Jeffrey Herf
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 283342 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jeffrey Herf |
| PRENOMES | Jeffrey |
| SOBRENOME | Herf |
| ASSINATURA | HERF J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0178-8250 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1977 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall
Katja Hoyer's Beyond the Wall draws on memoirs and secondary scholarship to offer an overview of the history of Communist-ruled East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Reviewers in major newspapers in the United States and Britain offered lavish praise. The reviewer in The New York Times referred to “this impressively researched history.” The Guardian saw in it a “meticulous book.” The New Republic referred to “an expansive and gen…
Three Faces of Antisemitism
Three Faces of Antisemitism examines the three primary forms of antisemitism as they emerged in modern and contemporary Germany, and then in other countries. The chapters draw on the author’s historical scholarship over the years on the form antisemitism assumed on the far right in Weimar and Nazi Germany, in the Communist regime in East Germany, and in the West German radical left, and in Islamist organizations during World War II and the Holoca…
Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Holocaust
Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Holocaust is a collection of essays delivered at a conference in Boston. The editors write that its ‘central question’ is the extent to which Mein Kampf ‘forbode the actions of the Nazi government more than a decade before they were carried out’ and ‘what might it reveal about the worst of Hitler’s crimes, the Holocaust’ (p. 4). The value of the collection lies less in presentation of new research than presentation of …
Israel's Moment
Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab St…
The U.S. State Department's Opposition to Zionist Aspirations during the Early Cold War
In the latter half of the 1940s, senior U.S. national security officials opposed Zionist aspirations for an independent state and sought to keep the Truman administration from actively facilitating that effort. Even though President Harry Truman himself expressed strong public backing for the new state of Israel, the reality, as recognized at the time by Israel's leaders and by prominent U.S. liberal political leaders and journalists, was that th…
Unerklärte Kriege gegen Israel
Wenn Antizionismus und Antisemitismus aufeinandertreffen: Die DDR als inoffizieller Kriegsgegner Israels.
Obituary
Walter Ze’ev Laqueur, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a historian of astonishing reach and productivity, died on September 30, 2018 at his home in Washington, DC. He was ninety-seven. Only a fraction of his more than seventy books dealt specifically with the Holocaust, but he had a major impact on this field and the scholars in it, including the authors of this obituary. Laqueur was born into a Jewish family in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland…
Kim Christian Priemel. The Betrayal
Kim Christian Priemel’s The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence examines the conceptualization, organization, and course of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg of 1945–1946 and the twelve “successor” trials conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) from 1946 to 1949. “Betrayal” refers to the argument of the prosecution that the crimes of the Nazi regime were a result of Germany’s departure from the no…
Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust
Divided into five discrete sections, this book examines the issue of Holocaust denial, and in some cases "Holocaust inversion" in North America, Europe, and the Middle East and its relationship to the
Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World
Jeffrey Herf, a leading scholar in the field, offers the most extensive examination to date of Nazi propaganda activities targeting Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. He draws extensively on previously unused and little-known archival resources, including the shocking transcriptions of the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” radio programs, which convey a strongly anti-Semitic message. Herf explores the intellectu…
Conflicting Perspectives on Timothy Snyder's Black Earth
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015. 462 pp. $35.00.Reviewed by Michael Berenbaum, American Jewish UniversityTimothy Snyder's much-acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, published by Basic Books in 2010, aroused serious concern among many Holocaust historians. They feared that his emphasis on double genocide—German and Soviet—was a backdoor attempt to diminish t…
Undeclared Wars with Israel
Undeclared Wars with Israel examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations - ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries - from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. This period encompasses the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an ongoing campaign of terrorism waged by t…
La propagande nazie destinée au monde arabe pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la Shoah ; ses conséquences
During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in significant Arabic-language propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. This propaganda took the form of printed materials distributed by the Wehrmacht’s Afrikakorps and above all, short-wave radio broadcasts from Germany itself. The propaganda was a form of political warfare that complemented Hitler’s unsuccessful efforts to win the war in North Africa. German government…
Nazi Germany and Islam in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East
In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, “the world would be Mohammedan today.” That was the case, he continued, because “theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have …
At War with Israel”
The Middle East was one of the crucial battlefields of the global Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West; it was also a region in which East Germany played a salient role in the Soviet bloc’s antagonism toward Israel. From 1953, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) signed its first trade agreement with Egypt, until 1989, when the Communist regime in the GDR collapsed, East Germany opposed the state of Israel and supported Israel’s en…
The Multiple Meanings of "the West" and the Indispensability of the United States
The following historical contrast illustrates an obvious but perhaps under-appreciated truth about the multiple meanings of the Western tradition. As a by now extensive scholarly literature documents, the Nazi Party and Nazi regime drew heavily on the anti-Semitic dimensions of Christian theology.1 To be sure, Hitler and his associates selectively read and radicalized Christian teachings, but they were not innovators in blaming the Jews for the d…
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective
Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered
The word critical as applied to the theory of the Frankfurt School applies to the views of capitalism and the Enlightenment in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's classic work, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The absence of reference to the specificities of German history and generalizations about modernity in general contained, however unintended, an uncritical moment
Nazi plans and Arab collaboration
Arabischsprachige nationalsozialistische Propaganda während des Zweiten Weltkriegs und des Holocaust
During the Second World War and the Holocaust, Arab exiles living in Berlin, led by Haj Amin el-Husseini, enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazi regime to produce Arabic language radio and print propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. The resulting propaganda displayed an ideological fusion between National Socialist ideology on the one hand, and elements of radical Arab nationalism and Islamist ideology on the other. Previousl…
Comment by Jeffrey Herf
Nazi Germany's Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust
During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in an intensive effort to appeal to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. It did so by presenting the Nazi regime as a champion of secular anti-imperialism, especially against Britain, as well as by a selective appropriation and reception of the traditions of Islam in ways that suggested their compatibility with the ideology of National Socialism. This article and the…
Post‐Totalitarian Narratives in Germany
The concept of totalitarianism was a more complex and analytically fruitful term than many of its critics suggested. In the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) after 1949 it figured prominently in efforts to confront the realities of radical anti‐Semitism and the Holocaust. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), the dismissal of the concept went hand in hand with an official anti‐fascism that gave only modest attention to…
Comparative perspectives on anti-Semitism, radical anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and American white racism
White racism towards blacks, as well as anti-Semitism, are traditions that have produced enormous amounts of suffering and injustice. In this paper, I want to draw attention to commonalities as wel
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective
Introduction Jeffrey Herf. Anti-Semites on Zionism: From Indifference to Obsession Derek J. Penslar. Can There Be a Principled Anti-Zionism? On the Nexus between Anti-Historicism and Anti-Zionism in Modern Jewish Thought David N. Myers. Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism Shulamit Volkov. Convergence: The Classic Case. Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II Jeffrey Herf. An Inseparab…
Divided Memory
War by Other Means
The Jewish Enemy
This is the first extensive study of how anti-Semitism pervaded and shaped Nazi propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, and how it pulled together diverse elements of a delusionary Nazi worldview. In an era when both anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories continue to influence world politics, Herf offers a timely reminder of their dangers
East German Communists and the Jewish Question
Before 1945 most German communists, and after 1945 most East German communists, viewed 'the Jewish question', that is, the whole complex of anti-semitism, the Holocaust and the place of the Jews in Germany and Europe, as peripheral to the main drama of class struggle and anti-fascism.' Before and after 1945, there existed a minority communist tradition in which the Jewish question was central. By January 1953, following Paul Merker's arrest the p…
"The "Jewish War
How the Nazi leadership translated radical antisemitism into a narrative of an innocent, besieged Germany striking back at an “international Jewry” it accused of starting and prolonging World War II forms the subject of this study. In the Nazis' paranoid conspiracy theory “Jewry” comprised powers behind the scenes in London, Moscow, and Washington. In response to the “war of extermination” that Jewry had supposedly launched against Germany, the N…
Nazi Germany's Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust
During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in an intensive effort to appeal to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. It did so by presenting the Nazi regime as a champion of secular anti-imperialism, especially against Britain, as well as by a selective appropriation and reception of the traditions of Islam in ways that suggested their compatibility with the ideology of National Socialism. This article and the…
Multiple Restorations
In the longer continuity of German history, the year 1945 will always, in part, represent the “ Stunde Null ” (zero hour), of catastrophic military defeat and complete moral disgrace and bankruptcy following Nazism and the Holocaust. 1 The term “ Stunde Null ” evokes the need for a new beginning, a moral and political break with disastrous and ultimately criminal national traditions. Yet, because the Third Reich lasted only twelve years, and beca…
War, Peace, and the Intellectuals
The Engineer as Ideologue
The dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, so crucial for German nationalism in the decades preceding the nazi seizure of power, posed a serious dilemma: how could the Kulturnation be both powerful and true to its soul? How could its strong romantic anti-Enlightenment traditions be reconciled with technical advance? Nowhere else in Europe did modernity arrive so rapidly and intensely as in Germany. Nowhere else was the anti-modernist rejectio…
Reactionary modernism
Convergence
Despite granting permission for limited Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1930s, the ideology and policy of the Nazi regime never supported establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. During World War II, Hitler's ideologically consistent view that such a state would be a branch of an international Jewish conspiracy converged with shorter-term efforts to gain Arab and Islamic support for the Third Reich's military goals in the Middle East. …
Nazi Germany and Islam in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East
In his global bestseller, Inside the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's former architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, cited the German dictator's view that if the Arabs had won the Battle of Tours in the eighth century, “the world would be Mohammedan today.” That was the case, he continued, because “theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to their faith. The Germanic people would have …
At War with Israel”
The Middle East was one of the crucial battlefields of the global Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West; it was also a region in which East Germany played a salient role in the Soviet bloc’s antagonism toward Israel. From 1953, when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) signed its first trade agreement with Egypt, until 1989, when the Communist regime in the GDR collapsed, East Germany opposed the state of Israel and supported Israel’s en…
Dialectic of Enlightenment Reconsidered
The word critical as applied to the theory of the Frankfurt School applies to the views of capitalism and the Enlightenment in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's classic work, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The absence of reference to the specificities of German history and generalizations about modernity in general contained, however unintended, an uncritical moment
Comparative perspectives on anti-Semitism, radical anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and American white racism
White racism towards blacks, as well as anti-Semitism, are traditions that have produced enormous amounts of suffering and injustice. In this paper, I want to draw attention to commonalities as wel
Politics and Memory in West and East Germany since 1961 and in Unified Germany since 1990
Conservatism
The West German Peace Movement
The "Holocaust" Reception in West Germany
I was in Frankfurt last year to do research on aspects of Critical Theory. But, as with other American working in West Germany for similar reasons, the subject of and was never far from my consciousness. The topic was not a new one for me. My father had fled from Hitler's Germany in 1937. I had opposed the war in Vietnam with arguments drawn from Hannah Arendt's reflections on the banality of evil. I viewed my own New Leftism as a logical outcome…
Murder Is Not a Political Weapon
In taking a position towards terrorism in West Germany, the Left must first ask itself two questions: Do terrorist actions contribute to the weakening of capitalism? Are these actions justified in view of the demands of revolutionary morality? To both questions I must answer in the negative. The physical liquidation of single individuals, even the most prominent, does not undermine the normal functioning of the capitalist system itself. On the co…
Murder Is Not a Political Weapon
In taking a position towards terrorism in West Germany, the Left must first ask itself two questions: Do terrorist actions contribute to the weakening of capitalism? Are these actions justified in view of the demands of revolutionary morality? To both questions I must answer in the negative. The physical liquidation of single individuals, even the most prominent, does not undermine the normal functioning of the capitalist system itself. On the co…
Technology, Reification, and Romanticism
Toward Clarifying Criticism of Terrorism
Several months ago the German magazine Stern decided not to publish an article I wrote on socialist criticism of desperado actions, one which Stern had first requested. In this article I wrote the following: Franco's minister (Carrero) was killed as a result of a terrorist action, the majority of Spanish people could breathe freely again, and an important step toward ending despotism in Spain had been taken. Given the social conditions existing i…
The Humanization of Socialism
Andras Hegedüs, Agnes Heller, Maria Markus, Mihaly Vajda. The Humanization of Socialism: Writings of the Budapest School. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976. 177 pages
The Critical Spirit of Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse's last public address was delivered in Frankfurt on May 17, 1979. He spoke at the Romergespriche, an annual symposium sponsored by the city of Frankfurt. This year the theme of the Romergespraiche was the social and political implications of scientific and technological progress. The vigor with which he spoke, the absence of the slightest hint of political resignation, and his openness to the political and cultural currents of the…
The "Holocaust" Reception in West Germany
I was in Frankfurt last year to do research on aspects of Critical Theory. But, as with other American working in West Germany for similar reasons, the subject of and was never far from my consciousness. The topic was not a new one for me. My father had fled from Hitler's Germany in 1937. I had opposed the war in Vietnam with arguments drawn from Hannah Arendt's reflections on the banality of evil. I viewed my own New Leftism as a logical outcome…
Reactionary modernism
The Dynamics of Nazism
Introduction to Critical Theory
David Held. Introduction to Critical Theory. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980
Western Strategy and Public Discussion
Telos is the first American left-wing journal to present a range of views from the West European Left on the peace movements protesting the NATO decision to station Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. But with the exception of Pierre Hassner's, none of the essays presents a defense of the strategic rationale for the "double decision." On the contrary, they restated the now familiar charge that the decision represented an American e…
The Technological Conscience
The Double Decision Still Makes Sense
If the beliefs and proposals of the peace movements and their intellectuals were to be implemented, war would be likelier and political freedom in Western Europe would be placed under the growing pressures of increased Soviet influence. Nothing more damning can be said of movements whose stated goal is peace but it is a conclusion which the responses to my defense of the NATO double decision confirm. The intellectuals of the peace movements want …
The Engineer as Ideologue
The dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, so crucial for German nationalism in the decades preceding the nazi seizure of power, posed a serious dilemma: how could the Kulturnation be both powerful and true to its soul? How could its strong romantic anti-Enlightenment traditions be reconciled with technical advance? Nowhere else in Europe did modernity arrive so rapidly and intensely as in Germany. Nowhere else was the anti-modernist rejectio…
Reactionary modernism
In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists' rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls 'reactionary modernism' found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the. Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spe…
War, Peace, and the Intellectuals
The West German Peace Movement
Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age.Jurgen Habermas , Andrew Buchwalter
Reading and Misreading Schmitt
I must be doing something right. In Telos 71 your reviewer attacks Reactionary Modernism as a liberal rehash that fails to live up to Leftist insights. In Telos 72 the same work is again attacked for rehashing liberal conventional wisdom by an enthusiast of Carl Schmitt. Who would have thought that Telos would become a meeting place of Right and Left against the middle? The issue devoted to Carl Schmitt is a sad event in the history of Telos. It …
Conservatism
Reactionary Modernism
Ideology
Asymmetric strategic interaction
(1990). Asymmetric strategic interaction: Democracy, dictatorship and the Euromissile dispute in West Germany. Journal of Strategic Studies: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 52-81
Simplicity and the 1983 Turning Point
Communism has collapsed in Europe and the Soviet Union. The specter of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West is also gone. Democracy and markets are trying to spread East. The West won the Cold War without firing a shot in Europe. War By Other Means is a history of one historically decisive, yet still most unappreciated, historical turning point which was one of many necessary preconditions for the subsequent turn of events. At the ti…
War by Other Means
War by Other Means
NATO's decision to deploy nuclear weapons - the Euromissiles - in Western Europe in 1983 met fierce opposition from the European left. This book argues that many of the left-wing organizations in West Germany were motivated by Soviet propaganda, and that Kohl's success in having the missiles deployed was an important victory over the Soviets and their supporters, and confirmed the link between West German democrats and the the democratic regime o…
Political science (50 obras) · Law (43 obras) · History (34 obras) · Politics (32 obras) · Philosophy (29 obras) · European history and politics (27 obras) · German (25 obras) · Nazism (25 obras) · History (24 obras) · Law (24 obras)