In Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning, David Theo Goldberg maintains that one of the central paradoxes of modernity, “the irony perhaps,” is that “as modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as it increasingly insists upon the moral irrelevance of race, there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain.”Footnote ¹ Central to Goldberg's argument is that liberal culture is not just an antidote to racism, but also often acts as one means by which racist expressions persist. The essays included in Phyllis Lassner and Lara Trubowitz's timely and illuminating collection explore this irony in great detail. Although the two ideologies—Jew hatred and Jew love—are sometimes understood to be mutually exclusive or as signs of ambivalence toward Jewish people and culture, this collection makes a compelling case for considering how these positions often complement or sanction each other.

In foregrounding philosemitism as both a subject of inquiry and a critical lens through which to read expressions of antisemitism, the essays in this collection will have broad appeal. The editors note in the introduction that their approach of mixing cultures, genres, nationalities, and time periods “will allow readers to compare the rhetorical effects of diverse, even ostensibly unrelated, instances of philosemitism, and to see how philosemitism and antisemitism are never discrete manifestations of a particular cultural and/or political movement, but rather engage and interweave images, myths, and ideas whose forms and meanings transform over centuries” (9–10). The insightful, well-connected eleven essays that follow the introduction argue persuasively for the importance of reading philosemitism as a distinct subject that may interact with strident antisemitism, but nonetheless has its own ideological underpinnings.

This collection has many merits; two, however, are particularly noteworthy. Until recently, studies of antisemitism traditionally searched for the source of hatred or cultural disease that fostered Jew hatred. Along these lines, studies by scholars such as Gavin Langmuir and Sander Gilman, among many others, have examined the profound and disturbing effects of hateful antisemitic expressions. In the 1990s, scholars began to approach this subject from a slightly different angle by foregrounding the varieties of Jewish or antisemitic representations. For example, in Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society, Bryan Cheyette explains that the “radical emptiness and lack of a fixed meaning in the construction of ‘semitic’ difference results in ‘the Jew’ being made to occupy an incommensurable number of subject positions which traverse a range of contradictory discourses.”Footnote ² More recently, Nadia Valman's The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture recovers a legacy of philosemitic literature written by British women writers that sought to save idealized Jewesses from their threatening Jewish communities.Footnote ³ Such studies have begun to open up a space for reading philosemitism as antisemitism's accessory. And yet, although some studies like Valman's have addressed the direct and complex connections between antisemitism and philosemitism in the cultural sphere, Lassner and Trubowitz are the first to foreground philosemitism as a primary agent in antisemitic rhetoric. A second important strength of this collection is the range of subjects it covers, testifying to the elasticity that marks philosemitic rhetoric from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Read together, the essays suggest that philosemitism does more than just change shape over time; rather, it is engaged in a constant process of renewal and re-indoctrination. Thus, unlike antisemitism's shock-and-awe tactics, Jew love frequently operates more discreetly, which makes it all the more difficult to point to or pin down. We know it exists, these essays argue, precisely because of its quiet logic that allows for, mingles with, or grows from its more strident accomplice, antisemitism.

Following the introduction, the collection is divided into two sections. The first lays important cultural and theoretical groundwork for studying the history of the way scholars have understood antisemitism and philosemitism. This section includes an important discussion by Jonathan Judaken on the Frankfurt School and anti-antisemitism; Max Silverman's illuminating essay that situates Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive “within the wider parameters of the modern construction of Jewish difference” (57); a coauthored essay by Seyla Benhabib and Raluca Eddon on Hannah Arendt's cosmopolitanism; and Sander L. Gilman's discussion of “the nature and form of Jewish intelligence by Islamic anti-Semitic discourse” (83), which builds from his earlier work, Smart Jews (1996), to read contemporary Islamic expressions of Jew hatred embedded in a discourse of Jewish intelligence.

The collection's second section covers a range of topics on literature and the arts from around the globe, including Helene Meyers's fascinating essay on Sandra Goldbacher's film The Governess; Margaret D. Stetz's comparison of the antisemitisms and gender tensions addressed in Arthur Symons's short story “Esther Kahn” and Arnaud Desplechin's 1999 film adaptation of that story; Lisa Marcus's analysis of novel depictions recalling the “panic” among elite colleges and universities in early twentieth-century America that led to restrictions on the admission of Jewish students; and Jonathan Freedman's brilliant essay on the Left Behind series, “the most popular series of books in contemporary America,” in which he argues that “despite, or perhaps even because of, their ostensible philosemitism, the basic narrative structures and figurative associations that have traditionally marked antisemitic discourse remain strikingly in place. Indeed, they are effectively reanimated, retrofitted for a seemingly tolerant, multicultural age” (156). Also included in this section is Kristin Bluemel's exceptional essay “The Urban Geography of English Antisemitism and Assimilation: A Case Study,” which examines Betty Miller's Farewell Leicester Square (1941), and Sara R. Horowitz's equally important examination of interfaith marriage in philosemitic representations and Michel Tournier's novel The Ogre. Murray Baumgarten's powerful examination of the Chilean writer Marjorie Agosin stands as a fitting conclusion to this study.

This collection argues for variety over fixity and ambivalence over unity in analyses of Jewish representations. Echoing Goldberg's identification of that which is ironic in liberalism's desire to be more inclusive and more tolerant, these essays show us how these “inconsistent, over determined, contradictory, and contextual relationships between artistic representations of Jews and their current and historical sites of production” (15) refuse to be contained or consistent. Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries is an important study that grounds and extends earlier work by Goldberg, Cheyette, Valman, and many others and, in the process, demonstrates how philosemitism has functioned, why it will not go away, and how we might read it as one mode of antisemitic discourse. The essays in this well-focused collection are thus a very welcome addition to the fields of cultural studies, literary studies, film studies, critical race discourse, and Jewish studies.