Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

New Books Network

Episode: Lisa Silverman, "The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Host: Paul Lerner
Guest: Lisa Silverman
Date: December 28, 2025

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Overview of the Episode

The episode features an engaging and in-depth conversation between host Paul Lerner and historian Lisa Silverman about her latest book, The Postwar Antisemite: Culture and Complicity After the Holocaust. Silverman’s nuanced study interrogates how postwar cultures in West Germany, East Germany, and Austria constructed the figure of the "antisemite"—a projection shaped by guilt, exculpation, and strategies for non-Jews to claim victim status after the Holocaust. Instead of revisiting the well-documented “figural Jew” of European culture, Silverman turns scholarly attention onto the making and uses of the “figural antisemite” in literature, film, and public life from the end of WWII through the decades following. The conversation delves deeply into key concepts from the book, Silverman’s intellectual formation, case studies from postwar culture, and the intersections of antisemitism with gender, race, and power both historically and in the contemporary world.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Lisa Silverman’s Background and Intellectual Formation

• Personal and Academic Background
  • Silverman’s fascination with modern European Jewish history began in college, catalyzed by a personal connection to the German language, which at the time still carried stigma within Jewish communities.
  • Her early career included work with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, involving restitution efforts in the wake of German reunification.
  • Transition from initial studies in political science to a PhD focused on Jewish intellectual and cultural history, notably in Austria—a relatively understudied area when she began.
  • Academic mentorship from influential scholars (Paula Hyman, Sander Gilman, Jeffrey Sammons) who encouraged innovative approaches, including the use of cultural history and sources outside of conventional archives.
  • “Sandra [Gilman]...really helped me take a different path in the sources that I wanted to look at. ... He said, Lisa, you're a cultural historian. That's what you're doing.” – Lisa Silverman [10:57]

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Theoretical Framework: Jewish Difference

• Defining "Jewish Difference"
  • Silverman introduces “Jewish difference” to name the structural, often binary, social and cultural framework that divides the world into “Jewish” and “non-Jewish,” a distinction at once artificial but deeply embedded in both culture and scholarship.
  • This framework, she argues, surpasses simplistic binaries of antisemitism versus philosemitism, acknowledging complex gradations, ambiguities, and shifts.
  • Quote: “It's a phrase I like to use because it helps to highlight the constructive categories of the Jew and the non Jew that inform so many of the cultural narratives...it's a framework that people, without even being conscious of it, are sort of socialized into knowing about.” – Lisa Silverman [12:58]

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Reframing Sartre and the "Constructed Antisemite"

• Moving Beyond Sartre
  • Silverman's work is in conversation with Jean-Paul Sartre's “Anti-Semite and Jew,” especially the famous idea that “[i]f the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would have to invent him.”
  • She contextualizes Sartre’s formulation by tracing it to earlier sources (notably, the ex-Nazi Hermann Rauschning), revealing how this conceptual reversal is historically charged and intricately connected with the politics of exculpation.
  • Sartre’s construction found resonance because it allowed both non-Jews and Jews to distance themselves from complicity and conveniently contain the problem of antisemitism within a discrete, externalized “antisemite.”
  • Quote: "[Sartre]...formulated this constructed anti Semite...I thought it was interesting that this phrase has lasted. ... Not only was his formulation popular with non-Jews, but also Jews very much involved in countering antisemitism also found this formulation helpful." – Lisa Silverman [21:12]

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Comparing Postwar West Germany, East Germany, and Austria

• Cultural Construction of the Antisemite in Three Contexts
  • West Germany:
    • Sought to reframe patriotism as antithetical to antisemitism; “patriot” versus “antisemite” was a central narrative.
    • Key case: the defense of filmmaker Veit Harlan (director of the antisemitic film "Jud Süß") centered on presenting himself as a “true German patriot” rather than an antisemite or Nazi.
    • Quote: “There was a certain sense of, let's reframe German patriotism as something that's antithetical to antisemitism. ...We can then have a certain degree of Germanness without having to answer for the further exclusion of Jews.” [25:12]
  • East Germany:
    • Framed the antisemite as a capitalist foil to the communist, leveraging accusations of antisemitism to reinforce anti-capitalist ideology.
    • Notably, more Jews held leadership roles in East German cultural structures, complicating the narrative.
  • Austria:
    • Relied on the “first victim” myth to distance Austrians from Nazi crimes; constructed narratives of innocence and victimhood while sidelining both antisemites and Jews themselves.
    • Cultural products, such as the film "Erster April 2000," reflected these strategies.

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Notable Cases and Cultural Texts

• Erster April 2000 (April 1st, 2000) (Austria) [32:38]
  • Satirical Austrian film functioning as propaganda, showcasing the country's supposed peacefulness and innocence, deflecting responsibility for Nazi crimes.
  • “This bitterness is borne out not first of all, when they tried to show it internationally, it wasn't very popular. ... More of this victim status and how the film really reflects how Austria felt victimized by the rest of the world and being called to account for crimes they did not commit.” – Lisa Silverman [35:58]
• Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz [36:48]
  • Wilder, whose family perished in the Holocaust, created a nostalgic depiction of prewar Austria that attempts to subtly criticize antisemitism through satire and veiled references, but ultimately reveals longing for a lost, imagined inclusive Austria.
  • “Is this a film that's critical of Austria? No. ... But I think that overall, the plot of it shows that he has a real longing for an Austrian...culture that is inclusive of Jews as long as they're not...recognizable as Jews, perhaps, but also not compatible with Nazism and anti Semitism.” – Lisa Silverman [38:56]

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Gender and the Figure of the Antisemite

• Is the Antisemite Always Male? [43:07]
  • Silverman complicates assumptions by identifying moments where women occupy the role of the antisemite or become symbols for the projection of guilt.
  • Example: Karina Niehoff, a “half-Jewish” witness in the Veit Harlan trial, becomes a target of public vitriol and scapegoating; her testimony catalyzes a cultural drama about victimization and blame.
  • Example: Bundestag commemoration of Kristallnacht, where Ida Ehrer’s recitation of Paul Celan’s "Todesfuge" is retroactively blamed by a male politician for triggering his downfall and health crisis.
  • Quote: “She ended up being a figure that really in my mind represented this as a woman. It was no, she was somebody who was a woman who could occupy as a so called half Jew, this liminal space of Jew and non Jew.” – Lisa Silverman [47:53]
  • The antisemite figure can thus be constructed as male or female; the dynamics of gender help reinforce or challenge victim narratives and projections of blame.

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Extending the Analysis: Race, the US, and Intersectionality

• American Context: Race, Antisemitism, and Passing [53:28]
  • Silverman ends the book by contrasting the European and American postwar handling of Jewish difference and antisemitism, especially in relation to Black/white racial dynamics.
  • Cases: "Gentleman’s Agreement," Josephine Baker vs. Walter Winchell at the Stork Club.
  • In the US, "antisemite" and "racist" become dueling categories, deflecting responsibility while maintaining the status quo; Jews are protected by whiteness, and the focus shifts from systemic discrimination to personal mudslinging.
  • “In the American context, it was interesting how the antisemite works in tandem with the racist...everyone's eye is now on the mudslinging and not on how racism and anti Semitism work.” – Lisa Silverman [56:00]
  • The film "Gentleman’s Agreement" demonstrates both a progressive stance against antisemitism and a reinforcement of white privilege (“pass[ing] as white”) without interrogating the structure of race.

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Contemporary Reflections and Lessons

• Relevance Today [60:59]
  • The ongoing battle over who gets to define “antisemitism” is, for Silverman, a legacy of the immense moral power that category conferred in the wake of the Holocaust.
  • She cautions that scholars, activists, and institutions today must recognize the persistent framework of “Jewish difference” and the temptation to wield victim status or accusations instrumentally, whether on the left or right.
  • Quote: “Everybody loves the Jewish underdog hero of so many classic movies and films, and I get that. But if you're a scholar of anti Semitism and you want to understand not just how it works, but why it's so powerful and persistent, you have to be willing to understand that it's a framework that we are all at risk of engaging instead of doing away with.” – Lisa Silverman [63:10]

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Notable Quotes

• “Jewish difference... helps to highlight the constructive categories of the Jew and the non Jew that inform so many of the cultural narratives...” – Lisa Silverman [12:58]
• “This phrase [from Sartre] has lasted... Not only was his formulation popular with non-Jews, but also Jews very much involved in countering antisemitism also found this formulation helpful.” – Lisa Silverman [21:12]
• “I'm not afraid to look at unpopular and even, shall we say, bad films because they're so interesting as historical artifacts.” – Lisa Silverman [32:52]
• “If you're a scholar of anti Semitism and you want to understand not just how it works, but why it's so powerful and persistent, you have to be willing to understand that it's a framework that we are all at risk of engaging instead of doing away with.” – Lisa Silverman [63:10]
• “The figure of Niehoff...really crystallizes this idea that, oh, here's Harlan, here's the perfect figure for Harlan to show that he's been victimized by her. She becomes for him this anti Semite who is tormenting him in that moment.” – Lisa Silverman [48:54]

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Major Timestamps

• [03:49] Lisa Silverman’s academic background and path into Jewish/German/Austrian studies
• [12:46] Definition and importance of "Jewish difference"
• [18:44] Sartre’s concept and Silverman’s critique
• [24:29] Comparative summary: West Germany, East Germany, Austria
• [32:38] Case Study: April 1st, 2000 (Austrian propaganda film)
• [36:48] Case Study: Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz
• [43:07] Gender and the figure of the antisemite
• [53:28] The US context, racism, antisemitism, and postwar constructions
• [60:59] Reflections on contemporary antisemitism
• [64:11] Silverman’s forthcoming trial-focused research projects

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Conclusion and What’s Next

The episode concludes with Silverman describing her future research interests—namely, a broad project on courtroom trials as cultural and historical narratives that intersect with antisemitism, gender, and race. She hopes to work on both a textbook (possibly with her colleague Chaya Halberston) and a continuation of her focus on Germany and Austria, exploring how witness testimony, legal roles, and performative narrative shapes justice—or its absence—with lasting impact.

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Recommended Listening

For listeners interested in deep cultural history, the mechanisms of collective memory, and the persistence and reinvention of social categories after atrocity, this episode provides both scholarly rigor and accessible, thought-provoking discussion.

Transcript

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[Lisa Silverman]

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[Paul Lerner]

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Jewish Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Paul Lerner, coming to you from the University of Southern California, and I'm delighted to introduce today's guest, Professor Lisa Silverman. Lisa Silverman is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where she teaches Jewish history and modern European history, as well as courses on the Holocaust, antisemitism, and such topics as visual culture, gender, memory, and representation. She's the author of the 2012 book Becoming Jews and Culture between the Two World wars, and co editor of three books, Making Space and Embodiment in the Modern City, Interwar Culture between Tradition and Modernity and Holocaust Representations in An Introduction. Her new book, which appeared in 2025 with Oxford University Press, is the Postwar Antisemite Culture and Complicity after the Holocaust. The Post War Antisemite is a nuanced and provocative exploration of post war culture in West Germany, East Germany and Austria which centers on the construction of this figure, the antisemite, a kind of guilt projection and a strategy of exculpation, indeed a way of claiming victim status for non Jewish Austrians and Germans. The construction of the figural Jew in European culture has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent decades. But Silverman turns this approach on its head innovatively shedding light on the construction not of the Jew but of the antisemite, a figure she treats in the context of, quote, decades of post Holocaust culture that was designed to comfortably distance non Jews from associations with antisemitism and which she also says furthered the idea that, quote, the true victims of the Nazis were non Jews. Silverman then traces the emergence and operation of this figure in cultural and political life in these three countries through a range of literary texts, films and trials in the years after the Holocaust. It's an intricately argued and deeply researched book which I'm excited to talk about. Lisa, it's a great pleasure to welcome you to the podcast.

[Lisa Silverman]

Thank you very much. I'm really pleased to be here.

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[Paul Lerner]

So before we really dig into the book, let me just start by giving you an opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself and about your path to becoming a scholar of German history, Jewish history, Jewish studies, and how your specific set of interests around this book project came together.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. Well, I first became interested in the history of the Jews of modern Europe in college, I would say, and for some reason I had a roommate taking German. I really wanted to take German. And this was back in the late 80s, early 90s. And at that time, I distinctly remember, you know, my. My family, Jewish relatives, et cetera, thinking it was very odd that I was taking German. There was still quite a bit of stigma for Jews to be, you know, immersing themselves in the study of Germany, German culture. And I always thought that. And I thought that was so strange because the more I learned, I saw how, you know, integral Jews were to German culture. And it just struck me as, you know, really unfortunate that there weren't more. That Jewish studies wasn't paying more attention to Germany and that there weren't more scholars who knew German were doing German studies, et cetera. And so I sort of got into it that way. And the door I went through was I was a political science major and I took a lot of Jewish intellectual history, political history. So as I even looked at Jewish intellectuals who weren't German, such as Spinoza, you know, or Maimonides. It's like, oh, wow. So Jews as part of assimilation, as part of living among majority cultures, Jews were always taking from, you know, adopting certain aspects of majority culture. The majority culture was interacting with them. And I thought that was a really interesting approach. And that's one I wanted to apply to thinking about the past in a way. I didn't directly go into history though, because of my political science background. I thought maybe I would do the foreign service. I didn't really know what I would want to do. And just by chance, in 1991, this was shortly after the Wende and the German reunification, and I found a small book in the library of Judaistique in Deutschland. And this was pre Internet days and it just listed some Jewish organizations in Germany. And I just thought, well, well, I'd love to have some experience there. And I just wrote to all of them and saw which ones came back. And some did answer me and they just couldn't offer me a job. But one organization did, and that was the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which because of now that it was possible to reclaim former Jewish property that had been Aryanized during the Holocaust in East Germany, now they could sort of come out of dormancy. And so I worked for them in Frankfurt for a year and a half, then in New York for a few more years, and only after that did I get involved in my history Ph.D. program.

[Paul Lerner]

That's such an interesting origin story. And I could certainly relate to this idea that German language and German culture were taboo back then. In the late 80s when I started learning German too, it was the same way. And it seemed so surprising, but yet. So, yeah, it was really quite a strong kind of. Yeah. So how can you then kind of complete the story of how you got interested in this particular project about the post war antisemite?

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. So basically, if I start back from when I worked for the claims conference, what it's not, I started to get interested first in Austrian culture, Austrian Jewish history and culture really, only because there just wasn't as much interest in it. And I thought, wow, what a great project for a PhD. So the more I came to study it, I realized, wow, this period before World War II, this is 20 odd years that people usually focus on Weimar Germany. It was a really interesting period in Austria too. And so I decided to take a look at that period. And what I found with my research on that period was that, you know, as these times became incredibly polarized, there was not necessarily an increase in incidents of explicit antisemitism, but incidents where that framework of antisemitism, or what I call a framework of Jewish difference, and we can get into that later, came to play a role in virtually every aspect of culture. You know, whether it was literature or film or even a biology group at the university, there just seemed to be a split between a Jewish coded and non Jewish coded group to sort of serve that dichotomy. And so I worked on that, on the issue of Jewish difference in interwar Austrian culture. And then when it came time to look at the next project, I wasn't for a while, a first year or two, I wasn't quite sure what I would do. But I realized too, it just came more and more. I came to realize that the way that people thought about antisemitism was in some ways similar to what was going on in interwar Austria, but in many ways it was very different. And that difference, I posited was because of the Holocaust. And so I engaged in those aspects of research as well. And I don't know if you want me to continue about cultural history. So when I first did my PhD, I really wanted to find a program that would. I didn't speak Hebrew, but I definitely wanted to do Jewish studies and I wanted to focus on Germany. I had gone to Yale and I knew that perhaps their German department may be amenable to me coming in and doing something a little bit different because I was a former student. So they were, instead of doing a straight German literature track, which was very much Goethe, Schiller focused, and lots of just straightforward literary topics, they let me do, transform it into German studies. And so I had an advisor in history, Paula Hyman, scholar of modern Jewish history, French history mainly, and also advisor, Jeffrey Sammons in the German department, a wonderful scholar of Heiner, Heine and others. He always had an interest in German Jewish studies. And then I brought in Sandra Gilman for my outside third reader. And he was great. And what was great about Sander was that he really helped me take a different path in the sources that I wanted to look at. And even though I didn't do all of the same sources for my dissertation that I did for my what eventually came becoming Austrians, I remember talking to him like, oh, but Sandra, I'm interested in trials, but film, but I'm not film studies. And he said, lisa, you're a cultural historian. That's what you're doing. You're using culture as a source to unpack history. And it's legitimate and it's Fine. And so I felt like he sort of gave me the okay, the go ahead to go and do this. And I just feel like I ran with it and that's what I was most interested in. And so I continued doing that. I did that in becoming Austrians, and I then applied it to this post war era that I wanted to look at as well.

[Paul Lerner]

I'm so glad you brought that up. First of all, paying tribute to Paula Hyman, Sandra Gilman, I mean, giants in the field, without whom I don't think either of us would be doing the work we do, but also Sanders openness. And I think many of us have had that experience where we come to him with a little bit of anxiety about what we're doing. And he says, don't worry, relax. This is what you're actually doing. And that's such a powerful kind of license to move forward. And I see the stamp of all of these scholars in your work, but also with very original contributions that you've made over the years, as I've been reading your work, your articles, your first book, this notion of Jewish difference is one that I think think you've really done so much to thematize, theorize, promote, and maybe that would be a good place for us to kind of start really discussing this new book, because Jewish difference is a category that runs throughout the book. And I think probably listeners have a notion of what you're talking about, especially people who've read some of your work already. But could you just take a few minutes and explain to us what you mean when you say Jewish difference and how this conception of Jewish difference informs the work you've produced?

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. Okay. So Jewish difference is a phrase that I came up with to name a structure, an analytic concept that I found existed in the work I did in becoming Austrians and now virtually in virtually anything I do that has to do with Jewish studies. And it's a phrase I like to use because it helps to highlight the constructive categories of the Jew and the non Jew that inform so many of the cultural narratives that are popular that we know about and really make up a framework that people, without even being conscious of it, are sort of socialized into knowing about whether they, you know, whether they call it Jewish or non Jewish or not. There's always this or not always, but often this underlying tension between this binary structure that on the one hand is totally fake. I mean, we know you can't divide the world up into the Jewish and the non Jewish. That's ridiculous. But at the same time, and especially looking at Culture in the past. This is the framework that people were using to make meaning in a lot of their cultural works. And I found when looking at history, when I'm looking at cultural history or even looking at literature and film, people found it. I think that scholars found it difficult to get away from this. The concept of antisemitism alone, this very negative and often very explicit act or attitude about Jews in which it was very clear that this was happening. You know, that there was some hatred of Jews or a reliance on a stereotype negatively. There was acknowledgement that, oh, it could, you know, sometimes there's philo Semitism and that that's, you know, that is also a part of it. And there's even a scholar who came up with the term allosemitism to refer to both antisemitism and philosemitism at the same time. But I didn't find that word, even that word, as helpful. Because after studying, for example, gender studies, you see that the term gender, even though the system that we live in is largely patriarchal, there's lots of misogyny. It sort of gives the hopeful ideal that there consists this masculine and feminine social structure that inform each other. And it didn't seem possible to be able to do that, because once you talk about antisemitism, you're always talking about this structure where the Jew is at the bottom and the non Jew is at the top. And that's not the structure that's always going on in. In the works that I look at. Nor is it anything that you could. I don't think you could necessarily call philosemitism. Sometimes it's in between, sometimes it's inflected and it disappears. Sometimes it's absolutely not explicit, but only comes forth in a very nuanced way. And I thought, wow, you know, if we had a framework that we could say, oh, here's this text. It's not an antisemitic text, it's not a phyosemitic text. But I can show you how it engages the terms of Jewish difference in order to make meaning with an audience. I thought that could help without just now placing it in some box and forgetting about it or automatically saying it's this or that. Because I find it incredibly helpful with gender studies, for example. So that's how I came to use it. And I do think that it informs the book as I've used it here.

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[Paul Lerner]

And I mean, I think it's as you've done really throughout your work. I think leading up to this project, we see how you draw on gender studies and this kind of notion of the construction of gender difference to talk about Jewish difference, which itself is entwined with gender in all kinds of ways. So I think you developed a really powerful tool for getting at this complex and often really kind of confusing cultural material. I think I want to get back to gender in a minute and of course the antisemite in a minute too. But anybody coming to this book is going to think about Jean Paul Sartre. So I thought maybe we should just start with him and then kind of work beyond him. Because you do something really interesting in this at the beginning of the book, early in the book, where you take the often quoted formulation of Sartre in his post war essay Anti Semite and Jew, where he says, if the Jew did not exist, I'm paraphrasing, the antisemite would have created him or would have invented him. But you start there, but you go a lot deeper, right, and talk about some of, you know, he didn't come up with that himself out of whole cloth. And I thought maybe another way in might be if you could give us a little bit of a kind of context for where the Sartre notion comes from and then how you transcend it in your treatment.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. It came from early on when I was less certain of the direction of the book. I did think that I would focus even more on post war antisemitism and gender. And I had to look at Simone de Beauvoir because, you know, it struck me that this Beauvoir was well known for this, you know, woman is not born, she is created. Right. Like this foundational notion of the socially constructed woman in society. And really, you know, this notion that really crystallized things. And when I looked at her relationship with Sartka, which is very contested and you know, a lot has been written about it, I was like, well, you know, this constructed Jew is very similar to her constructed woman in many ways. It's not something that a lot of people talk about. I think there's a lot of controversy surrounding who informed who exactly. But I. And in the course of trying to look a little bit more at this, these constructed ideals of man, woman, Jew, non Jew, I came across the reference to Rauschning, this former Nazi who had published this book of fraudulent conversations with Hitler. And I saw that it came up in his book and I thought, wow, I wonder, did Sartor read that? And I went to his diaries and he did. He even puts in his. There's footnotes when he says, oh, I'm reading Rauschnigg and this is like 1943 or 42. Because for some reason it came out first in French and then later only after that translations were published. And I did read some scholarship on Satra, but not a whole deal. I didn't really go into the ins and outs of his philosophy, which is of course not straightforward. It's contradictory. He may have formulated this constructed anti Semite here, but maybe it's contradicted later. You know, I give all of that, and this is. It's not a book about Sartre, but I thought it was interesting that this phrase has lasted. And at the time, how many other people, you know, well known German Jewish emigres like Maria Hoda were, you know, were happy to say, oh, this is a really great conception. We understand this. And I thought, well, what. I wonder why it caught on. And I just realized that it's just especially as imagined first by this, and I say former Nazi because Rauschnigg at that time was trying to prove to the world he was no longer a Nazi. And not only did he have clout with knowing what Hitler was saying, which he probably didn't, but he also had a formulation that distanced himself from not just the anti Semite, but also the antisemites. Jew, Jews, right? Like this sort of contained system of the antisemite determining a Jew. That's it. And I'm out of it. And I think Sartre must have picked up on how powerful that could be for his conception as he wanted to think about the Jew, especially as a non Jew writing about this, and especially as someone who had his own bigotries toward Jews, I might add, which I haven't done the scholarship on, but I have read it. And yeah, he had a, you know, wasn't immune to some of the other ways in which people who believe that they're not antisemitic actually contribute to its perpetuation through stereotypes, et cetera. So not only was his formulation popular with non Jews, but also Jews very much involved in countering antisemitism also found this formulation helpful. And that shows in some of the cultural products, I think, that I. That I work on in the book.

[Paul Lerner]

That's great. Thank you so much for that answer, which I think is really clarifying. And I think another thing you kind of get at in that answer is what you don't thematize so much. But what's clear from your discussion in the book is how complicated many of these individual stories are. Right. And how things are other than the most hardcore Nazis or the most victimized Jews and others, there are very few sort of black and white distinctions. Right. We have people who consider themselves anti Nazi but still work with the regime in all kinds of ways. Thinking about some of the filmmakers you discuss, I don't know if Pops considered himself anti Nazi, but he certainly was not aligned in all ways, but then had a good career during the Nazi period. Or Feit Harlan, who of course is even more associated with the regime through the insist film and so forth. But yet. Or people who German non Jews who were married to Jews who tried to either protect or distance themselves from certain individuals. And you just show you. I think anybody who's read your work here cannot in good faith make generalizations about the way certain groups behaved. Right. It's just so nuanced and it calls for such fine detail, which comes through in the book so beautifully. I wondered if we could just pull back a little bit for listeners who haven't had a chance to read the book yet. You deal primarily with three countries in the West, Germany, East Germany and Austria, in that order. And then there's a short conclusion or kind of coda about the United States, which I want to turn to later. Could you just give us a bit of an overview of what are some of the similarities that run through these three different contexts, but also some of the key differences between east and West Germany, for example, or West Germany, East Germany and Austria, as you kind of go through and chronicle tackle the emergence of this constructed anti Semite in politics and culture.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure, sure. You know, I think what Drives me in the choices that I made for the sources are, you know, wow, like, I would read something or read about something. I think that really shows the engagement with Jewish difference. And in thinking about, okay, but if I want to. And of course, I work on Germany and Austria, and I wanted to from the beginning, I wanted the project to be on Germany and Austria. But as I did more reading and research, what became clear to me was that there was a sort of overarching, unnuanced structure to how to think about this or how people thought about this, and especially how the powers that be in terms of governing the nation felt about the use of antisemitism. And at that time, you know, these ideas from on high were very influential in who could make. Who could make popular culture, who could, you know, be able to make a film or publish and especially show that they weren't, not just Nazis, but they weren't anti Semitic. So, in other words, most people had to try to at least show that they were on board with how the new nation was going to frame itself as contradicting antisemitism. And what I found was that I think it's helpful, or I hope it's going to be helpful to readers to sort of, for example, in West Germany, I framed that section as the patriot and the anti Semite, because I found that in a lot of the culture I looked at, there was a certain sense of, let's reframe German patriotism as something that's antithetical to antisemitism. That way it's going to be the Nazi externalized, very minimal number of people who are involved in identifying with antisemitism. And we can then have a certain degree of Germanness without having to answer for the further exclusion of Jews from the concept of the German, for example. And in that case, I found that when I read more about the trials of Fei Harlan and what he was doing in terms of his defense when he was charged with having committed a crime against humanity with the film, I thought, wow, like, there's. Not only was he really obsessed with Jews and obsessed with proving that he was not an anti Semite, he was, you know, tried to insist as much as he could that he was a true German patriot, but not a Nazi and not anti Semitic. It really was a cornerstone of his defense. And not just during the trial, but also lifelong, you know, up until his death. So that was the framework for West Germany. I thought that would work well. And then as we, you know, the East German context was very different as a country out of which emerged a communist government that not only was it smaller than West Germany, not only was it less significant in terms of the number of Jews who lived there, and also less turned to, to answer for the Holocaust. The way that the antisemite was constructed there was very different. It was, it came in very handy for an anti capitalist agenda. Now, of course, it's much more nuanced than that. Right. But at the same time, to associate the antisemite with the capitalist, that was a perfect way to pack a punch with audiences, with popular culture, was to frame it that way. What complicated the story in East Germany, however, and I think that's very interesting, is that East German leaders, there were actually a higher proportion of Jews in the East German governed leadership than there were in the West. And so, you know, there has to. Anyone looking at antisemitism in East Germany has to account for that, you know, and I thought a good way to do that was to show just how, you know, just because somebody was Jewish and involved in, you know, the high levels of cultural production in East Germany, like writers Anna Zegers and Victor Prover even they struggled with this concept of the anti Semite, you know, and you sort of got a sense of, oh, these Jews are coming in very handy for this government to be able to construct this antisemite in a certain way, in a way that it wouldn't have been in West Germany at the time and certainly wasn't. It didn't fit into this patriotism narrative. And then Austria finally also had a very different way of engaging with this antisemitism, the antisemite and antisemitism. Because on one hand you had this, you know, this very sort of, of, you know, by now overused victim myth of Austria as Hitler's first victim. But at the same time, you can't deny that it really was this overarching, very convenient narrative for Austrians to distance themselves from, you know, the real anti Semites in Germany, wherever they may be, and also claim that it never was part of Austrian culture. And what I found is here was that in some of the works that I look at in Austria was that that exclusion of the anti Semite also involved exclusion of the Jews as well. And in that way I thought it overlapped. I can see now it overlaps in some ways with what Frances Tanzer talks about in her book Vanishing Vienna. This sort of, this somehow exclusion and absence of Jews only to bring the idea of the Jew back for certain very well circumscribed reasons. And so that's the way these countries fit in. And as I say in the introduction too, I concentrate on these countries not just because they're my area of interest, but because that's, you know, the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust started there. So, you know, it makes sense to me to look at how antisemitism played out there after the war. But also you get a sense of what happened during the war.

[Paul Lerner]

Great. So if I could just come back for a second. It seems like in each case you have this kind of three way division of the Jew, the German or Austrian, and the anti Semite. Right. So we have this kind of common theme of creating these categories or boxes. But in each case there's a different operation, a kind of different. The anti Semite symbolizes something which is useful to the regime. Right. Or, you know, and stuff like if patriotic German is in opposition to the Nazis. Right. Then anti Semitism is anti German in a way. Or it's anti communist in the East German case. And I think, I mean, what you do with these films and stories and novels is so interesting. And I'm thinking about some of the material you treat is really well known, like the Third man, which I think generations of viewers have watched without really thinking about where images of the Jews are sort of, even though they're not made explicit, how they're kind of hovering around everything in that film, or the Klemper diaries or whatever. There's some very well known pieces, but there are also obscure things and things that I think even specialists might not be familiar with, like this Austria film. And so I wondered if you could pick. Do you have a favorite? And if you want to talk about that one, I think that 4-1-2000 project is really peculiar and fascinating. Or Billy Wilder's Emperor Waltz, which seems like it was kind of a failed, you know, a film that left nobody very. Everybody perplexed, I guess, including the filmmakers themselves. But if, if you want to kind of pick any of these or something else to dive deeper into it, I think that would be really interesting.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure, sure. Well, I'll start with the. The April 1st film, because it's such a, you know, it's such a treat. It is, you know, as I feel like as a cultural historian, I'm not afraid to look at unpopular and even, shall we say, bad films because they're so interesting as historical artifacts. Especially a film like Ersta April 1, 2000, which was basically an Austrian propaganda film. It wasn't called as such, of course, but it was for the new post war Austrian nation to show it as a sort of like a counterpart to tourism efforts to, you know, showcase Austria's Alpine culture, its Lipitzaner horses, its love of tavern and gemutlichkeit and all of this. So it was an attempt to make a film that would hit every single one of these, you know, sort of tourist brochure aspects, but also reframe Austria as not dangerous, certainly not related to anything to do with Nazis or Germany. And to do so it actually emerged from. They thought they would have a competition first and they asked people to write in their idea for a film plot and that unfortunately it didn't work out. They found out it was too much, too somber and people were suggesting things that were much too war related. And they decide and at some point Brun Graber and Wolfgang Liebeniner, who had been quite an important filmmaker under the Nazis, decided to turn it into what they called a satire, but which I think I find very, you know, I guess you could say, yeah, you know, does the film take itself seriously on one hand? No, you know, it's not a serious plot of the international configuration headed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner's wife, by the way, who plays the president of this international organization coming to accuse Austria of having disturbed world peace. Right, Yeah, I mean that didn't happen. They're trying to make fun of it. They have very silly looking spaceships that come and land from this global union. But at the same time I find that there's this undercurrent of bitterness in it whereby Austria is actually put on trial. And they are shown, they show the scenes in a courtroom where Austria is held to account for all of its past history, to show that it has no intention of disturbing world peace. And I think this bitterness is borne out not first of all, when they tried to show it internationally, it wasn't very popular. You know, for example, like, you know, people didn't buy that poor Austria was not responsible for anything that had happened during the war. But also, you know, the book that I found that accompanied this film by one of the co screenwriters, Ernst Marbo, I thought really probably because it was just for an Austrian audience, really I thought showed through this bitterness like this. Just kidding. Ha ha. Austria wasn't responsible. And more of this victim status and how the film really reflects how Austria felt victimized by the rest of the world and being called to account for crimes they did not commit. So that's why I think it's interesting. Now the Billy Wilder film of course was not made in Austria. Billy Wilder at that Time had been in Hollywood for quite some time. And you might remember my talking about this film earlier when, you know, there was this. Your wonderful conference about Austria and Hollywood. But what I thought was interesting was, you know, Billy Wilder went back to Germany after the end of the war in the American propaganda department and was very involved in helping to, you know, helping to restructure the film industry for films that. Making sure that they weren't filled with old Nazi party members, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, his mother and other relatives had been murdered in the Holocaust. And so to sort of have him go back and not only be involved in the nascent film industry, but he was also asked to edit, not to direct, but to edit one of the atrocity films that had been filmed from the concentration camps. You can just, you know, you don't have to be a psychologist to imagine the immense emotional toll that must have taken on him. And some of his colleagues do attest to that. But the fact that he went. When he went back home, the very first film that he made was this nostalgia film, his first color film musical that dealt with the Austria, Austria, Hungary and waltzes and an American coming over. And, you know, it was also, to some degree, a satire as well, but it was a musical. And they, you know, what really impressed me was, of course, this film was a flop and the plot was silly, you know, but he no expense to recreate an entire Austrian village in the Canadian Rockies and had everyone shipped up there with all of the materials, not just the people, but also the set. They had to recreate an entirely accurate Austrian rope. Rope tramble. According to exact specifications, the village had to look like Hallstatt or some of these other very picturesque Austrian towns. So you see here, too. Wow. Is this a film that's critical of Austria? No. I mean, no. It shows love for Austria. At the same time, there is a theme of anti Nazism in it. But I think that overall, the plot of it shows that he has a real longing for an Austrian. A vision of an Austrian culture that is inclusive of Jews as long as they're not, you know, openly so, you know, recognizable as Jews, perhaps, but also not compatible with Nazism and anti Semitism.

[Paul Lerner]

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's really just a wild film reading. I haven't seen the whole thing. I've only seen clips you've shown. But reading your description of it and this kind of imagining, this epic project of assembling an Austrian village in the Canadian Rockies and then the bizarreness of it, and I Mean, just you mentioned Francis Tanzer a minute ago and it just got me thinking. The nostalgic vibe in this film gets me thinking about her work on nostalgia. Also that the sort of very sharp edged, critical Viennese cabaret culture kind of comes back in exile and then in the post war period in a nostalgic vein. I wonder if there's something similar running through Wilder as well. That he's a really, it seems like in all of, I've seen, I think most of his films and they all seem to be so much more, well, so much more critical and cynical and humorous and cunning rather than nostalgia for a thing that never really existed or that he wouldn't have been included in any way had it existed.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. You know, it's funny, when I did the research on Billy Wilder, I found, you know, and there's countless books and interviews and filmmakers and, you know, he's so such an immense figure. I find that. And maybe this is true in other film scholarship as well, but there's just, there's a real desire to take him for his word for things, you know, like. And especially when he's talking about Austria, the way he talked about this film afterwards. Oh, it meant nothing to me. It was awful and you know, I hate Austria and you know, this kind of thing. But when you really look at what he created and what he had to do to create it, I think some, something very different emerges. And I'm not so sure that it can be that Cabaret to me it seems because it's sort of more fringe and marginal and didn't involve such huge convincing studio heads to spend enormous amounts and construct sets. There probably was something very different going on in the role that the creator of that cultural element had to play. And therefore the way that antisemitism was presented and the way that, and especially because it was for local audiences as well, that also had to be part of it. Right. Emperor Waltz was supposed to be for American audiences, but also international. And he was supposed to make a huge splash. And so that was also something that would affect how the idea of that post war anti Semite be portrayed there.

[Paul Lerner]

I see. That makes a lot of sense. And then, I mean, with these very veiled references to the Holocaust rite with, you know, drowning puppies and just following orders, it seems. So such an odd way of getting at the larger issues that must have been swirling around Wilder's mind.

[Lisa Silverman]

You know, Billy Wilder claimed he got the idea of the puppies from Ernst Lubitsch or something. Some idea about mating puppies and how Fun. It would like. And you can see how, you know, it is interesting. Like people had this idea, yes, this is an important topic, but is there a way we can use satire to get at it? And I think in this case it's a very failed effort. But it's also no secret. I mean there's just. It's so obvious and on the nose that he's trying to show that, you know, that there is this evil force that wants to keep these puppies apart. And by proxy the lead Austrian aristocrat from the traveling phonograph salesman played by Bing Crosby, who of course has nothing Jewish about him, but of course plays that role of the Jewish outsider coming and you know, charm, ending up charming through humor, et cetera. So yeah, it works in that way as well.

[Paul Lerner]

So I promised earlier that we'd get back to gender. I don't want to take too much of your time, but one question I had. Is the anti Semite this sort of construct, this figure, is it always coded male or is there kind of female or not gender specific antisemite? And maybe we could just think it's a huge topic, but think a little bit about how gender kind of plays a role in your discussions of these different kind of appearances of the antisemite figure.

[Lisa Silverman]

Sure. You know, on one hand that question it's. I didn't think it would be that productive to say, okay, I want to find cultural artifacts of films and literature where the antisemite is always a woman to sort of make this point. I sort of hoped that I would reveal it if it came up in the culture and how it was used. And I think, and I hope I did that. So for example, in the trials of Fight Harlan for crimes against humanity, you know, there's actually, you know, there's been a lot written about these trials. A lot of legal scholars, a lot of film scholars have addressed it. You know, it's great that there is this focus on it. But what interested me was this one witness, Karina Niehoff, who later became a pretty well known film critic and journalist in Germany, who was one of the very few witnesses at the trial to testify against Harlan and to sort of try to break through his structure of him being the victim of the anti Semite. So she testified against him. She had worked, she was a so called half Jew. So she had been allowed to work in Germany up until she a very late point in the war. And she happened to work for one of the early co screenwriters of YT Zus who happened to drop out after Harlan took over. But in her testimony, she was not only was she very forthcoming with how she felt, well, the earlier screenplay just wasn't as anti Semitic. And whether that's really true, who knows? She basically admitted to that screenwriter who had died by then, Ludwig Metzger. She basically admitted to his daughter later, after the war, that she had done this as a favor to him. And probably because, you know, why should she? She doesn't owe anything to fight Harlan having made this horrible film. So she testified against him. And in the middle of her testimony, there was a tumult in the courtroom. It was actually Harlan who yelled out, ah, you know, what a freshheit. You know, like, how dare you. Because she had mentioned Fein Harlem's wife, Christina Soderbaum, in the context of some of his films. There had been a joke going around how he always cast his wife as a woman who commits suicide in water. So she mentioned this as something that her boss had said and that prompted this outburst from Harlan. And then that just sort of took shape for additional outbursts in the courtroom when the judge, who had also served as a judge under the Nazis, asked her questions like, you know, oh, didn't your boss know that you were a Jew? You know, like very anti Semitic notions of her as a Jewish woman, you know, so that broke out, you know, disorder in the courtroom because of her testimony. As she left the courtroom, people, the crowds that had gathered yelled at her. And even I used this image on the COVID of the book of her. It's actually from an illustration from a Jewish newspaper at the time showing her leaving the courthouse and people yelling at her, calling her Yudenzao, telling her to go home. Right. And what I found in the archives was she wrote about that incident and said, I knew they were going to be able to recognize me because I had this red beret on. And so that's why I showed her in this red beret on the COVID And not only that, but after that, the mayor of Hamburg. Now this became an international incident in 1950 when it happened, and even the mayor of Hamburg now felt heard. Now Hamburg was being accused of being an anti Semitic city because this had happened at the courthouse. So he went out and what did he do? Do you sympathize with her? No. He claimed that it was part of a communist plot and she, because she had spent some time doing newspaper reporting in Russia, you know, like, like whatever. So. And she then tried to sue him for libel. They dug in their heels and according to her daughter, with whom I spoke it, you know, for decades she just tried to get them to, you know, compensate her and they didn't. And finally they dropped any sort of charges against her because of course they tried to countersue that she was the one being la boust. So. So she ended up being a figure that really in my mind represented this as a woman. It was no, she was somebody who was a woman who could occupy as a so called half Jew, this liminal space of Jew and non Jew. And even in his autobiography that he wrote at the end of his life, Harlan also was still upset about her and sort of of resented her. And also you see a lot of resentment of anyone who mentions her in his work. So I thought that, you know, this is. I like that Harlan as a cultural figure is an important subject to work on. But the figure of Niehoff, I think really crystallizes this idea that, oh, here's Harlan, here's the perfect figure for Harlan to show that he's been victimized by her. She becomes for him this anti Semite who is tormenting him in that moment. So that's one aspect of it. There are other women and women characters who play a role along the way in other works. But I start and I end and I don't know if this became clear and I hope it did. I start and end with examples by which men end up feeling victimized by women. And the first, it's an event that happened at the first Kristallnacht commemoration at the Bundesliga in 1988, when Ida Ehrer, a German Jewish actor, was asked to recite Paul Celan's poem Tors fuge at this 50th anniversary monumental event. And what ended up happening, some people may know, was that when the president of the Bundestag, Jeninger, gave a speech after that, his words were misinterpreted as fostering antisemitism. It raised a ruckus, people left and he ended up later in an interview, I found sort of blaming Ida Ara's recitation of this poem on the tumult of the night, the reason he had to resign. And he even said I had a heart attack from this recitation. Which maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but either way it's pretty telling that he said this. So that was the opening to sort of show how this concept of this figural anti Semite could take the form of a woman, it could take the form of a Jew, it could take many different forms. And at the end then, when, you know, especially if we talk about race, we can Talk about why. But I end with a Jewish man, Walter Winchell, who thinks back, you know, by the time he was a very influential gossip, you know, he sort of invented the gossip column. He remained an influential journalist up until he wasn't anymore, sort of towards the end of his life. And even at that moment, he, at the, you know, I found a moment where a witness says that he is, you know, down on his luck, he's in poor health. And he, this colleague, the person who had been a colleague of Josephine Baker says, you know, oh, Walter Winchield, you know, you had this incident with Josephine Baker. She accused you of being a racist, you accused her of being anti Semitic. Do you want a reconciliation with her? Do you really? Do you want that? And he sort of considers it for a moment and he says at the end, no, she broke my heart and I can't do it. Right. So then to me it's just like, wow, right? It's just somehow there's this extra oomph when it's a woman who he can accuse of causing him this physical breakdown that it becomes important. And that's why I ended the book with it. And not just because it was also about race.

[Paul Lerner]

Yeah, no, that absolutely was clear. And I think it's just staggering, you know, hearing you talk about it. I'm going through it all over again, this kind of ability of, especially some of these German figures to blame Jews for making them feel bad about what happened and therefore cast the Jew and, you know, they're the good German or whatever role they're filling, and cast the Jew in the role of the sort of perpetrator in that sense, or the anti Semite. And it's just mind boggling. And it makes me think about, I hope it's not apocryphal, the line of Heinrich Broder. I think that the Germans never forgave the Jews for Auschwitz. Right. I mean, it just rings so true in some of these treatments. But since you mentioned Jasmine Baker, I do want to turn to the US context a little bit because that's where you end the book. And I think it's really, it's disturbing but fascinating to read your treatment of Gentlemen's Agreement and this incident with Josephine Baker and Walter Winchell. And how does Jewish difference and this notion of the anti Semite, I mean, you've already given us a preview of it, but how does that work similarly or differently in the American context where we of course have racism against African Americans and sort of, I'm wondering about notions of black Difference versus Jewish difference. And I think there are clearly some parallels, but also many differences. So can you just also tell us why you decided to bring the black book to the US in your final chapter?

[Lisa Silverman]

So thank you for that question. It's great. At the time, I mean, I've been writing the book over the course of maybe 10 years, but with particularly, I guess the past five years, past six years I have really. As I was working on antisemitism, I was sort of dissatisfied by how little treatment there was of antisemitism and its similarities and differences to racism. Not just, you know, misogyny it was already covering, but also racism. And in the context of Germany and Austria and post war culture, of course racism existed, but I found that it wasn't as salient as antisemitism in these post war cultural narratives because of the Holocaust. And so it didn't seem to fit for me to try to come up with a parallel situation in which racism functioned similarly enough to make a comparison in Germany and Austria at that time, but where it was quite salient in a way that antisemitism still existed but wasn't sort of the inverse was in the United States and living here and living it. I noted that. And also, you know, I had a fellowship in Vienna right before COVID 2019, 2020. And in one of our methodology seminars I tried to sort of bring some, you know, American style work on racism and sociology and sort of talk about its similarities to antisemitism and its differences. And it was really not met with people did not be like, no, no, no, it's totally different, you can't use it, it doesn't work. And I thought that's just really. That didn't fly with me. And to some degree too I felt I just, I can't leave out, I can't not talk about race in this book. It's just, it would just be wrong. Now one of the one, or maybe it was both of the reviewers sort of challenged me on this and said, well, it doesn't fit. This is a book on Germany and Austria. You know, you can't just turn to the US And I just pushed back and went through and I said no, we have to talk about race and how it, it connects with what's going on in Europe at this time. And the way that the anti Semite functions, I argue here through gentleman's agreement is that yes, antisemitism is still present in the U.S. in fact, Walter Winchell was one of the few who stood up to a neo Nazi gathering at Madison Square Garden and called them out for support for the Nazis for racism at a time when a lot of Jewish Americans were more hesitant to sort of make a lot of noise about antisemitism, to be open and out with criticism of antisemitism. And this was something that Laura Hobson wanted to address too. And she chose the route of showing more, more subtle instances of antisemitism. Right. The, the antisemitism of people who didn't think that they were being anti Semitic or just took pains not to show it when they thought Jews were around. Right. So I really wanted to use that because. Not only because of this incident that took place at the Stork Club when Josephine Baker was not served, it was for racial reasons. And Walter Winchell, who was there a little bit earlier in the evening, didn't stand up for her afterwards, even though he had before that he was very friendly with her, had put himself out there as a staunch anti racist. But at this point, because of that incident, he felt that it would endanger his position with the owner of the Store Club. And so he tried to show that it was Josephine Baker who was really the one who was at fault here. She's the racist, she's the anti Semite. He found her autobiography and found passages where she talked about Jewish landlords in Harlem. Yes, using. They did indeed use stereotypes about Jews, but this was hardly the, the main message of her book. Right. So he just chose and cherry picked to try to smear her. Whereas on the other hand, she and others tried to snare Winchell now with racist comments, and some of which she did. You know, he was supporting the Store Club and, you know, refused to acknowledge the racism there. So I thought that in the American context, it was interesting how the antisemite works in tandem with the racist and, and in a way end up supporting people who have everything to lose from these constructions and let the white, non Jewish actor in this incident not have to deal with any of these constructions and not refocus everything on the mudslinging between Winchell and Baker and even in. Yeah, so, so that would be the way that that incident comes to play. So the Sherman Billingsley, the head of the Stork Club, isn't held to account for anything because he doesn't have to be. So everyone's eye is now on the mudslinging and not on how racism and anti Semitism work. The way that Laura Hobson plays into it is what I found. The scholar Eric Goldstein had written about gentlemen's agreement quite a while ago. And so I was not, not the first to point this out about her anti anti Semitic film, that it actually ends up supporting racism by arguing that Jews, you know, you shouldn't be anti Semitic because Jews can pass as white. You know, like this was all about Jews being able to pass. And even though she, Laura Hobson, was certainly not racist, she actually picketed outside the store club on behalf of Josephine Baker. Unlike Walter Winchell, she certainly argued that the reason she wrote this book and that was turned into a film was because she felt very strongly against racism. But she had her blind spots too, and she couldn't see that. Just like some people didn't understand that what they did perpetuated antisemitism even when they thought they weren't. She, in her narrative, was perpetuating America's white racial frame in her narrative without realizing at all that that's what she was doing. And so I thought that was helpful and I hoped it would be helpful for people to think about antisemitism in that context.

[Paul Lerner]

I think it's really helpful and I'm really glad that you've stuck with your guns and stuck to your guns and kept that in the book. I think I would feel remiss if I didn't ask you, you know, with an eye toward the contemporary context, to think a little bit about having written this book about antisemitism and its instrumentalization. If you could just think a little bit about how antisemitism is used today in our own world, especially by, one could say by the right as a way of suppressing certain kinds of voices on campus and throughout our culture. If you see parallels between the deployment of antisemitism in the period you've written about with today, or if as a scholar of antisemitism and Jewish difference, you want to share any reflections about what's going on today.

[Lisa Silverman]

Thanks. Yes, I would like to. I think the main way that I think my book can help contribute to contemporary discussions today about antisemitism is hopefully showing people that this idea of defining the antisemite, which is just so prescient today. And you know, they say, whose definition are we using? You know, why is there all of this anxiety about having the right to define antisemitism a certain way, how that right to do so is there because after the Holocaust, being able to do so gained so much moral power and clarity and because Jewish difference as a framework is still such a strong framework. It's just an irresistible framework in some sense, especially when Things are polarized. People want to be the ones to be able to use it but not be accused of being an anti Semite. So in order to do that, you have to have power to define that antisemite by which you assert it and get people to believe you. That's your power in doing that. And I think, think we see that on left and right. Everybody, like nobody wants to be denied the power to use that framework of Jewish difference to get their message across, even if they certainly don't hate Jews. They may be Jews themselves. There's all a whole range of ways in which people engage with Jews in which they are. They take pains to show that they are not antisemites. And yet they cannot let go of that. That framework. They cannot. They will not admit that that framework, the way they use it, is engaging, actually supporting this idea of the Jew as down here, the non Jew as up here. That reinforcing that reinforcing that framework of Jewish difference instead of destabilizing it, because destabilizing it means you can't use it the same way anymore. And maybe it's helpful to think of a philosemitic narrative also doesn't do anything to destabilize the terms of Jewish difference. And it's not a very popular view. Everybody loves the Jewish underdog hero of so many classic movies and films, and I get that. But if you're a scholar of anti Semitism and you want to understand not just how it works, but why it's so powerful and persistent, you have to be willing to understand that it's a framework that we are all at risk of engaging instead of doing away with.

[Paul Lerner]

Thank you for that really nuanced answer. I mean, I wish more people would read your work and kind of think about the incredible staying power of this constructed anti Semite and what it. The work it does and our political system today. So I want to, before we wrap up, I just want to give you a chance to tell us what you're thinking about. Now, having put in a lot of time on this project, I'm sure you're excited to jump into new research and new writing projects. So what are you up to these days?

[Lisa Silverman]

So I've decided that for my next project, I really want to turn to and focus on trials, the courtroom. I have looked at trials in my books before, and it's always been an area of interest for me as a cultural historian, along with some colleagues, we're always at the Law, Culture and Humanities conference and giving papers. I really like it. And Certainly in Jewish history, there's no dearth of books on famous trials, like not just blood libel trials, but the Dreyfus of air, et cetera, et cetera. But what we don't have is really a way to focus on the trial as a source in itself and how witness testimony in trials, how the role of the judge and the witnesses and the defendant and the lawyers, how those roles all are used to construct narratives in the courtroom that, you know, narratives that are not only like narratives for film, literature, et cetera, but have very real consequences of, you know, either exhibiting justice or limiting someone's freedom, sometimes unjustly. So I decided that I really do want to focus on trials and also, too, because there's an element to them that I'm just fascinated by you just. Even though there's a. In some sense they're scripted in the way that everyone has a certain role to play and everyone has a narrative that they're trying to put forth, you don't know what's going to come out in this witness testimony. You just don't know how that's going to hit. You don't know what's going to be revealed. And so the final truth, which is the verdict, the Verdi. Right. Like the spoken truth, is what ends up happening. And I'm so interested to see not just how antisemitism functions and verdicts, but also whether there is, you know, and I'm sure that there is. There's more opportunity there to look at how antisemitism intersects with gender and with race, all other kinds of frameworks, in order to make meaning not just for popular culture, but for the very real, very important reason of bringing someone to justice.

[Paul Lerner]

Wow, that sounds really exciting. Are you limiting yourself to a particular time period, geography, or is it a very expansive idea?

[Lisa Silverman]

Right. So I think what I'd really love to do is with my colleague Chaya Halberston, who works in an ancient world, ancient Judaism and Hebrew Bible, since we're both so interested in trials, we would love to try to come up with a book that can be used as a textbook, perhaps with examples, but also pulling out some of the ways in which trials function in Jewish history over a broad span of time. So that's one idea. And that wouldn't be limited geographically, of course, we'd have to. To figure out how to do it, but that's just something we both want to do, something that would be new and useful. And so we're hoping to do that. And hopefully a parallel to that, I think I would be working on modern Germany and Austria because that is the place that I love to do research in and would interest me most. And so we'll see what emerges with that.

[Paul Lerner]

Great. Well, I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of this set of projects. Sounds really fascinating. So yeah, thank you. You've been really generous with your time and I really enjoyed this kind of deep dive into the book. I hope listeners who haven't yet had a chance to will read it because it's so deeply informative and just such a tour de force. So thank you again and look forward to seeing what comes next.

[Lisa Silverman]

My pleasure. And thank you.

[Paul Lerner]

Sa.