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A chilling investigation of America’s only alleged case of blood libel, and what it reveals about antisemitism in the United States and Europe. On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, policemen and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. To believe in the accusation seems bizarre at first glance—blood libel was essentially unknown in the United States. But a great many of Massena’s inhabitants, both Christians and Jews, had emigrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe, where it was all too common. Historian Edward Berenson, himself a native of Massena, sheds light on the cross-cultural forces that ignited America’s only known instance of blood libel, and traces its roots in Old World prejudice, homegrown antisemitism, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Residues of all three have persisted until the present day. More than just the disturbing story of one town’s embrace of an insidious anti-Jewish myth, The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive exploration of American and European responses to antisemitism.
A chilling investigation of America’s only alleged case of blood libel, and what it reveals about antisemitism in the United States and Europe. On Saturday, September 22, 1928, Barbara Griffiths, age four, strayed into the woods surrounding the upstate village of Massena, New York. Hundreds of people looked everywhere for the child but could not find her. At one point, someone suggested that Barbara had been kidnapped and killed by Jews, and as the search continued, policemen and townspeople alike gave credence to the quickly spreading rumors. The allegation of ritual murder, known to Jews as “blood libel,” took hold. To believe in the accusation seems bizarre at first glance—blood libel was essentially unknown in the United States. But a great many of Massena’s inhabitants, both Christians and Jews, had emigrated recently from Central and Eastern Europe, where it was all too common. Historian Edward Berenson, himself a native of Massena, sheds light on the cross-cultural forces that ignited America’s only known instance of blood libel, and traces its roots in Old World prejudice, homegrown antisemitism, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Residues of all three have persisted until the present day. More than just the disturbing story of one town’s embrace of an insidious anti-Jewish myth, The Accusation is a shocking and perceptive exploration of American and European responses to antisemitism.
A landmark history of the antisemitic blood libel myth—how it took root in Europe, spread with the invention of the printing press, and persists today. Accusations that Jews ritually killed Christian children emerged in the mid-twelfth century, following the death of twelve-year-old William of Norwich, England, in 1144. Later, continental Europeans added a destructive twist: Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. While charges that Jews poisoned wells and desecrated the communion host waned over the years, the blood libel survived. Initially blood libel stories were confined to monastic chronicles and local lore. But the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century expanded the audience and crystallized the vocabulary, images, and “facts” of the blood libel, providing a lasting template for hate. Tales of Jews killing Christians—notably Simon of Trent, a toddler whose body was found under a Jewish house in 1475—were widely disseminated using the new technology. Following the paper trail across Europe, from England to Italy to Poland, Magda Teter shows how the blood libel was internalized and how Jews and Christians dealt with the repercussions. The pattern established in early modern Europe still plays out today. In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League appealed to Facebook to take down a page titled “Jewish Ritual Murder.” The following year white supremacists gathered in England to honor Little Hugh of Lincoln as a sacrificial victim of the Jews. Based on sources in eight countries and ten languages, Blood Libel captures the long shadow of a pernicious myth.
In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars. Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.
"What a pleasure it is to read a book by a gifted writer whose exhaustive research results in such thought-provoking insights."—Deirdre Bair, author of Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography
From the bestselling author of World War IV, a brilliant investigation of a central question in American politics and culture. During his career as a neoconservative thinker, Norman Podhoretz has been asked no question more often than “Why are so many Jews liberals?” In this provocative book he sets out to solve this puzzle. He first offers a fascinating account of anti-Semitism in the West to show the historical roots of Jewish mistrust of the right. But, Podhoretz argues, since the Six Day War of 1967 Jewish allegiance to the left no longer makes sense, and yet most Jews continue supporting the Democratic Party and the liberal agenda. Reviewing the history of Jewish political attitudes and examining the available evidence, Podhoretz argues against the conventional explanations for Jewish liberalism—finally proposing his own.
For centuries, Jews have been accused of something called "blood libel" or "ritual murder": the killing of non-Jews, often children, to use their blood in bizarre religious ceremonies or to make food. For centuries, this has been denied by Jews. But in fact there may be some truth to such claims after all.
In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of anti-Semitic iconography in the Middle Ages The straggly beard, the hooked nose, the bag of coins, and gaudy apparel—the religious artists of medieval Christendom had no shortage of virulent symbols for identifying Jews. Yet, hateful as these depictions were, the story they tell is not as simple as it first appears. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Lipton argues that these visual stereotypes were neither an inevitable outgrowth of Christian theology nor a simple reflection of medieval prejudices. Instead, she maps out the complex relationship between medieval Christians' religious ideas, social experience, and developing artistic practices that drove their depiction of Jews from benign, if exoticized, figures connoting ancient wisdom to increasingly vicious portrayals inspired by (and designed to provoke) fear and hostility. At the heart of this lushly illustrated and meticulously researched work are questions that have occupied scholars for ages—why did Jews becomes such powerful and poisonous symbols in medieval art? Why were Jews associated with certain objects, symbols, actions, and deficiencies? And what were the effects of such portrayals—not only in medieval society, but throughout Western history? What we find is that the image of the Jew in medieval art was not a portrait of actual neighbors or even imagined others, but a cloudy glass into which Christendom gazed to find a distorted, phantasmagoric rendering of itself.
"This is great material, and Florence...handles it with dramatic flair....An excellent work of popular history."--"Publishers Weekly" Damascus, February 1840. A Capuchin monk and his servant disappear without a trace. By the end of the day, rumors point to the Jewish community, a tiny minority in the city's rich but delicate balance of religions and ethnicities. Within weeks, the rumors turn to accusations of ritual murder, the infamous "blood libel." Fiendish tortures in the pasha's dungeons, coerced confessions, manufactured evidence, and the fury of the crowds are enough to convict the accused Jews. By the time the rest of the world learns of the events in Damascus, the entire leadership of the Jewish community is awaiting execution. Narrating with a novelist's skill, Ronald Florence recounts the unexpected twists of the story and the strange alliances forged by mutual fears and misperceptions as the Damascus affair became a worldwide cause--the Moslem majority were not the accusers of the Jews; the French consul, representative of the nation that had first recognized Jews as citizens, was the chief prosecutor; the Sultan defended the accused Jews; the liberal London "Times" considered whether the accusations might be true. The legacies of the growing rift among the minorities, the dominant Arab society, and the outside world are the divisions in the Middle East today and the myths that continue to feed and sustain anti-Semitism. "Blood Libel" is a gripping historical narrative that explores the fragile social fabric of a society as it stretches and ultimately rips into shreds of hatred and fear.