ABSTRACT
Antisemitism is not politically or intellectually respectable in an era when Jews form part of the political elite. In the US Congress of 1982-1984 eight Jews were members of the Senate and thirty of the House of Representatives. No important political organization in the United States or in other democratic countries openly advocates antisemitic views; nor are Jews denied civil or political rights in those countries; nor is much overt public expression of antisemitism heard. Ever present is what Jacob Talmon called the "baffling obsession with the Satanic ubiquitousness and malignant effectiveness of the Jews." Sometimes the obsession is directed to Jews as a category; at other times it pertains to particular groups of Jews, impoverished masses of alien immigrants with a culture of their own, or a financial elite, or shopkeepers denounced as nonproducing parasites. More recently, anti-Zionism has taken another form in addition to its rejection of the collective right of Jews to form their own state.
