Frank Adler

In the famous opening sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx notes that somewhere Hegel had written that great world-historical phenomena occur twice, neglecting to add, however, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Given what we now know of the heretofore hidden side of Bruno Rizzi, still another revision seems in order: sometimes such phenomena make yet a third appearance, this time as embarrassment, rank embarrassment. Indeed, Rizzi's name surfaced in three such sequential contexts. The first was in the late 1930s when non-stalinist Marxists, primarily Trotskyists, were debating whether or not a “new class” had emerged in the Soviet Union

ExcerptIt may come as a surprise to those unfamiliar with Israeli society, and especially to those who have been led to believe it composed primarily of European Jews who settled in the Middle East, that roughly half of Israel's Jewish population is made up of Jews who for millennia were deeply rooted in the region, and who were summarily expelled from Arab states after Israel was founded in 1948. In fact, this Arab Jewish population exceeds in number those Palestinians who were displaced, and it possessed substantially greater property that was confiscated without compensation upon expulsion.1The purpose of this…

ExcerptMy focus shall be on challenges to civility in Europe raised by the presence of sizable immigrant communities, which, unlike those of earlier times, are significantly different from host populations in terms of national origin, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture. Coming principally from former colonial territories, their otherness additionally bears the deep historical imprint of inferiority and subordination, merited or not, to the degree that to Europeans they sometimes appear to be, at worst, uncivilized, or, at best, to live in another non-European or semi-European world. Though they inhabit the same geographical space as the host population, and have become…

ExcerptWhen we examine European anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and especially the Shoah, the case of Germany looms so large that the Nazi regime immediately appears as the paradigmatic form of fascism and the manifold policies directed against European Jewry during the 1930s little more than German racial policy writ large. Without in any way trivializing or, worse, relativizing in an ethical sense the German case, one might nevertheless suggest that it occupies too much conceptual space and occludes a more precise comparative understanding of other European cases where anti-Semitic policies had been autonomously generated, relatively independent of direct Nazi pressure