e.g. of the Jews as blind to the "truths" of Christianity. Other images, like that of the Jew as a rain-maker, reflect traditional East European peasant views. An apparently positive image may have negative connotations, e.g. the positive omen of meeting a Jew at the beginning of a trip is based on the idea of the Jew as a "lightning-rod" for attracting the devil away from Christians. The religious portrait combines traditional universal Christian images of the Jew as deicide with local legends of the Jews as responsible for martyring a Christian saint and defacing a revered local icon. As elsewhere in Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christian children. Some of these negative stereotypes were also associated with the Gypsies or other minorities.