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classify Trumpism with respect to fas- cism. But it is hard not think of the 1938 remarks of Yale Divinity School professor Halford E. Luccock: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism.’” Whatever Trumpism is, and how- ever unsettling it is to Canadian Jews as Canadians, it is not an anti-Jewish eliminationist movement. That does not mean contemporary resonances are absent. The City Without Jews is most notable for being a Jewish writ- er’s 1922 dystopian description of what would in fact soon happen: Vienna (and not just Vienna) expelling (and not just expelling) its Jews. A 2004 film, A Day Without a Mexican , has basically the same plot as The City Without Jews , but with a different minority group set in a different locale (modern-day Los Angeles). In 2025, The New York Times Never-Ending Tales is a portrait of a civilization at a crossroads. What sort of portrait do we get? One in which, notably, the lure
for reasons he could not have antici- pated. To read Herzl in the mid-2020s is to emerge with more questions than answers. That Herzl did not simply solve the “Jewish question” is maybe the strongest evidence that this was never a question that Jews had the power to solve. AS ZIPES CONVEYS in his introduc- tion, the so-called Jewish question is still with us. But the stakes and dynam- ics have changed with world events: “Now the Palestinians seem to occupy the role of oppressed, while Israel ap- pears to be the oppressor. This is one of the sad paradoxes of post-Holocaust history. What is a Jew to do when roles are reversed?” The way the existence of Israel changed Jewishness is obviously not something a book about Europe from 1870 to 1930 can address head-on. What it can do, helpfully, is remind us in the here and now exactly how foreign Jews were viewed as being in Europe for much of that period. Antisemitism was about eliminating the “Semitic” or “Ori- ental” presence from European lands. There is a subtext one sees in some anti-Zionist rhetoric that Jews had lovely lives in the diaspora, outside the odd microaggression, cheerily existing as Germans, etc., of the Jewish faith, until a fascist madman took power. The creation of Israel, therefore, would seem like an overreaction to a histor- ical discontinuity. The takeaway from Never-Ending Tales is not that Israel’s creation was the end-of-history cap- stone to Jewish modernity. Rather, it’s that Jews’ status as full Europeans was new, tenuous, and continuously under attack well before Nazism. More broadly, Never-Ending Tales offers models for resisting oppres- sive regimes. No, Trumpism is not Nazism; I leave it to the political sci- entists to decide how they wish to
revisited this movie because some of the events described were playing out in real life, in the form of immigration enforcement raids. That said, Never-Ending Tales is also relevant for the obvious reason: antisemitism is back, if it ever went away. Antisemitic incidents regular- ly outpace other forms of hate crime, despite our small numbers. Hateful speech on social media, whether by humans or bots, has it in for Jews dis- proportionately. Anti-Jewish senti- ment remains a way of revving up all manner of crowds. With that in mind, the anthology helps illustrate conti- nuities within the history of antisemi- tism. Antisemites of yore may not have been reacting to the actions of the not-yet-existent Jewish state, but they absolutely saw themselves as fighting their oppressors. The Jews in these sto- ries were not all-powerful, far from it. But antisemites saw them as a menace. When I came across the concept of the Jewish question in the early 2000s, as a graduate student learning about European Jews’ emancipation, it seemed a thing of another time. Sure- ly today’s modern societies were sim- ply too heterogeneous to view Jews as The Other. That way of seeing things had to be specific to European envi- ronments where most everyone was the same thing apart from this hand- ful of people who were another one, namely Jewish. Or, fine, maybe WASPy postwar country clubs. But in contexts where all sorts of religions and physi- cal features abound, and overlap, how could “Jewish” not just be one category among many? How could we still be a question, let alone of interest to any- one other than ourselves? Zipes does not answer this, nor would I expect that of him. Never-Ending Tales offers the uninitiated, as well as the initiated, an excellent survey of where we our- selves are coming from.
of the outside world always coexists with its dangers.
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