LICENSE TO MURDER:THE ENDURING THREAT OF THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION: DR. ALEX GROBMAN
It is always important when an historian chooses to tackle an issue rooted in the past but whose impact continues to make waves of tsunami proportion in the present. Few documents better fit that description than the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
In a new book, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (Balfour Books and the America-Israel Friendship League), Dr. Alex Grobman examines the “Protocols” and tracks the 100 years of its sordid influence. A prolific author of works ranging from Holocaust studies to advocacy for the State of Israel, Dr. Grobman, whose doctorate is in Contemporary Jewish History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is in a unique position to confront the enigma and the impact of the Protocols. A member of the academic board of the David S Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, he established and directed the first Holocaust center in the United States under the auspices of a Jewish Federation in St Louis, Missouri and also served as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, where he was the founding editor-in-chief of the Simon Wiesenthal Annual, the first serial publication in the US focusing on the scholarly study of the Holocaust.
Dr. Grobman now serves as executive director of the America-Israel Friendship League.
In License to Murder, he discusses how and why a recognized falsehood is still used to justify not only raw Jew-hatred but also its latest incarnation: the unjustified, single-minded condemnation and promotion of annihilation of the State of Israel by the Muslim world and, incongruously, much of the political left in Western Europe.
“Too many people, even in the 21st century, embrace and transmit negative perceptions about the Jewish people and the Jewish state. In this new book, Dr. Alex Grobman seeks to explore how and why a vicious lie, a warrant for genocide, first written in the early 1900s aided endemic antisemitism and then morphed into anti-Zionism,” says Kenneth Bialkin, Chairman of the America-Israel Friendship League, the book’s co-publisher.
In his introduction to the book, Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens, suggests reasons for this hatred of Jews ranging from the “politics of envy” (“There has always been a political utility in stirring populist hatred any minority, particularly those that are economically successful but politically powerless”) to frustration stemming from the Jewish people’s position as “the living witness for the absence of redemption.”
Dr. Grobman’s new book is important, he says, because “it is a potent reminder that no libel against the Jews, however preposterous, can be safely ignored.”
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