Human Conditions: 'Anti-Semite and Jew' by Jean-Paul Sartre

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book 'Anti-Semite and Jew', originally published in French as 'Réflexions Sur La Question Juive'. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry in France and how Jewish people had been treated under the Vichy government and before the war.

Judith and Adam discuss Sartre’s attempt to develop a philosophical understanding of this kind of hatred and the apparent moral satisfaction it brings, and his contentious suggestion that not only does the anti-Semite owe his identity to the Jew, but that 'the Jew' is a creation of the anti-Semitic gaze. They also consider some of the criticisms levelled at the book, such as its focus on the bourgeois personality, and Sartre’s definition of Jews in entirely negative terms.

NOTE: This episode was recorded on 5 October 2023.

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Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley.

Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, 'The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon'.

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Running in 2024:
ON SATIRE with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell
HUMAN CONDITIONS with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards
AMONG THE ANCIENTS II with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

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MEDIEVAL LOLS with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
POLITICAL POEMS with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

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AMONG THE ANCIENTS I with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones
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MODERN-ISH POETS: SERIES 1 with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

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