Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification [Hardcover]

Why were modernist works of art, literature, and music that were neither by nor about Jews nevertheless interpreted as Jewish? In this book, Neil Levi explores how the antisemitic fantasy of a mobile, dangerous, contagious Jewish spirit unfolds in the antimodernist polemics of Richard Wagner, Max Nordau, Wyndham Lewis, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, reaching its apotheosis in the notorious 1937 Nazi exhibition Degenerate Art. Levi then turns to James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, and Samuel Beckett, offering radical new interpretations of these modernist authors to show how each presents his own poetics as a self-conscious departure from the modern antisemitic imaginary.

Levi claims that, just as antisemites once feared their own contamination by a mobile, polluting Jewish spirit, so too much of postwar thought remains governed by the fear that it might be contaminated by the spirit of antisemitism. Thus he argues for the need to confront and work through our own fantasies and projectionsnot only about the figure of the Jew but also about that of the antisemite.

This book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernisms hostile reception, and its self-conception.Until I saw the cover of Neil Levis book, I had no idea that 'Jewification' was a real world. It certainly got picked up in spellcheck. But after I read just a few pages of Levis book, I knew exactly what he meant. The word, strange and twisted as it seems, is an apt way to describe a modern phenomenon that seems to defy description. Levi argues that 'both aesthetic modernism and modern anti-Semitism seek formal solutions to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity, and that the figure of the Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disoriels.