"Beneath the surface [of our society]," writes historian Robert Wistrich, are "ancient myths, dark hatreds, and irrational fantasies [that] continue to nourish antisemitism." But the larger question has to do with why we are so prone to believe them. To that end, Steven K. Baum has an answer. In this book, Baum carefully guides the reader through the social mind and explains how the formation of social beliefs can be used as a narrative to determine reality. He offers a new perspective regarding how antisemitic legends and folk beliefs form the basis of our ongoing social narrative. Baum asks the reader to consider a social unconscious-the cauldron of cultural fantasies that consists of superstitions, magical thinking, and racial tales. This witches' brew concocts a Social Voice that can be loud or quiet, benign or hostile, fleeting or permanent. Most importantly, this voice is undeniably antisemitic and racist. As is often the case in the court of public opinion, those who own the narrative, win. In Antisemitism Explained, Baum reminds us to think critically about our own social narrative and to be careful about what we choose to believe.

Dedicated to the memory of the 'conscience of the Holocaust', Simon Wiesenthal - to whom it offers a number of personal tributes - this book brings together essays by a wide variety of authors on antisemitism and related forms of intolerance, racism, and xenophobia. Starting from the idea that antisemitism constitutes a paradigm case of collective and individual hatred, the book examines some of the reasons why it has prospered over the ages and persists in our time, even after well-nigh universal condemnation of the Holocaust. Some authors see it as a virus, always ready to develop and spread wherever Jewish difference is resented. Others emphasize that the antisemitic myths are not grounded in reality but depend rather on a fabrication, an imagined being to whom every kind of vice and perversion can be attributed. Jews, Gypsies, Kurds, Armenians, Tutsis they can all be made to fit the bill. Simon Wiesenthal believed not in vengeance but in justice for the victims and played a pre-e