Antisemitism and Holocaust Inversion

Abstract

Already in 1971, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch predicted the increasingly ominous connection between Israel, antisemitism, and the Shoah, which has come to haunt the contemporary European mind. He remarked on the extraordinary shadow which the Holocaust had cast over the events of the Second World War and modernity as a whole—a kind of invisible cloud of remorse. This was the “shameful secret” (“ce secret honteux”) behind the apparent “bonne conscience contemporaine”—the hidden anxiety which seized so many Europeans at their belated realization of the enormity of the crime in which they were so deeply implicated.

^†The author was deceased at the time of publication.