Dr. Paul Hanebrink, associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University, will speak on Thursday, March 7 at 12 p.m. in the H-wing Auditorium (H-129) at Ramapo College of New Jersey about his recently published book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard University Press, 2018). The program will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

For much of the twentieth century, Europe was haunted by the myth that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe. Although a contrived paranoid fantasy that took hold during the Russian Revolution, it spread across Europe becoming a potent political weapon of fascists, Nazis, conservative Christians, and other Europeans terrified by Communism. Under the Third Reich, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism underpinned the Holocaust. Hanebrink argues that the Cold War saw a continuation of the myth that persists on both sides of the Atlantic till today.