The Ideas Letter

Some four decades ago, the historian Arno Mayer sparked a historiographical firestorm by arguing that the Nazi destruction of the European Jews was not the outcome of a long-settled master plan. Rather, Mayer wrote, it radicalized into a policy of continent-wide annihilation only at the end of 1941, when the Nazis’ campaign to destroy the Soviet Union failed to achieve the rapid victory they had expected. Jochen Hellbeck’s recent World Enemy No. 1 has traces of the Mayer volume but goes further and returns the Soviet Union to center stage in the chamber of horrors of World War II, after a decades-long interlude during which Poland had become the historiographical center of gravity. Through the novel deployment of personal diaries and other sources, Hellbeck shows that the Nazis imagined Soviet communism as a Jewish-led existential threat and that their 1941 invasion of the USSR became the laboratory in which Nazi mass murder radicalized. The great historian of genocide and memory culture A. Dirk Moses takes the full measure of Hellbeck’s essential tome.

Benjamin Moser’s new book on anti-Zionism has also attracted both foes and friends. Through a series of vignettes, Moser explains that Jewish opposition to Zionism is not a recent aberration or merely an expression of antisemitism, but a long-standing and often suppressed current within modern Jewish thought. Barnaby Raine, an editor at the revitalized socialist British publication Tribune, is an intellectual historian who has written and spoken considerably on theories of contemporary antisemitism. His judicious reading of Moser’s book will, one hopes, complicate the debate and move it past customary loggerheads.

In 2024 Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman published the powerful (and powerfully speculative) book Children of a Modest Star,