"Fatal Gift: Jewish Intelligence and Western Civilization," is the third volume of Seymour Itzkoff's highly praised series, "Who Are the Jews?"
The theme of this book involves the Holocaust, perhaps the most searing event in the history of the Jews. Itzkoff's main concern is to understand and explain this event in the context of Jewish history and the unfolding meaning of the Western Civilizational experience.
The Holocaust was enabled because the Jews had become a vulnerable minority in Europe, attempting to assimilate, but carrying with them their unalterable heritage of religious and ethnic uniqueness. This they could not shed.
"Fatal Gift" is a plea to understand the place of the Jews in modern Western Civilization, to treasure the Eur-Asian intellectual and creative gifts which the Jews protected and cultivated, and for which they were sacrificed by a modern ideological barbarism.