Kreisky, Israel, and Jewish Identity

The book revolves around understanding and illuminating the myriad ways in which Kreisky's Jewishness was—or was not—a formative factor in his treatment of "Jewish" questions within Austrian politics, Austrian-Israeli relations, and his active engagement in Middle Eastern affairs. This deeper understanding mainly emerges through examining Kreisky's actions during several pivotal events like the Kreisky-Peter-Wiesenthal affair, the Waldheim affair, the 1973 Marchegg incident, and his overall relationship to Zionism, the State of Israel, and the Palestinian Arab world.

This book is not a comprehensive biography of Kreisky. Instead, it attempts to document and place Kreisky's fraught engagement with his Jewishness and the related sensitive issues that touched upon it in a historical, political, ideological, and personal context. This mainly comes down to the entangled and always-ambiguous politics of identity, especially his understanding of his Jewishness.