Antisemitism and Sexism

Antisemitism and Sexism: Ideological Constellations Before and After 7 October analyses the manifold ways in which antisemitism and sexism appear not as isolated ideologies but as intersecting ones, exploring their historical, social, political, economic, and psychological constellations. Drawing on Critical Theory, the book offers a comparative historical analysis of these entanglements from nineteenth-century Europe—particularly Germany and Austria—through National Socialism and its preconditions, to the historical and contemporary formations of Islamism. The sexist antisemitism of 7 October and its aftermath are examined as a contemporary eruption of these enduring ideological patterns, while Critical Theory itself is sharpened in light of these events.

Structured around distinct analytical dimensions, the book opens with a theoretically dense examination of the damaged relationship between human beings and nature under modern labour society, identified by Critical Theory as a key source of both antisemitism and sexism. Subsequent chapters analyse the contradictory constructions of Judaism and femininity, the relation between body and mind, and socially regulated forms of sexuality. Conspiracy myths linking weakness and omnipotence, the psychosocial roots of authoritarian dispositions, and the embedding of these ideologies in specific formations of capitalist modernity and repressive communities are examined in turn. The book also offers a critical examination of intersectional feminist antisemitism in the aftermath of 7 October and advances a proposal to reformulate intersectionality as an ideology-critical framework for a feminist critique of antisemitism.

This book will be of interest to scholars of gender studies, feminism, Critical Theory, history, and antisemitism studies.