How Anti-Semitism and the Casting Off of Tradition Ruined Stefan Zweig’s Golden Age

July 26 2024

Among Theodor Herzl’s friends was the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who like Herzl was a product of the cosmopolitan culture of the Hapsburg empire, but did not share in his Zionism. Zweig was a highly successful author of short fiction, essays, and biography in his own day, but he is best remembered now for The World of Yesterday, a memoir which depicts that cosmopolitan culture at its height. John P. Rossi reflects on the book and its author:

World War I ended that golden age for Zweig. It destroyed the Austrian empire and left his beloved Vienna a backwater city. The war and its vast destruction of human life depressed him. Despite a brief return to prosperity in the 1920s, he grew pessimistic about the future, especially as he saw the slow emergence of a new vicious form of hatred of the Jews, not the anti-Semitism of Vienna’s pre-war mayor, Karl Lueger, the Vienna where Lueger said “I determine who is a Jew” and Jews flourished. Something else was afoot.

Zweig’s belief in the power of culture was tested by the war, and he found himself out of sympathy with much of post-war culture, which turned its back on tradition. He described the new culture as a “mixture of impatience and fanaticism.”

The book’s subtitle is “Memoirs of a European,” and I’m reminded of the comment that, before World War I, there were many people who were Europeans. After the war, there were only Germans and Frenchmen and Czechs; the only Europeans were Jews.

Read more at University Bookman

More about: Anti-Semitism, Austrian Jewry, Stefan Zweig

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023