Why does antisemitism keep returning?

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin begin Part Four, the Aftermath and final section of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, with Abigail’s idea of “passionate history.”

The conversation begins with Abigail seeing her former Paris lover years later and finding that he had developed strong antisemitic views. From there, Abbie and Jerry explore the difference between objective history and the history people actually live - shaped by memory, meaning, responsibility, and the choices they make after disappointment or defeat.

Their discussion moves through Cain and Abel, sibling rivalry, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the temptation to blame an outside enemy rather than face what has actually gone wrong.

For Abbie, antisemitism is not only a political or historical problem. It is also a problem of how people understand their own lives, their failures, and their place in history.

The episode asks what happens when people stop living honestly within the sequence of their own experience - when memory is avoided, responsibility is displaced, and an enemy is brought in to explain a defeat that came from somewhere else.

In Abigail’s account, that act of deflection is part of what makes antisemitism so persistent, and why the story of Cain and Abel still matters.

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Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated.

Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.