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 Bernard Harrison

Blaming The Jews: Politics and Delusion

October 18, 2 PM, Eastern Time (US and Canada) 

 Blaming The Jews: Politics and Delusion offers a systematic analysis of the ancient delusion that "the Jews" collectively dominate world affairs and that a "Jewish Threat" lies at the root of all the world's evils. The book occupies itself, among other things, with the renewed role of such ideas in anti-Zionist and BDS thinking about Israel, with the question of who profits from propagating such delusions, and with the related question of why the Jews, of all people, should have found themselves targeted by them. It concludes by enquiring at length whether antisemitism masquerading as a pseudo-explanatory theory of world affairs, however much it may serve the interests of certain non-Jewish political movements to propagate it, has not exacted a price from the wider non-Jewish world almost as great as the appalling price it has exacted from the Jews.

Bernard Harrison is a philosopher of language and literary critic, whose books in those areas include Form and Content (Blackwell 1973), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale, 1994), What Is Fiction For: Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana, 2015) and (with Patricia Hanna) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge 2004). Over the years he has held teaching and research posts at universities in the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. At present he holds emeritus professorships in the University of Utah and the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of two books on antisemitism, The Resurgence of Antisemitism, Jews, Israel and Liberal Opinion (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) and Blaming the Jews, Politics and Delusion (Indiana, October 2020), along with a number of related essays, many of which are available on his website: bernardharrison1.academia edu.