Lisa Silverman has gained a prominent reputation for her nuanced approach to cultural dynamics and discourses in Central European Jewish history. Silverman’s work examines what she calls “‘Jewish difference’: the hierarchical social framework that encompasses the relationship between the constructed categories of Jew and non-Jew” (5). Jewish difference encompasses a range of attitudes about Jews, including, but not limited to, antisemitism. In this way, it captures a “deeply embedded, hierarchical binary system of thought in which the constructed Jew functions as the quintessential other” (5). Her first monograph, Becoming Austrian: Jews and Culture Between the Wars (Oxford, 2012), analyzed this dynamic in interwar Austria. According to Silverman, Central Europeans coded cultural materials, forms, and spaces as “Jewish” to bestow them with frequently derogatory meanings that gave further force to other prominent social codings, such as gender, nation, and political or ideological affiliation.
The Postwar Antisemite expands this line of inquiry to the postwar period and beyond the Austrian context. Through careful, lucid, and perspicacious prose, Silverman’s new monograph offers a rich cultural reading of the postwar evolution of antisemitism. Silverman’s text makes a timely contribution to a growing body of work, including that of Daniel Cohen, Mark Mazower, and myself, that endeavors to examine the post-Nazi transformation of antisemitism with an eye to its discursive adaptation.
The lens of Jewish difference and antisemitism offers a crucial revision to standard narratives of the postwar period. Once again, Silverman finds resonance with the most cutting-edge scholarship. Rather than viewing the postwar period as characterized primarily by the experience of guilt for Nazi crimes, attempts to establish justice, and the eventual—if precarious—victory of Holocaust memory, Silverman’s narrative focuses on the postwar perpetuation of an “antisemitized culture” (15). She notes that a core aspect of the Nazi cultural revolution, not to mention the culture of the right that preceded National Socialism, persisted in contexts marked by efforts to eradicate National Socialism and denounce antisemitism.
Still, antisemitism did transform in the postwar period. Accusations of antisemitism proliferated and gained political potency—especially since the figure of antisemite had become inseparable from the now repudiated figure of the National Socialist. But efforts to identify antisemites focused primarily on what Silverman calls “the figural antisemite.” The “figural antisemite” allowed Jews and non-Jews to establish distance from the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi criminality—a feature that Silverman also identifies in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive (1946) (13). Across seven chapters, Silverman locates this distancing mechanism in vastly different ideological and political contexts: East Germany, West Germany, Austria, and the United States. While the literature on antisemitism has often fixated on particular national or ideological contexts, Silverman identifies shared assumptions across Central Europe, as well as within the capitalist West and the communist East. In so doing, she contributes to a growing effort to examine the postwar period across the Cold War bifurcation.
Many of Silverman’s protagonists are Jewish, and the text grapples with why Jews, often refugees or survivors, would participate in the creation of such a figure. In Silverman’s formulation, it offered “Jews and non-Jews alike the illusion that antisemitism was not integral to the culture they loved” (14–15). Such a mechanism might have enabled Jews to participate in cultural reconstruction and to reconstitute their lives within societies of former perpetrators and beneficiaries. At key moments, this certainly rang true for Dora Gerson in West Germany, the celebrated film director Billy Wilder in Austria, Anna Seghers, and Victor Klemperer in East Germany—just to name a few of the prominent Jewish figures who feature in the text.
The distancing mechanism worked in part by identifying the corruption of culture, rather than harming Jews, as the main crime of the “figural antisemite.” This discursive innovation allowed non-Jews, also potential victims of cultural degradation, to imagine themselves as victims of antisemitism. One of Silverman’s most striking revelations examines this latter point. Silverman finds that postwar Europeans imbued the figural antisemite with classic antisemitic stereotypes of Jews—a fact that ensured that Jews paradoxically fell victim to accusations of antisemitism. To this end, victim reversal remained a distinct discursive possibility after 1945—an eerie reverberation of Nazi-era reversals. There is an added gendered dimension: Silverman examines how Christian men levied accusations of antisemitism against Jewish women—a striking expression of the interrelation between antisemitism and misogyny after 1945.
The last chapter turns, brilliantly, to the United States in the late 1940s. Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and a racist incident at New York’s glamorous Stork Club stand at the center of the chapter. The incident in question was between Josephine Baker and the gossip columnist Walter Winchell. The owner of the Stork Club and his waitstaff refused to serve Baker. In response, she rallied supporters to protest her racist treatment. The Jewish Winchell and Baker had long been friendly, but Winchell, who relied on access to the elite club for his profession, refused Baker’s request for support. A feud ensued: Baker and Winchell resorted to antisemitic and racist stereotypes, respectively. Silverman exposes the dynamics of an interlocking system of oppression, which encourages oppressed groups to take on the position of the oppressor to navigate their own disadvantaged position.
The episode formed a momentary touchstone for cultural figures like Laura Hobson, who supported Baker and presented herself as an anti-racist. Upon closer inspection, Silverman finds Hobson complicit in upholding the racial ordering system that places non-Whites below Whites, as well as the Jewish and non-Jewish hierarchies of antisemitism. Hobson’s The Gentleman’s Agreement reveals the trappings of the cultural construction of the postwar antisemite (and their victims) even as it endeavors to fight against antisemitism: the protagonist—who becomes both a victim of antisemitism and a savior in an anti-antisemitic battle—was a Christian man only pretending to be Jewish for his professional assignment. In the United States, Silverman astutely proposes, the “antisemite’s real danger” is framed as a “threat to democracy” (250). Meanwhile, she explains that the power of the antisemite was that they stripped the Jew of the benefits of whiteness. In other words, Hobson’s fight against antisemitism reaffirmed the racist status quo. What is assumed and unstated in the text is that democracy is a privilege for those deemed White.
This example lays bare one of the central questions of Silverman’s book: How do efforts to combat antisemitism (or other forms of racism) at times reaffirm the hierarchies that they claim to oppose? How can such a circumstance be avoided? We still live with the consequences of the moment that Silverman deftly explores. The only criticism that this reader found with Silverman’s ambitious and timely book was that the narrative concludes in the 1950s. Given the pressing, contemporary relevance of Silverman’s observations, I hope that future scholars—or Silverman herself—will apply this framework to the present moment in which the power of defining the antisemite persists and seems to have only renewed its potency.
