Hitler's Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy

The war against the Jewish people didn't stop with Hitler's defeat, argues the author; its main proponents today are the U.S.S.R, ""a no less powerful source of antisemitism'' than the Nazis were prior to World War II, and Arab and Third World anti-Semites in the Soviet Union's client states. This startling thesis is closely argued in a disturbing and important study written by a teacher at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Wistrich maintains that Stalin's fantasy of a world cabal of Jewish financiers bent on destroying socialism has been supplanted by specious Soviet attempts to link the Star of David and the swastika, to equate ``imperialistic'' Zionism with Nazism. In Islamic nations, he charges, political radicals are as intransigent as conservative fundamentalists in their refusal to start a dialogue with Israel. Wistrich traces Hitler's hatred of Jews back to the early 1920s, when he planned the genocide of Eastern European Jewry. Those alarmed about modern anti-Semitism should read this book. (March 3)