340 Book Reviews

UPCP1058-46091091-7675Political Communication, Vol. 24, No. 3, Jun 2007: pp. 0–0Political CommunicationBehind Media Marginality: Coverage of Social Groups and Places in the IsraeliMedia, by Eli Avraham. New York, Lexington Books, 2003. 272 pp. $79.00 cloth.

Book ReviewsBook Reviews Reviewed by HANNA HERZOG

Eli Avraham’s Behind Media Marginality is a journey into the riddles of the “mediamind.” Avraham’s book offers a new perspective on media in practice. He unveils theinner workings of the media. Perhaps most importantly, he asks why minority and periph-eral social groups are often disregarded, marginalized, and described as “other” and as athreat to the dominant social order by the media. Israeli media is Avraham’s case study.He investigates the Hebrew newspapers’ coverage patterns of four socially and geograph-ically peripheral groups in Israel. These groups are the following: kibbutzim, Jewish set-tlements in the Occupied Territories, Arab communities, and development towns. Eachplays an instrumental part in the ongoing social negotiations over social boundaries,national and ethnic identity, political boundaries, and citizenship. Comparing these groupsand places contributes to our understanding of the media and its role in the formation ofnational identity. Thus, this book contributes not just to theoretical discourse about themedia but also to the sociology of Israeli society by opening another “black box” into thetroubling question of how reality is constructed.

This book was based on an enormous research project that seeks to present a histori-cal perspective on 30 years of press coverage. Methodologically, it utilizes previousstudies, statistical and demographic data about the analyzed groups, qualitative and quan-titative content analysis of newspaper articles, and interviews with editors, reporters, andgovernment spokespeople. Such a wide range of data allows Avraham to create a modelthat considers the nature of reciprocal relationships within the social-political context ofthese groups. This model includes groups’ geographical and sociological location (popula-tion size, socioeconomic profile, rate of crime), the proximity between social groups andfoci of power, the social-ideological distance between journalists and the studied groups,editorial policy toward these groups, groups’ public relations and strategies in response totheir coverage, and the coverage patterns of the groups/places. Each factor is introduced ina detailed way and is clearly analyzed.

The relationship between the center and periphery has, for a long time, troubledresearchers who have studied society and media. Avraham’s multilevel approach to fram-ing the “peripheral location” of place and group is an important contribution, one thatallows the author to include research from many previous studies (pp. 14–15, 27–43) andto deconstruct the dominant perception of various groups’ and places’ locations. The built-in paradoxical nature of the peripheral location between fact and the socially constructedterm is what makes this model so persuasive. Israel is a very small place geographicallyand demographically. What is defined as a peripheral geographical location might be nomore than an hour’s drive or less from the “center.”

The four groups/places are defined as marginal on different social characteristics.However, though they are spread across the geographical and social landscape, thesegroups and places are treated as remote social categories. Though centrality and marginal-ity have no one leading logic that defines them, they are one of the most dominant framesused by politicians, media, and the groups themselves, and though marginal locations havechanged over time, the language of discourse used to describe them is strong and has a life

Hanna Herzog is Sociologist in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University.Address correspondence to Hanna Herzog. E-mail: hherzog@post.tau.ac.il

Book Reviews 341

of its own. Finally, though many changes are the result of complex sociopolitical relation-ships and contingent relations, we still believe in the limitless power of the media or, alter-natively, in its powerlessness and subordination to political and/or economic powers.Avraham’s exploration into the “black box” of the media mind successfully illustrates thecomplexity of the social-political environment and the power of the social construction ofimages.UPCP1058-46091091-7675Political Communication, Vol. 24, No. 3, Jun 2007: pp. 0–0Political Communication

The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, byJeffrey Herf. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. 416 pp. $29.95cloth.

Book ReviewsBook Reviews Reviewed by KURT LANG

Anyone with even an inkling of history should know something of the long history of ani-mosity toward Jews and beliefs about a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. That this phenome-non reached new heights in Hitler’s Germany should become indisputably clear to anyonereading Jeffrey Herf’s thoroughly documented study. Its focus is on the content of Nazipropaganda but, as he forewarns the reader, includes no data on how Germans respondedto the stream of anti-semitic messages.

The general thesis advanced by the author and documented with an abundance ofquotes drawn from a range of sources—such as media output, propaganda guidelines, andpersonal diaries including those of propaganda minister Josef Goebbels—is that the cam-paign against Jews was central to the Nazi view of the world. More specifically, he aversthat the paranoiac myth of an international Jewish conspiracy against Germany wasinvoked, on the one hand, to justify military actions taken to assure Germans their rightfulplace in the world and, on the other, to make them understand, as the military situationdeteriorated, just how strong was the evil power opposing legitimate German claims.International Jewry and Jewish money were depicted as prime movers behind AngloAmerican intractability toward Germany. And when the Wehrmacht encountered unex-pectedly strong resistance in the campaign against the Soviet Union, this was likewiseattributed to the devilishly clever Jewry for whom the old bolshevist crowd was merely afront. The wartime alliance of capitalist and communist states against Germany provedthat one could be both at the same time and that German troops were deployed in a purelydefensive reaction.

It follows, according to Herf, that the underlying ideological rationale driving theHolocaust was not just, and certainly not primarily, derived from a pseudoscientific biologyabout racial inferiority. Important as beliefs exemplified by the crude stereotypes of Jews inJulius Streicher’s The Stürmer may have been as a predisposing influence, “the core accu-sation [by Hitler and his henchmen] against the Jews was not one about physical appear-ance, sexual appetites, or the Jewish body.… Rather, it remained the primarily politicalaccusation that held ‘international Jewry’ responsible for World War II” (p. 206). Similarstatements of this important, possibly controversial, point appear on several other pages.

Kurt Lang is Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Washington.Address correspondence to Kurt Lang, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Box

353340, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-3340, USA. E-mail: lang@ u.washington.edu