Robert S. Wistrich

Robert Wistrich

Robert Solomon Wistrich (April 7, 1945 – May 19, 2015) was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the University's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. According to Indiana University, Wistrich was "a leading scholar of the history of antisemitism."^[1]

Early life

Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945.^[2] His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape the Germans; however, they found Soviet totalitarianism to be little better. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD.^[3] His parents returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile.

Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic^[4] – the family moved to France. The author grew up in England, and went to Kilburn Grammar School where he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently" (Dedication in Wistrich (2012) From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel)

in December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship in History to Queens' College. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969–1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber.

Professional career

Robert Wistrich (left) and Bernard Lewis, 2007

Wistrich received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974.^[2] Between 1974 and 1980, he was Director of Research at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library (at that time the largest research library on the Third Reich existing in Europe) and the editor of the Wiener Library Bulletin in London. Appointed a Research Fellow at the British Academy, he had already written several well-received books by the time he was given tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982. In 1985 his book Socialism and the Jews won the joint award of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American Jewish Committee. His 1989 book The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph received the Austrian State Prize in History. His next study, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize in the UK a year later, and was the basis for The Longest Hatred — a three-hour British-American TV documentary mini-series made for Thames Television/WGBH scripted by Wistrich and shown on PBS. In 1993, he also scripted Good Morning, Mr. Hitler, an award-winning documentary on Nazi art commissioned by the UK's Channel 4.

Between 1991 and 1995, Wistrich was appointed the first holder of the Chair of Jewish Studies at University College London, in addition to his position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also wrote several dramas for BBC radio and Kol Israel on the lives of historical figures ranging from Leon Trotsky to Theodor Herzl. In 2003, he acted as the chief historical consultant for the BBC documentary, Blaming the Jews (about contemporary Muslim antisemitism) and in 2006 he was the academic advisor for the film: Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West.

He was one of six scholars who sat on the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission from 1999 to 2001 to examine the wartime record of Pope Pius XII, with special reference to The Holocaust.^[5] From 2002, he was the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and edited its journal, Antisemitism International.

Wistrich died of a heart attack on May 19, 2015 in Rome, Italy.^[6]

Works

Selected books

Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky. Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. ISBN 0-06-497806-0
The Left Against Zion. Vallentine Mitchell & Co, 1979. ISBN 0-85303-199-1
Socialism and the Jews. Oxford University Press, 1982.
Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary. Stein & Day, 1982. ISBN 0-8128-2774-0
The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Between Redemption and Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity. Routledge, 1990. ISBN 0-415-04233-X
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World. New York University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-8147-9237-5
Antisemitism, the Longest Hatred. Pantheon, 1992.
Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Routledge, 1995. ISBN 0-415-12723-8
Terms of Survival. Routledge, 1995. ISBN 0-415-10056-9
Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich (with Luke Holland). Trafalgar Square, 1996. ISBN 1-85793-318-4
Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State. New York and Jerusalem: Herzl Press and Magnes Press, 1999, 390 pages.
Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia. Routledge, 1999. ISBN 90-5702-497-7
Hitler and the Holocaust. Random House, 2001.
Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? Princeton, 2002.
Laboratory for World Destruction. Germans and Jews in Central Europe, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2007. ISBN 978-0-8032-1134-6
A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism – From Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4000-6097-9
From Ambivalence to Betrayal. The Left, the Jews and Israel, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2012. ISBN 0803240767

Selected papers

“German Social Democracy and the Problem of Jewish Nationalism, 1897–1917,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 21 (1976), pp. 109 142.
“A Neo Revisionist Renaissance? Back to Bernstein,” Encounter, (July 1978), pp. 75 82.
“Historians and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (1983), pp. 317 20.
“The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multi-Ethnic State,” in: Toward Modernity: The European Model, Jacob Katz, ed., Transaction Books, 1987, pp. 43 70.
“Antisemitismus,” in Neue Lexicon des Judentums, J. H. Schoeps, ed., München: Bertelsmann Lexicon Verlag, 1992, pp. 41 47.
“Socialism and Judeophobia: Antisemitism in Europe before 1914,” Leo Baeck Yearbook, (1992), pp. 111 145.
“The Jews and Nationality Conflicts in the Habsburg Lands,” Nationalities Papers, (New York) Vol. 22, Nr. I (Spring 1994) pp. 119 141.
“Theodor Herzl,” Israel Affairs, (Spring 1995) Vol. 1. No. 3, pp. 1 37.
“Max Nordau and the Dreyfus Affair,” The Journal of Israeli History, (Tel Aviv) Vol. 16, No. 1 (1955), pp. 1–19.
“Hitler’s Helpers,” Commentary, (June 1996), pp. 51–55.
“Zionism and its Jewish `Assimilationist Critics’, 1897-1948,” Jewish Social Studies, 1998, Vol.4 No.2, pp.59–111
“The Pope, the Church and the Jews,” Commentary (April 1999), pp. 22–28.
“How to Tackle the New Antisemitism” in Standpoint (October 2008) pp. 74–77. "Austria and the Legacy of the Holocaust", The American Jewish Committee, New York 1999, 56 pages.
“Austria and the Jewish Question, 1945–1950”, in: Robert B. Pynsent (ed.), The Phoney Peace. Power and Culture in Central Europe, 1945–49 (London, 2000), pp. 39–57.
“Was Nietzsche a Fascist Thinker?”, Partisan Review, 2001, 2, pp. 201–217
“The Vatican and the Shoah”, Modern Judaism, Vol. 21, Nr. 2, May 2001, pp. 83–107
“The Demise of the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission”, Midstream, December 2001, pp. 2–5.
“Jewish Suffering, Vatican Silence”, Catholic International (Washington, D.C.), vol. 13, No. 2, May 2002, pp. 57–62.
"Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger" (PDF). (3.48 MiB), American Jewish Committee, 2002.
“Muslims, Jews and September 11: The British Case” in Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski (eds.) The New Anti-Semitism (London, 2003) pp. 169–191.
"The Old-New Antisemitism”, The National Interest (Washington D.C.), Summer 2003, pp. 59–70; abstract online.
"The Politics of Ressentiment: Israel, Jews and the German Media". ACTA paper no. 23, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, November 2004, 37 pages.
"Islamic Judeophobia: An Existential Threat", NATIV online, Volume 2, 2004.
"Islamic Judeophobia: An Existential Threat", in Bukay, Daid (ed.) Muhammad's Monsters, Balfour Books, 2004
“Friedrich Nietzsche and the Austrian Fin de Siecle”, in J. Golomb (ed.) Nietzsche and the Austrian Culture (Wien, 2004) pp. 42–60.
“The Jihadist Challenge”, Midstream (Nov/Dec 2004), pp. 8–12.
“The Last Testament of Sigmund Freud”, Leo Baeck Yearbook XLIX (2004), pp. 87–106.
"Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism", Jewish Political Studies Review 16:3-4, Fall 2004.
"Antisemitism in Western Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century", World Jewish Congress Research Series, January 2005, 24 pages.
“Antisemitism – A Civilizational Pathology”, in Manfred Gerstenfeld (ed.) Israel and Europe: An Expanding Abyss (Jerusalem 2005) pp. 95–110.
"European Anti-Semitism Reinvents Itself" (PDF). (2.62 MiB), American Jewish Committee, 2005.
"The Jedwabne Affair", The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University.
"Reinventing European Antisemitism". The American Jewish Committee, New York, 2005, 54 pages.
"Pius XII and the Shoah" in M. Zimmermann et al., Three Generations of Historians on Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime (Magnes Press, Jerusalem 2006) pp. 21–41.
"Stefan Zweig and the ‘World of Yesterday’", in Mark H. Gelber (ed.) Stefan Zweig Reconsidered – New Perspectiveson his Literary and Biographical Writings (Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2007), pages 59–77.
"Anti-Semitism and Multiculturalism: The Uneasy Connection" – Posen Papers No. 5, The Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, March 2007, 12 pages.
"Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Case of Bruno Kreisky". ACTA paper no. 30, The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, December 2007, 26 pages.
“Modernity and the Nazi Genocide” in Song Lihong (ed.), Holocaust: history and Memory (Nanjing University 2007), pp. 171–192.
“Dialogue in Hell: Zionism and its Double” in Midstream (May/June 2008), pp. 9–14
“How to Tackle the New Antisemitism” in Standpoint (October 2008) pp. 74–77.
“Post-Mubarak Egypt: The Dark Side of Islamic Utopia”.(2012). Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 6(1), 23-32
“Gaza, Hamas and the Return of Anti-Semitism”. (2014). Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 8(3), 35-48
“Anti-Zionist Mythology of the Left".(2015). Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Vol. IX(2), 1-13.

Notes

↑ Indiana University to Launch Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, 1/11/2010
1 2 Robert Wistrich, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences website, accessed August 21, 2006.
↑ "The Jedwabne Affair", The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, accessed August 21, 2006.
↑ "A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad: Robert S. Wistrich: 9781400060979: Amazon.com: Books". amazon.com. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
↑ "Robert Wistrich", NATIV online, retrieved August 20, 2006.
↑ "Robert Wistrich, leading scholar of anti-Semitism, dies of heart attack". The Jerusalem Post - JPost.com. Retrieved 4 October 2015.

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