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Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left
In April 1945, Jean Améry was liberated from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. A Jewish and political prisoner, he had been brutally tortured by the Nazis, and had also survived both Auschwitz and other infamous camps. His experiences during the Holocaust were made famous by his book At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities.
Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left features a collection of essays by Améry translated into English for the first time. Although written between 1966 and 1978, Améry's insights remain fresh and contemporary, and showcase the power of his thought.
Originally written when leftwing antisemitism was first on the rise, Améry's searing prose interrogates the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and challenges the international left to confront its failure to think critically and reflectively.
Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left features a collection of essays by Améry translated into English for the first time. Although written between 1966 and 1978, Améry's insights remain fresh and contemporary, and showcase the power of his thought.
Originally written when leftwing antisemitism was first on the rise, Améry's searing prose interrogates the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and challenges the international left to confront its failure to think critically and reflectively.
124 pages, Paperback
Published January 4, 2022
About the author
Jean Améry
55 books93 followersJean Améry (October 31, 1912 – October 17, 1978), born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austrian essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II.
Formerly a philosophy and literature student in Vienna, Améry's participation in organized resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium resulted in his detainment and torture by the German Gestapo, and several years of imprisonment in concentration camps. Améry survived internments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and was finally liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. After the war he settled in Belgium.
His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). Améry killed himself in 1978.
Formerly a philosophy and literature student in Vienna, Améry's participation in organized resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium resulted in his detainment and torture by the German Gestapo, and several years of imprisonment in concentration camps. Améry survived internments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and was finally liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. After the war he settled in Belgium.
His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). Améry killed himself in 1978.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 29, 2025
Just to think that this book was first published a full year before the October massacare is astonishing. it didn't start in October indeed. It's quite astonishing how relevant this book is for today, as if it was written as a response to the events of October. Learning that what he depicts was written half a century ago, I ask myself if he was way ahead of his time or whether things were always the same. one thing is for sure, this book should be way more well-known.
thinking about Améry's views and image, I'm reminded of Michelangelo depiction of Jeremiah in the sistine chapel. I can't think of a greater compliment than that.
thinking about Améry's views and image, I'm reminded of Michelangelo depiction of Jeremiah in the sistine chapel. I can't think of a greater compliment than that.
December 25, 2024
In 1935, the 23 year old Austrian Hans Maier read Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and realized he was a Jew. Maier had not previously understood this. Only his long dead father was Jewish, his Catholic mother had raised him in the Church, and already the young man had adopted the temperament of the political Left: unsympathetic toward nationalism, suspicious of religion. But now, anticipating Sartre, a thinker he later would admire, Maier intuited that one is a Jew when others say he is. Years later, he would write of “the inescapably of being a Jew.”
With Austria’s too-willing rush to Anschluss, (“my country jubilantly threw itself at the Führer of the Greater German Reich like a bitch in heat who cannot wait to be mounted…”), Maier fled to Belgium, joined the wartime resistance, survived capture, torture, and Auschwitz, then changed his name to the more French and pointedly less German Jean Améry.
After the war, Améry emerged as a cultural journalist, writing for Swiss newspapers. He came to prominence in 1966 with the appearance of the Holocaust themed Jenseits von Schulz und Sühne (English edition At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1980). He delivered essays and lectures on West German public radio. His position in the firmament of good, Left thinkers was secure.
Then he wrote about Israel. Favorably. And, for reasons all too clear a half century later, his position on the Left was no longer secure.
Both developments were inevitable. The first flowed from Améry’s personal relationship to being Jewish, the second from the tenets of the New Left that in our day would supplant what we once called liberalism.
Améry considered himself a “catastrophe Jew,” one whose Jewishness is defined not through the Jewish faith, or even by positive identification with the Jewish community but, more grimly, by his lack of trust in the world. In 1966, he writes:
My neighbor greats me with a friendly, ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ ‘Bonjour, madame,’ I reply and doff my hat. Because another madame looked away yesterday when a monsieur was taken away, and another monsieur, like a stone angel from some bright and severe heaven to which the Jews will never have access, watched a madame through the bars of a departing vehicle, worlds now separate monsieur and madame. I read an official notice that calls on ‘la population’ from hiding me yesterday, and whether it would show more courage if I came knocking tomorrow, is, alas, a moot point. Hence, la population too constitutes yet another extraterrestrial realm I can no more hope to enter than I might Kafka’s castle.
As he put it ten years later: “There is no one on this planet who would raise the alarm if a new genocide [of the Jews] was imminent.” The Jew, he concludes, is “a dead man on furlough.”
One reason no one would raise that alarm was the persistence of antisemitism. The ties between Jew hatred old and new is a unifying theme of these essays. Another is the role played by the State of Israel in the minds of Jews in the diaspora, that is, Jews facing the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in 1960s and 1970s Europe. By refuting antisemitic tropes—-“Jews were cowards… they knew what to do with a bank note but not how to operate a plow”—- Israel empowered the galut Jew, even one of Améry’s attenuated communal ties, to walk with “upright gait,” a recurring phrase in this work. More fundamentally, the Jew “knows that as long as Israel exists, one will not be able to stick him into a fiery furnace again.”
The reader who encounters Améry after October 7 will face few doubts whether history does, in fact, rhyme. For Soros-fueled and Qatar-funded college mobs, substitute the 1960s West German student slogan “Strike the Zionist dead—-make the East red!!” Already in 1969, Eméry writes of a new, anti-Zionist Left, besotted by the vision of national-revolutionary insurrection. For this campus centered Left, “Vietnam, the struggle of the Bolivian guerrillas, the resistance movement in Greece, the Black Panther movement, the El Fatah—-they all suddenly became indistinguishable.”
That the Jews, protagonists of the greatest national liberation struggle of all, fell on the oppressor (yes, that word even then!) side of this simplified narrative was overdetermined by centuries of European animus toward the Jew. For historically ignorant New Leftists (again it rhymes!), the word Zionism did the work performed for 1930s Germans by the phrase World Jewry, a scapegoat on which to hang everything they hate … “The emotional infrastructure is in place,” Eméry concludes, the antisemitism “as virulent as ever in the collective subconscious of the European peoples.”
The essays collected here were penned between 1966 and 1978, too soon for antisemites to parade forthrightly their Jew hatred. But even then, anti-Zionism provided an alibi, a “veneer of virtuousness.” The phrase captures perfectly the surfeit of passion wrapped in the thinnest veneer of knowledge that characterizes today’s antisemitic campus warriors. For those arguing that today’s Jewish students protesteth too much about their classmates’ antics, Améry offers a perfect riposte:
The young socialists, communists, Maoists, and Trotskyists need only imagine what it would be like if the powers that be told them, ‘Our issue is not with you but only with World bolshevism. We do not object to your leftist orientation. However, you may not teach, may not enter the civil service, may not hold public assemblies, and should you form parties, you would be breaking the law.
Eméry was a man of his times and very much a man of the political Left. Part of the tragedy he foresaw was how the Left’s embrace of anti-Zionism inevitably would drive it toward illiberalism. In the name of opposing Israel and embracing revolution, it embraced as “progressive” a dog’s breakfast of reprehensible regimes, from Idi Amin in Uganda to Qaddafi in Libya and of course many others in the decades that followed. The Left, Eméry continues, always considered nationalism something pigheaded but now perhaps “agreeable wherever it is directed by tyrants against Jews but unjust as soon as Jews, in the face of unbearable pressure, fall into its trap.”
Another theme in these pages is Israel’s precariousness. Repeatedly he ponders the long-term sustainability of the Zionist state in the face of overwhelming demographic odds and the spreading ideological chill. In 1978, Améry took his life. We do not know how much of his despair reflected the trauma of his personal experiences and how much his understanding of the trials that were about to besiege Israel and the Jewish people. It is tragic that he did not live at least to see his people rise to confront, and ultimately to conquer those challenges.
With Austria’s too-willing rush to Anschluss, (“my country jubilantly threw itself at the Führer of the Greater German Reich like a bitch in heat who cannot wait to be mounted…”), Maier fled to Belgium, joined the wartime resistance, survived capture, torture, and Auschwitz, then changed his name to the more French and pointedly less German Jean Améry.
After the war, Améry emerged as a cultural journalist, writing for Swiss newspapers. He came to prominence in 1966 with the appearance of the Holocaust themed Jenseits von Schulz und Sühne (English edition At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1980). He delivered essays and lectures on West German public radio. His position in the firmament of good, Left thinkers was secure.
Then he wrote about Israel. Favorably. And, for reasons all too clear a half century later, his position on the Left was no longer secure.
Both developments were inevitable. The first flowed from Améry’s personal relationship to being Jewish, the second from the tenets of the New Left that in our day would supplant what we once called liberalism.
Améry considered himself a “catastrophe Jew,” one whose Jewishness is defined not through the Jewish faith, or even by positive identification with the Jewish community but, more grimly, by his lack of trust in the world. In 1966, he writes:
My neighbor greats me with a friendly, ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ ‘Bonjour, madame,’ I reply and doff my hat. Because another madame looked away yesterday when a monsieur was taken away, and another monsieur, like a stone angel from some bright and severe heaven to which the Jews will never have access, watched a madame through the bars of a departing vehicle, worlds now separate monsieur and madame. I read an official notice that calls on ‘la population’ from hiding me yesterday, and whether it would show more courage if I came knocking tomorrow, is, alas, a moot point. Hence, la population too constitutes yet another extraterrestrial realm I can no more hope to enter than I might Kafka’s castle.
As he put it ten years later: “There is no one on this planet who would raise the alarm if a new genocide [of the Jews] was imminent.” The Jew, he concludes, is “a dead man on furlough.”
One reason no one would raise that alarm was the persistence of antisemitism. The ties between Jew hatred old and new is a unifying theme of these essays. Another is the role played by the State of Israel in the minds of Jews in the diaspora, that is, Jews facing the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in 1960s and 1970s Europe. By refuting antisemitic tropes—-“Jews were cowards… they knew what to do with a bank note but not how to operate a plow”—- Israel empowered the galut Jew, even one of Améry’s attenuated communal ties, to walk with “upright gait,” a recurring phrase in this work. More fundamentally, the Jew “knows that as long as Israel exists, one will not be able to stick him into a fiery furnace again.”
The reader who encounters Améry after October 7 will face few doubts whether history does, in fact, rhyme. For Soros-fueled and Qatar-funded college mobs, substitute the 1960s West German student slogan “Strike the Zionist dead—-make the East red!!” Already in 1969, Eméry writes of a new, anti-Zionist Left, besotted by the vision of national-revolutionary insurrection. For this campus centered Left, “Vietnam, the struggle of the Bolivian guerrillas, the resistance movement in Greece, the Black Panther movement, the El Fatah—-they all suddenly became indistinguishable.”
That the Jews, protagonists of the greatest national liberation struggle of all, fell on the oppressor (yes, that word even then!) side of this simplified narrative was overdetermined by centuries of European animus toward the Jew. For historically ignorant New Leftists (again it rhymes!), the word Zionism did the work performed for 1930s Germans by the phrase World Jewry, a scapegoat on which to hang everything they hate … “The emotional infrastructure is in place,” Eméry concludes, the antisemitism “as virulent as ever in the collective subconscious of the European peoples.”
The essays collected here were penned between 1966 and 1978, too soon for antisemites to parade forthrightly their Jew hatred. But even then, anti-Zionism provided an alibi, a “veneer of virtuousness.” The phrase captures perfectly the surfeit of passion wrapped in the thinnest veneer of knowledge that characterizes today’s antisemitic campus warriors. For those arguing that today’s Jewish students protesteth too much about their classmates’ antics, Améry offers a perfect riposte:
The young socialists, communists, Maoists, and Trotskyists need only imagine what it would be like if the powers that be told them, ‘Our issue is not with you but only with World bolshevism. We do not object to your leftist orientation. However, you may not teach, may not enter the civil service, may not hold public assemblies, and should you form parties, you would be breaking the law.
Eméry was a man of his times and very much a man of the political Left. Part of the tragedy he foresaw was how the Left’s embrace of anti-Zionism inevitably would drive it toward illiberalism. In the name of opposing Israel and embracing revolution, it embraced as “progressive” a dog’s breakfast of reprehensible regimes, from Idi Amin in Uganda to Qaddafi in Libya and of course many others in the decades that followed. The Left, Eméry continues, always considered nationalism something pigheaded but now perhaps “agreeable wherever it is directed by tyrants against Jews but unjust as soon as Jews, in the face of unbearable pressure, fall into its trap.”
Another theme in these pages is Israel’s precariousness. Repeatedly he ponders the long-term sustainability of the Zionist state in the face of overwhelming demographic odds and the spreading ideological chill. In 1978, Améry took his life. We do not know how much of his despair reflected the trauma of his personal experiences and how much his understanding of the trials that were about to besiege Israel and the Jewish people. It is tragic that he did not live at least to see his people rise to confront, and ultimately to conquer those challenges.
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July 1, 2025This collection of essays, translated into English for the first time, were written in the late 1960s to late 1970s. In spite of the timing, the essays are extremely relevant and a must read for today. In fact, the essays could have been written in these times. Jean Amery, a Catholic Austrian, was interned in Nazi concentration camps and seen as a Jew. (As per Hitler’s 1/4 Jewish rule). After surviving the Holocaust, Amery remained a committed leftist until he witnessed something that shocked him two decades later. Amery was horrified to see the resurgence of Antisemitism taking root in the late 60s, this time not on the Right but on the Left. Post the Six Day War, Soviet sponsored propaganda swept up Amery’s European comrades on the Left, replacing the unacceptable antisemitism of the Right with Anti-Zionism. Amery created a term and concept for this new kind of Jew-hatred, known as “anti-Zionism,” on the Left. It became not only acceptable but “virtuous” to be Anti-Zionist. For Amery, who understood viscerally the necessity for a Jewish homeland to exist in the world, the resurgence of antisemitism in its latest incarnation, that of a “virtuous” anti-Zionism, was nothing more than an old hatred with a new name.
July 13, 2026
A must read. Although these essays were written in the late 60s and 70s they are premonitory and are good descriptions of what is going on with the left in today's western societies. Very interesting his analysis of how soon after the Holocaust the left embraced antizionism, which according to Amery, an Auschwitz survivor, is just "virtuous antisemitism".
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews