In 2022 book-lovers celebrate the 100 th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, which tracks the peripatetic wanderings of Leopold Bloom in Dublin on 16 June 1904. Each year on that day ‘Bloomsday’ is celebrated by lovers of the novel. This year, Fathom is delighted to publish an essay by (Israeli-Canadian) Noga Emanuel that looks more closely at the ...

Noga Emanuel reviews the TV series The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, a dramatic adaptation of Sarit Yishai-Levy’s bestselling novel of the same title, set in the Jerusalem of the 1920s and 1940s. She finds a ‘jousting between frivolous liberating modernity and rigid traditions of cultural convention’ that takes the viewer back to ‘a time and a place where every single aspect of life ...

Jared Kushner’s account of his four years in the Trump White House produces several interesting revelations. It is all there: the incremental friction with China, impeachment, John Bolton, Russian subversion, Hunter Biden, the wooing of Kim Jong-un, the 6 January assault on the Capitol, the murder of George Floyd, the Covid pandemic, white supremacism and a …

Karin Stögner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Passau, Germany and co-ordinator of the Research Network on Racism and Antisemitism in the European Sociological Association. In this important essay she explains why the influential theory of ‘intersectionality’ so often fails to ...

Cary Nelson and Michael Saenger argue for understanding antisemitic anti-Zionism as ‘a prejudice with definable characteristics’ and of the need for ‘a standard that can help us identify antisemitic bias in articles, books and public statements about the Jewish state.’

How reliable are the casualty figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry? The answer offered in this article is blunt: not reliable at all. The authors are Tom Simpson, a generalist economis...

All his life Trotsky was a consistent fighter against antisemitism. – Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews, 1971. Of course we can close our eyes to the facts and limit ourselves to vague generalities about the equality and brotherhood of all races.

Lyn Julius is the author of Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (2019) and the co-founder of Harif, an association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in the UK.. Can a shared love of ‘Arab culture’ be a force for moderation? More to the point, can it stop the ‘Second Israel’ from …

Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes. Today, it is all over ...

Matthias Küntzel’s new book, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East, explores the still under-analysed impact of Nazi antisemitism on the development of Islamic antisemitism and the Arab world’s 1948 war against the Jewish State. Here, he introduces the book’s central discoveries and arguments. Is there any connection between the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews that ...