Studies of anti-Semitism occupy a prominent place among the publications of Sander L. Gilman, a cultural historian and a historian of medicine. In a previous book, Gilman (1986) presented Freud as a case study of Jewish self-hatred and developed the thesis that this ambivalence about his Jewishness influenced many aspects of his life and work. The striking new thesis developed in Freud, Race, and Gender is that Freud's attitudes towards femininity are expressions of his displaced ambivalence towards Jewishness.

In the introduction to Freud, Race, and Gender Gilman reviews the literature and discusses previous treatments of Freud's Jewish identity. He then sketches his original perspective and outlines the plan for his book. He emphasises that for Freud and others, ‘being a male scientist-physician and being a Jew were linked at the turn of the century