The following was from the introduction I’m writing with Alex Gourevitch for a new translation of Marx’s On the Jewish Question. I say was because I just had to cut it. It doesn’t work. But I thought I’d share it here, as a public service. If you’re ever the victim of antisemitic insults and want to know what to do, check out how a master rhetorician—Heinrich Heine—dealt with that kind of abuse, though please don’t use the homophobia he does in response! Heine forges one last weapon for his comic arsenal, which later writers like Kraus and Jewish American comedians will borrow and refine. At the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, the Jewish comedian Lewis Black describes the weapon thus: […]