Many books have been written about anti-Semitism. This one is different. Without for a moment averting his eyes from the particular horrors of the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, or of its culmination in the Holocaust, Jackson invites us to go deeper. Jackson finds in anti-Semitism fundamentally an effort to escape our humanity before God, a form of idolatry that lashes out in hatred of God and of the frail and vulnerable, whom God loves. He summons each of
us recognize our own inner Nazi, intent on denigrating others in order to elevate ourselves, resistant to a moral monotheism that demands universal love and suffering service to the world. A proper engagement with these matters, he insists, must be radically self-involving, not detached or merely
analytic. Mordecai Would Not Bow Down is a profound, lyrical, forceful book that will not let you go.
Timothy P. Jackson is Professor of Christian Ethics at The Candler School of Theology at Emory University. He is the author of Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal Democracy and The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice, among other works.