On the left and the right, from podcasts to protests, from the heights of the Ivory Tower to the depths of Twitter, antisemitism has haunted every corner of American life since the October 7 attacks. As governments, politicians, and universities attempt to ferret out antisemitism, an agreed-upon definition of antisemitism — especially in relation to the state of Israel — has proved elusive. Mark Mazower’s new book attempts to clarify the terms of the ongoing debates about antisemitism, Israel, and Gaza by viewing antisemitism as a historically conditioned and evolving concept rather than a static, eternal Jew-hatred.
The book’s first half centers on Europe, where most of the world’s Jews lived prior to the Holocaust. Modern racialized, conspiratorial antisemitism emerged from the shocks of the nineteenth century, when capitalism and modernity reordered almost every aspect of western life; the disillusioned and aggrieved seized upon the newly emancipated Jews of Europe as physical embodiments of these destabilizing forces. Antisemitic ideas exploded in popularity following the upheavals of the First World War; to many, a Jewish cabal seemed to lurk behind every vicissitude of modernity. Antisemitism’s political ascendancy over the successive three decades is well known. Mazower insightfully frames Nazism as an attempt to roll back the emancipation of Jews across Europe. While popular antisemitism did not evaporate at the end of the Second World War, it quickly became socially and politically unacceptable in western Europe. It lingered longer in the USSR, and many Soviet Jews emigrated.
After the war, the center of Jewish life shifted to the United States and Israel, and with it the major developments in the history of antisemitism, which the book’s second half traces. Crucial to the evolving definition of antisemitism was, unsurprisingly, the founding of the state of Israel. American Jewish communities felt no special kinship with Israel until the Six Day War, when the threat of its annihilation galvanized American Jewish identity and forged affective bonds between American Jews and Israelis. Increasingly, for some, antisemitism extended to include anti-Zionism and other criticisms of Israel. This change was neither inevitable nor wholly organic; the book deftly explores how antisemitism was defined, and how anti-antisemitism activism was institutionalized, by governments, academics, and Jewish organizations. With his characteristic lucidity, Mazower explores how these efforts converged with other factors to redefine antisemitism as including criticism of the state of Israel. As activists and institutions equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the latter became an increasingly unstable and contested concept. After October 7, this volatile dynamic exploded.
Mazower presents a convincing, albeit American-centric, argument for how antisemitism has acquired new meanings over the past century. He does not fully grapple with how easily legitimate critiques of Israeli policy can intertwine with conspiratorial Jew-hatred, especially in recent years, but the clarity and precision with which he analyzes the history of antisemitism throws into sharp relief how ill-defined other terms, like Zionist and anti-Zionism, that currently structure public and campus debates about Israel and Gaza are. As discourse about the conflict continues to clamor, hopefully more thoughtful and humane voices like Mazower can rise above the noise.
Meghan Riley earned a PhD in Modern European History from Indiana University. She is a postdoctoral fellow at Northern Arizona University.
