Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 31, 2015

A Science-Fiction Classic’s Bizarre Obsession with Jews

Why does Dune portray the Jews as a "fossil-people"?

In his novel Dune, Frank Herbert depicts a future where today’s great religions have been “scrambled” into new faiths. Judaism, however, appears in the book’s sixth and final volume as having remained unchanged for thousands of years. Michael Weingrad notes that “Herbert’s portrait of the Jews owes more than a little to anti-Semitic stereotypes,” and explains what’s behind it:

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