A review by guojing
Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (Revised) by Jean-Paul Sartre

2.0

My God was that a horrible read! Sartre paints the shallowest possible portrait of the Jew, so one-dimensional, so pitiful, and of such generalization that it is hard - nay, impossible! - to take him seriously. Indeed, Sartre himself comes off looking like the supreme anti-Semite, not just holding but airing his childishly simplistic views of the Jew and maintaining himself as their supreme benefactor. Weak, weak, weak, is all that comes to mind: that is, a weak argument, a weak veil for his own anti-Semitism, and a weak mind. I had heard both good and bad things about this laughable French intellectual in the past, but now my mind is set: Sartre is an imbecile. His play No Exist was enjoyable, but his actual attempts at writing non-fiction seem, so far, to be terrible; though, besides this volume, I have only ever read parts of his The Psychology of Imagination.

Not only does his talk of "the Jew" ring utterly false from its insulting and massive generalizations (indeed, the entire book is generalization after generalization for 100 pages) but this work is filled with the most asinine leaps of logic and absurd claims, such as, on one of the final pages, "anti‐Semitism leads straight to National Socialism." How in the world is Sartre hailed as being so significant a thinker?