Response to “The Conquerors of Tomorrow”

Response to “The Conquerors of Tomorrow”

A letter to the editor.

The following is a response to “The Conquerors of Tomorrow” (Fall 2025) by Jack Jacobs:

To the Editor:

There are many theories about why Primo Levi killed himself: the crushing aftermath of Auschwitz; depression; family troubles; the aftereffects of a surgery; despair over Holocaust denial. Pankaj Mishra offers no evidence for the highly dubious claim that Levi killed himself as the result of being “denounced” for criticizing Israel before a group of New Yorkers, as your reviewer writes.

Nor is it true that Jean Amery “rejected[ed]” Zionism at the end of his life. Though Amery was highly disturbed by Israel’s rightward trajectory, he continued to regard Israel as the only guarantor of the Jewish people’s survival. It was precisely because he was a Zionist that he worried so much about the relationship between diaspora Jews and Israel. In the 1960s and 70s, Amery wrote a scathing series of essays that criticized exactly the kind of leftist anti-Zionism that Pankaj Mishra epitomizes. These are collected in a book called “Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left.”

Mishra’s The World After Gaza: A History is, admittedly, a difficult book to review because, unlike most histories, the author offers no footnotes or endnotes to support his claims. Nonetheless, his false statements should not be carelessly repeated.

-Susie Linfield

Jack Jacobs responds:

I strive always to write with humility and integrity, and receive this criticism in the same spirit. Thank you, Susie Linfield, for engaging and responding so thoughtfully. We are all the wiser.