ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses anti-intellectualism and the longing for authenticity as a central nexus linking antisemitism and sexism in modern and contemporary societies. Building on Critical Theory, it argues that hostility towards the mind emerges alongside hostility towards the body, sexuality, and ambiguity, and functions as a false response to the tensions of modernity. Jews, intellectuals, and emancipated women are constructed as figures of excessive reflection, abstraction, and doubt, threatening authoritarian desires for immediacy, purity, and fixed hierarchies. Tracing this constellation from the fin de siècle through National Socialism to contemporary Islamist and postcolonial antimodernisms, the chapter shows how anti-intellectualism mobilises idealised images of nature, tradition, and community against Enlightenment universals such as autonomy, equality, and rational critique. Particular attention is given to left-wing cultural relativism and its convergence with Islamist ideology, in which antisemitism and misogyny are reframed as resistance to ‘Western hegemony’. The chapter argues that this intellectual anti-intellectualism erodes conceptual clarity, historical judgement, and empathy, enabling the denial or legitimation of antisemitic and sexist violence, especially in the aftermath of 7 October. It concludes by defending a feminist Critical Theory committed to rescuing universality from both reactionary purity fantasies and nihilistic deconstruction.
