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Rating: 
Summary: Clarifying and Alarming
Review: Mr. Bronner's book not only manages to crystalize the reason for the forgery but explains the rationale for how the historical remainder of the 20th century proceeded as a result of the "Protocols.." No small feat. In addition, the book is made more valuable because the author doesn't get self conscious about being too objective. Normally, being slightly subjective would detract from a scholarly work such as this. Instead it brings the clarity and understanding the topic truly deserves. If you really want to understand antisemitism without the usual variety of historical apologetics, this is the work to read. The bar has been raised, writers!
Rating:
Summary: A study of Anti-semitism from a Secular Jewish Viewpoint
Review: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still worth reading about since it one of those books that it helped start a social movement of increased intolerance and violence towards Jews in Nazi Germany. It is still taken seriously in the present-day middle east. Author Stephen Bronner's most interesting point is that the Protocols was written in reaction against modernity and its components of a republican state, rule of law, democratic liberalism, universal suffrage, universal equal rights, and separation of church and state. The reactionary forces of the church and aristocracy were against the liberal forces of Jews, freemasons, and the middle class mainly because they wanted to hold on to their arbitrary power over their subjects. Another observation is that Bronner shows why many Jews support cosmopolitanism and separation of church and state so much; those two things the Protocols opposed with nationalism and the church. Such ideas give the Jews more freedom and equality than they would have under a Christian government or a nation that defines its true citizenry on the basis of race. Nationalism often has a racial component to it as opposed to a cosmopolitanism that pretends that race does not matter. In the last chapter, Bronner analyzes contemporary anti-semitism and racial nationalism. He advocates that more conservative Jews should even give up their cultural and genetic heritage to the inevitable march of progress, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. Those who resist multiculturalism will be the inevitable losers. To be a racial nationalist is to join forces with the likes that support the values of anti-semites. He poses the question that once antisemitism is removed from society, the Jews themselves may vanish because they will no longer be the persecuted 'others'. But of course, one can think that there are seeds of destruction in excessive cosmopolitanism also. The Protocols are reprinted in the book. It is clumsily written propaganda, but it came along at the right time and it plays upon fears that people still have today: autocratic world government, destruction of Christianity, planned economic depressions, indoctrination of children in schools of values parents are against, control of the news media that doesn't tell the truth, mindless entertainment to destract citizens from their vanishing freedoms and wealth, and planned spread of diseases for population control. Bronner gives the history of the creation and appearance of the Protocols in Russia in 1905 when the reactionary and anti-semitic monarchy enthusiastically supported its discimination.
Rating: 
Summary: A sloppy history of anti-Semitism.
Review: This is a good book because first it is short and easy to read, it discusses a notorious fabrication or conspiracy theory, and it shows just how confused the Jewish position is with regards to the "other" or antisemitism. The author seems to meander between numerous concepts and explanations of antisemitism, but never really embraces a coherent theme. Oddly, this is very similar to "The Protocols" that he attacks. We have of course many venues of indoctrination, and "The Protocols" is just one of many. Why anyone would write a book about such a pamphlet that is an obvious forgery over 100 years old, and treat it like a present day threat is a real mystery. In addition, the author seems to be trying to convince Jews to somehow change their behavior, while he excoriates all Gentiles for their insane obsession with antisemitism. He tends to vacillate between "there is no more antisemitism" and "Jews had better give up their world view of domination or people will again become anti-Semitic." He in many ways confirms that Jewishness, unlike other religions, is really a supremacist position that embraces dominance over the "other." He openly discusses the Jewish obsession with racial purity and what will be required to stop intermarriage. What is lacking in this and books like it, is a real analysis of what we now know about group evolutionary strategies. Kevin MacDonald's trilogy on Jew-Gentile competition, based on group evolutionary strategies, makes this book a transparent work of mere propaganda. Anyone familiar with the neo-Darwinist position on group behavior will recognize what this book is all about trying to make the world safe for Judaism (that is the race, not the religion). The best book to read to understand this book is MacDonald's "The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements." As an academically reviewed book, and part of the "Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence" series of books edited by Seymour W. Itzkoff, it explains why and for what purpose this book was written.
Rating:
Summary: A sloppy history of anti-Semitism.
Review: This is a good book because first it is short and easy to read, it discusses a notorious fabrication or conspiracy theory, and it shows just how confused the Jewish position is with regards to the "other" or antisemitism. The author seems to meander between numerous concepts and explanations of antisemitism, but never really embraces a coherent theme. Oddly, this is very similar to "The Protocols" that he attacks. We have of course many venues of indoctrination, and "The Protocols" is just one of many. Why anyone would write a book about such a pamphlet that is an obvious forgery over 100 years old, and treat it like a present day threat is a real mystery. In addition, the author seems to be trying to convince Jews to somehow change their behavior, while he excoriates all Gentiles for their insane obsession with antisemitism. He tends to vacillate between "there is no more antisemitism" and "Jews had better give up their world view of domination or people will again become anti-Semitic." He in many ways confirms that Jewishness, unlike other religions, is really a supremacist position that embraces dominance over the "other." He openly discusses the Jewish obsession with racial purity and what will be required to stop intermarriage. What is lacking in this and books like it, is a real analysis of what we now know about group evolutionary strategies. Kevin MacDonald's trilogy on Jew-Gentile competition, based on group evolutionary strategies, makes this book a transparent work of mere propaganda. Anyone familiar with the neo-Darwinist position on group behavior will recognize what this book is all about trying to make the world safe for Judaism (that is the race, not the religion). The best book to read to understand this book is MacDonald's "The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements." As an academically reviewed book, and part of the "Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence" series of books edited by Seymour W. Itzkoff, it explains why and for what purpose this book was written.
Rating: 
Summary: The Protocols: Anti-Semitisim for Another Century
Review: What is striking about this book is that is a rare contemporary contextualization of this nasty little tract...written at the end of the 1900s and which provided fuel for the fire of National Socialism.
The context is the "new" fascism--Islamo-fascism. It is so easy to forget that the Ottoman Empire was largely Muslim, and that they were the Allies of Germany in two world wars.
And now, some say, we're in the third world war. While there are places to quibble (e.g. that non-multiculturalists will be the ultimate losers worldwide)...this is still an important work for anyone who would understand current anti-semitism.
As noted, in an Egyptian television series the Protocols are referred to as fact.
The "fact" is is that the Protocols are fiction, but this book ought to stand along your copy of "Mein Kampf". I read while in Germany that a Jewish organisation was about to make FREE copies of Mein Kampf available throughout Germany. Obviously, current readers would see that is was absurd, and reject neo-Nazism.
I'm not so sanguine--about readers of "Mein Kampf" or about readers of sections of the "Protocols" without adequate context.
Whether this provides "adequate" context is a judgment for the reader. I think the conclusions are misleading. However, the context is current, and therefore extremely significant.
Rating:
Summary: Clarifying and Alarming
Review: With the whole tzuriss over the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" reaching such a boiling point, I wish to recommend this excellent history of the topic. Rutgers Political Science Professor, Stephen Eric Bronner, whose parents fled Nazi Germany and settled in the German Jewish enclave of Washington Heights in Manhattan, provides this remarkable analysis into the antecedents of THE PROTOCOLS, the reasons it was published in 1903 by the Russian Imperial Secret Police, the groups that used the Protocols for their political ends, the legal suit that was brought against the book in the 1930's in Switzerland, the early opponents to this popular fictitious Antisemitic tract, and the current state of antisemitism, whether it be social, religious (judeophobia), or political.
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