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Amit Varshizky

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Amit Varshizky
Born1977
Haifa, Israel
OccupationHistorian
Academic background
EducationPhD (2017), Tel Aviv University
Academic work
InstitutionsTel Aviv University, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jena Center 20th Century History
Notable worksThe Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview, Routledge. 2024 (published in Hebrew in The Open University of Israel Publishing House and Yad Vashem, 2021.)
Websitehttps://uni-jena.academia.edu/amitvarshizky

Amit Varshizky (Hebrew: עמית ורשיצקי; born in 1977) is an Israeli-born historian, novelist, and essayist who lives in Berlin. His fields of expertise include the history of racism and anti-Semitism in modern Europe, intellectual and cultural history of Nazism, German Romanticism, philosophy of science, and theories of religion, myth, and secularism.

Education

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Born in Haifa, Israel, Varshizky received his bachelor's degree in Mass Media and Communication from the Faculty of Social Sciences in Academic College of Emek Yezreel and his MA in history from the Tel Aviv University. In 2017, he was awarded a PhD in Studium History from The Zvi Yavetz Graduate School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.[1]

Career

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In 2016, Amit Varshizky was a lecturer in the History Department at Oranim Academic College of Education as well as teaching at the Department of Cultural Studies at Sapir Academic College and in the Department of Communications at the Academic College of Emek Izrael. [2]

From 2017 to 2018, Varshizky was a Research Fellow at the Minerva Institute for German History of the Tel-Aviv University.[1] From 2018 to 2019, he was a Research Fellow at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) in The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.[1] Since November 2019, Varshizky worked on the postdoc and served as a guest researcher at the Jena Center 20th Century History, Friedrich-Schiller-University University of Jena, Germany.[1]

He is also a singer-songwriter who has released two albums. [3]

Family

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Varshizky lives in Berlin with his wife and their two kids. [3]

The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview

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His book The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview (2021) was awarded the Goldberg Prize for the best research book for 2019 [4] and the Bartal Am VeOlam Prize of the Israel Historical Society for outstanding book for the year 2022. [5] An English version of the book was published by Routledge in 2024. In his book, Varshizky undertakes to reframe debates on the conflicting scientific and spiritual traditions that underpinned the Nazi worldview and shows how despite the multitude of tensions and rivals among its adherents, it provided a coherent conceptual grid and possessed its philosophical consistency. The book examines the emergence of nuanced Nazi racial theories in Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and the pursuit of German racial scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals of a new ethical, spiritual, and existential fulcrum in biology. Drawing on a variety of anthropological, psychological, and political-theoretical works, he illustrates how interwar racial theories were shaped, not only by the latest discoveries in the field of human heredity but also in conjunction with contemporary debates over religion and secularization, value, and science, and biological determinism. Accordingly, the book calls for a re-examination of the place of genetics in Nazi racial thought, drawing attention to the multi-register voice of biological metaphor and the development of non-mechanistic explanatory styles within the framework of interwar racial theory. It explores how these ideas provided new justifications for the Nazi politicization of science and the regime’s political revolutionary aspirations. The book illustrates how Nazi ideology took on the form of an all-encompassing system of thought that saturated all aspects of life, offering a spiritual antidote to the increasing disintegration of a “disenchanted” modern world and a new existential and ethical fulcrum with which to face the dangers of contemporary nihilism. [6]

Novel

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In November 2021, Varshizky published a novel based on his historical insights named Face of Janus which was awarded the Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports Award in the field of Hebrew literature for the year 2021 [7] and the Dudu Geva Literature Award for the best Israeli alternative book for 2022. [8] Israel Hayom praised the book as a magnum opus in the complete sense of the word, rare in its breadth and depth of discussion. [9] The novel interweaves facts, anecdotes, and historical quotations with myths and fiction, and the historical figures speak their own words as recorded in documents from the period. The plot revolves around a discharged American soldier in post-war II Paris who falls in love with a prostitute who dips his senses. During their relations, she entrusts him with the diary of Helmut Knochen, the chief of the Nazi Sicherheitspolizei (security police). The secrets in the diary summon the superpowers to the scene as each struggle for dominion over Europe’s bleeding body. The book is also an inquiry into the eternal question of the sources of evil, and its Gothic architecture embodies the chronic ambivalence of the human condition. [10]

Views

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Varshizky regularly contributes essays on politics, philosophy, and culture to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and other Israeli newspapers.

After the Ukraine war outbreak, Varshizky published an article about Alexander Dugin, in which he introduced the Israeli public to Dugin’s ideas and his influence on Putin's politics. Varshizky wrote that “Dugin’s radical ideas don’t end with imperialist ambitions and declarations about the need to restore “Great Russia”; he purports to put forward a cultural, spiritual and moral alternative to the liberal order of the modern West. [11]

After the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel, Varshizky wrote: “The illusion that fundamentalism and terrorism can be overcome with Western tools has been completely shattered. In light of the left’s intellectual hypocrisy and the right’s lust for war, it may be time for a new approach.” Varshizky proposed a “third way” for human solidarity which “does not pass through the blurring of cultural boundaries or through forcing the values of the secular West on non-Western and non-secular cultures, but rather lies in adopting a principle of equality in diversity and in cultivating life-sanctifying values, values of openness and tolerance, which exist to some degree in every religion and every culture while emphasizing what’s shared over what’s different and articulating a unifying vision of a multihued humanity based on recognition of universal human nature.” [12]

Varshizky criticized the Israeli use of disproportionate military force in Gaza and argued that the disproportionate use of force did not intend to serve military purposes alone but rather to restore Israel's domestic morale and self-prestige and to make up for its loss of self-confidence after the 7th of October. [13] He also pointed to the dominant force of Messianic Fervor within the Israeli present-day political and public discourse. He showed how it traveled from the margins of right-wing politics into the Likud center. He points to the weakness of the conventional liberal view and claims that “it’s a mistake to assume that messianic allurements can be fought only with rational tools. Myth cannot be suppressed by reason, and the yearning for the absolute cannot be moderated employing learned logical arguments”.[14] He claims that to battle against the messianic myth, a counter-myth is needed, one that does not lie within the realms of religion and meta-earthly redemption but in the imperfect world of humankind.

In some essays, Varshizky has emphasized the fluctuations in the discourse of values and the collective mentality of Israeli society and pointed to the underlying changes in Israeli society and its transition from a liberal and democratic society into a more ethnocentric, religious and non-liberal society, which is driven by political-messianism and paternalist populism. [15] He argues that only a radical transformation in Israeli secular culture, education, and intellectual-spiritual life can bring about an actual change.

Selected works

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Essays
Book reviews
Books
Encyclopedias
  • Racism, lexica entries, the Holocaust Resource Center – Yad Vashem (the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust edited by Dr. Shmuel Spector on Dr. Robert Rozett).
Novel
  • (2021) פני יאנוס (English: Face of Janus). Carmel Publishing House: Jerusalem, Israel.

References

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  1. ^ a b c d Dr. Amit Varshizky Curriculum Vitae, 2019/2020. Jena Center Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts
  2. ^ 2012-2014 and 2016-2017 Research Groups. The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism.
  3. ^ a b (2022) Historian Amit Varshizky: "I am trying to understand Nazism from the inside". Haaretz (Hebrew).
  4. ^ Contributors to This Issue. Cambridge University Press.
  5. ^ the Bartal Am VeOlam Prize of the Israel Historical Society for an outstanding book for the year 2022. Historical Society of Israel.
  6. ^ Dr. Amir Engel (April, 2023). Nazism as a Apiritual Discipline. (Book review, in Hebrew).
  7. ^ Literature Award 2021 Winners. Ministry of Culture and Sport (Israel).
  8. ^ Eran Hadas (June 22, 2022). Dudu Geva Literature Award.
  9. ^ Aharon Lapidot (March 4, 2022). Geniune Magnum Opus. Israel Hayom.
  10. ^ Face of Janus. The Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature.
  11. ^ (May 17, 2022). To Understand Putin, You First Need to Get Inside Aleksandr Dugin's Head. Haaretz.
  12. ^ (November 17, 2023). Israel-Hamas War: What if There's Another Way to Fight Fundamentalism?. Haaretz.
  13. ^ (May 25, 2024). A Society So Indifferent to Death and Destruction Has Already Lost the War. Haaretz.
  14. ^ (August 3, 2024).War Will Usher in Israel's Redemption? Messianic Fervor Is Gaining Popularity Beyond Religious Fanatics. Haaretz.
  15. ^ (May 16, 2020). Startup Nation's Moral Values Are in Decline, and It's Not Just About the Occupation. Haaretz. (March 4, 2023). It's possible to win the war, but the protest chooses the wrong direction. Haaretz. (September 20, 2023). Inside Each of Us lies Little Ben Gvir, who Strives to Make Others miserable.
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