Hate: The New Brew of an Ancient Poison

From an award-winning journalist, a provocative, deeply reported exposé of the history and present crisis of anti-Semitism in France—and its dire consequences for the rest of Europe
Hate explores the alarming history and present predicament of anti-Semitism in France. By examining the issue at local, international, and personal levels—interviewing everyday French men and women as well as powerful leaders such as National Front president Marine Le Pen—Weitzmann attempts to understand how nine Jews have been murdered by French citizens in the last eight years, and how France has become the number one country from which Western jihadists flee to join ISIS and other extremist Middle Eastern organizations. How do contemporary French Jews grapple with these troubling facts, and with the historical legacies of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, and the Gaullist “Arab-French policy”?While internationally minded consumers of the news may have some knowledge of the events Weitzmann describes—including the 2013 “Day of Anger” and the rise of France’s popular, and famously anti-Semitic, comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala—these controversies are largely unknown in the States, and utterly shocking in the unity Weitzmann gives them here. In his hands, these events are not just the story of French anti-Semitism, but that of the breakdown of a major Western power, of the dark side of our global age.