“One person questioning the truth of the Holocaust is one too many.” Karen Pollock, Holocaust Educational Trust, January 2019
In Studying the Jew (2006), Alan Steinweis’s slim,
Harvard-published text on the scholarly study of Jews under the Third
Reich, the author laments “the perversion of scholarship by politics and
ideology” and its service in the goals of “exclusion and domination.”
While some of the anecdotal material presented in the book is
fascinating, especially its prosopographies of what one reviewer called the “clearly brilliant” German scholars who undertook such work, the overarching message of Studying the Jew
is that one should, under no circumstances whatsoever, study the Jew.
That Steinweis felt such a message was in any way necessary in 2006 is a
testament to the same paranoia in which the fevered Jewish inability to
let go of the past becomes the frantic injunction unto the Gentile to
“Never Forget.” Steinweis’s limp appeals to contemporary relevancy
aside, by 2006 the kind of patient and methodical Judenforschung produced
by Édouard Drumont, Henry Ford, Hillaire Belloc, and the scholars of
the 1930s, had indeed become a thing very much of the distant past —
Kevin MacDonald’s remarkable 1990s trilogy being the exception that
proves an otherwise solid rule. By the 1960s, Jews had effectively
monopolized the study of their own history and sociology in the
post-war, modern incarnation of “Jewish Studies,” and quickly followed a
self-congratulating, navel-gazing, agenda-driven, victim-orientated
trajectory in the same fashion as their later counterparts in Women’s
Studies, Chicano Studies, and Black Studies. Serious critical study of
the Jews vanished from academia and mainstream culture.
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