Dear Colleague,

Historians once wrote about the Final Solution and World War II as if they were distinct events. Jeffrey Herf demonstrates, however, that in Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi leaders’ minds, the Holocaust and Second World War were part of a single “war against the Jews.”

“International Jewry,” the Nazis believed, was a conspiracy operating behind the scenes, dominating Soviet, British and American government policy. The “eternal Jew,” Hitler claimed, stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin alike. How else could one explain the alliance of these ideological foes?

Of course, there is no evidence to support the claim that the United States and Great Britain were ruled by Jews. As for the Bolsheviks, Herf documents that at no time did Jews constitute more than 5% of the Communist Party. Nazi propaganda about Jewish domination, Herf concludes, was a “complete fantasy.”

Yet the Nazis believed their fantasy. The assumption that they did not is based on an optimistic belief in the power of human rationality, and a devaluation of the human capacity for delusion. Herf shows how German ideology and propaganda were held together by a gigantic persecution mania, or paranoid myth.

What does it mean to claim that an entire political movement is based on paranoia? What is the relationship between paranoia and delusion? Can an entire society be deluded or psychotic?

LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK REVIEWS seeks a reviewer for Geoffrey Herf’s The Jewish Enemy. The review will be approximately 750-1000 words in length. Your review will be presented through Library of Social Science Newsletter, which reaches 35,000 professors, professionals, policy-makers and students around the world, as well as editors and marketing personnel at nearly every major publisher.

To be considered, please write to me.

Orion Anderson Communications Director Library of Social Science Telephone: 718-393-1104 Fax: 413-832-8145 oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com