The Pornography of Fools: Tracing the History of Sexual Antisemitism

This article is an attempt to provide a genealogy of the sexual emotions and desires at work in contemporary far-right antisemitism. Embedded in primary research while also drawing heavily on the existing literature on antisemitism, the article seeks to make an intervention into the historiography of antisemitism and to argue for the existence of a sexual component at the heart of antisemitism, both historically and today. The article starts by briefly discussing a very short and specific story from Irish Jewish history in the 1900s, and then moves to a seemingly very unconnected story about the vocabulary of twenty-first-century American politics. And then what follows—a discussion of how these two stories are essentially intertwined and a broad overview of the history of antisemitism—argues for sexual antisemitism as a key concept for understanding anti-Jewish ideologies.