Anti-Semites on Zionism: From Indifference to Obsession
This article compares European and Middle Eastern anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1870s through the 1930s, in parallel fashion anti-Semitism became a mobilizing, all-embracing ideology in Europe, while the Arab world witnessed an eruption of anticolonial and nationalist sentiment, often directed against the Zionist project. Arab anti-Semitism featured the irrational and fantastic qualities of its European counterpart, but it took form against the reality of the Zionist project. The article draws a distinction between the realms of systemic intolerance, aggravated by socio-economic crisis, and political strife, driven by discrete events and policies. Its main sources are fin-de-siècle European anti-Semites' writings on Zionism, which are shown to be fundamentally different from the anti-Zionist rhetoric emanating from the Middle East at that time.
A Lie and a Libel: The History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a potent forgery alleging a Jewish plot to run the world, has proved durable since its turn-of-the-century fabrication by Russian police; this book offers welcome background, context and refutation. The main section is the 1926 effort by Segel, a German Jewish journalist, to expose the fraud; he shows how the infamous text was plagiarized from trash fiction, Machiavelli's speeches and a political satire...Levy adds much in his comprehensive introduction. Unlike most anti-Semitic works, he notes, this has no national context or identity. Thus it has served multiple purposes for different audiences; it was not only publicized by the Nazis, but it also remains influential in the Arab world and eastern Europe and among American right-wingers and black nationalists' - "Publishers Weekly".A strange and repugnant mystery of the twentieth century is the durability of the Protocols, despite repeated exposure as a forgery. Binjamin W. Segel's work was the first full explanation of the shadowy sources for this virulent group libel. Richard S.Levy now adds an examination of the history of the Protocols since its original publication and describes its continuing psychological appeal and political function in the modern world. Richard S. Levy is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He is the editor of "Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts".
Letting Women in? Gender Mainstreaming in Regional Policies
Gender mainstreaming has over the last ten years become the dominant strategy of integrating gender issues in public policy. This article presents regional policy as a broad and increasingly important policy field to study, and analyses gender mainstreaming in this policy field in the Norwegian and the Swedish contexts. How do problem representations surrounding “gender equality” and “gender mainstreaming” produce meanings of gender as well as construct possibilities for change? The article shows that, despite some differences between the two countries, gender mainstreaming in regional policy can to a large extent be read as meaning “women”. Women are in this context given a narrow subject position and are constructed as lacking what it takes to produce sustainable regional growth. The concluding discussion highlights the relations between the implementation of gender mainstreaming and neo‐liberal political trends.