Robert S. Wistrich

According to Scott Ury, "More than any other scholar, Wistrich has helped integrate traditional Zionist interpretations of Jewish history, society, and fate into the study of antisemitism." Other researchers have reproduced much of his work without questioning its founding assumptions.

Robert Wistrich was born in Lenger, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 7, 1945. His parents were leftist Polish Jews who had moved to Lviv in 1940 in order to escape from the Germans; however, they discovered that Soviet-style totalitarianism was little better than Nazism. In 1942 they moved to Kazakhstan, where Wistrich's father was imprisoned twice by the NKVD. After World War II, the Wistrichs returned to Poland. Later, finding the post-war environment in Poland to be dangerously anti-Semitic, the family moved to France and then to England. Wistrich grew up in England, where he went to Kilburn Grammar School, where in Wistrich's words, he was taught by "Walter Isaacson, a refugee from Nazi Germany who first taught me how to think independently" His parents later returned to Poland under a repatriation agreement between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile. In December 1962, aged 17, Wistrich won an Open Scholarship to study history at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1966 he graduated with a BA (Hons) from the University of Cambridge, which was raised to a MA degree in 1969. At Cambridge, he founded Circuit, a literary and arts magazine that he co-edited between 1966 and 1969. Between 1969 and 1970, during a study year in Israel, he became the youngest ever literary editor of New Outlook, a left-wing monthly in Tel Aviv, founded by Martin Buber. Wistrich received his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1974.

• Illustration — Wistrich (left) and Bernard Lewis, 2007 Between 1974 and 1980, Wistrich was Director of Research at the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library (at that time the largest research library on the Third Reich existing in Europe) and the editor of the Wiener Library Bulletin in London. Appointed a Research Fellow at the British Academy, he had already written several well-received books by the time he was given tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982. Between 1991 and 1995, Wistrich was appointed the first holder of the Chair of Jewish Studies at University College London, in addition to his position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also wrote several dramas for BBC Radio and Kol Yisrael on the lives of historical figures ranging from Leon Trotsky to Theodor Herzl. In 2003, Wistrich acted as the chief historical consultant for the BBC documentary Blaming the Jews, which explores contemporary Muslim antisemitism. He also served as the academic advisor for the controversial documentary film Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West (2005). As head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2002, Wistrich was a sought-after lecturer and scholar on antisemitism. He served as a rapporteaur on antisemitism for the State Department, OECD, Council of Europe, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Wistrich also served as a member of the board of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations. He was one of six scholars who sat on the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission from 1999 to 2001 to examine the wartime record of Pope Pius XII, with special reference to the Holocaust. From 2002, he was the director of SICSA, and edited its journal, Antisemitism International. Wistrich wrote prolifically on antisemitism in the Islamic world, insisting that "The Islamists have never made any secret of the centrality for them of the religious dimension of the Muslim–Jewish conflict—something very poorly understood in the West. This is clearly spelled out in the radically antisemitic Hamas Covenant of 1988, which constitutes the ideological basis for its continuing jihad to annihilate Israel. The Covenant draws on an ancient hadith attributed to Muhammad himself in which he purportedly declares: 'The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, O Muslims, O Abdullah [servant of Allah], there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'" In 2014, Wistrich authored an exhibition entitled "The 3,500 year relationships of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel". The exhibition was scheduled for display at the headquarters of UNESCO, but was canceled under pressure from Arab nations. The exhibit eventually opened six months later after the phrase "Land of Israel" was replaced with "Holy Land". In response to the controversy, Wistrich said the cancellation "completely destroyed any claim that UNESCO could possibly have to be representing the universal values of toleration, mutual understanding, respect for the other and narratives that are different, engaging with civil society organizations and the importance of education."

Over his career, Wistrich edited and published dozens of notable books about Jews and antisemitism. In 1985 his book Socialism and the Jews won the joint award of SICSA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the American Jewish Committee. His 1989 book The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph received the Austrian State Prize in History. His next book, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991), won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize in the UK a year later, and was the basis for The Longest Hatred, a three-hour British-American TV documentary on antisemitism, which Wistrich co-edited. In 1993, he also scripted Good Morning, Mr. Hitler, an award-winning documentary on Nazi art commissioned by the UK's Channel 4. His 2010 book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad was awarded Best Book of the Year Prize by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

• Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky. Barnes & Noble Books, 1976. • The Left Against Zion. Vallentine Mitchell & Co, 1979. • Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1982. • Socialism and the Jews. Oxford University Press, 1982. * • The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph. Oxford University Press, 1989. • Between Redemption and Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity. Routledge, 1990. • Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary World. New York University Press, 1990. • Antisemitism, the Longest Hatred. Pantheon, 1992. • Terms of Survival. Routledge, 1995. • A Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich (with Luke Holland). Trafalgar Square, 1996. • Theodor Herzl: Visionary of the Jewish State. New York and Jerusalem: Herzl Press and Magnes Press, 1999, 390 pages. • Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia. Routledge, 1999. • Hitler and the Holocaust. Random House, 2001. • Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? Princeton, 2002. • Laboratory for World Destruction. Germans and Jews in Central Europe, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2007. • A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010. • From Ambivalence to Betrayal. The Left, the Jews and Israel, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2012.