Not long after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, assault on Israel and the start of that country’s brutal and ongoing war of retaliation, students at Columbia University—as well as many other colleges—set up an encampment to protest against Israel’s bombardment of Palestinian civilians. Both Columbia’s administration and New York City’s elites panicked. A group of billionaires began lobbying the mayor to get rid of the encampment. So did many outside commentators, who insisted that the students involved were antisemites, though many of them were Jews. Before long, the city’s riot squads had stormed the campus, and the school locked its gates against its own students. By that point, “the community of learning I knew and loved had vanished,” writes Mark Mazower, an eminent historian of twentieth-century Europe who has taught at Columbia for decades, in his new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History.
As the school year limped on, Mazower found himself struggling to understand what had happened. But “if one thing was clear to me,” he writes, “it was that the lines dividing antisemitism from opposition to Israeli policies and criticism of Zionism had become hopelessly blurred.” And dangerously so: On Antisemitism begins by establishing that “antisemitism” is both a powerful word—a “word weapon,” as Mazower puts it—and a troublingly ill-defined one. It was coined by a German in 1879, entered the common vocabulary during World War II, and is now used to describe anything from calls to boycott Israeli hummus to white-supremacist demagogues who tell their followers that “the Jews” are conspiring to replace them. Clearly, it is incoherent to lump wholesale racial hatred in with a targeted protest technique, and incoherence of this sort is exactly what intellectual history—the genre to which On Antisemitism belongs—is built to address. If most history chases what happened, intellectual history chases the ideas that made it happen; if the former helps explain why we live how we live, the latter addresses why we think what we think and feel what we feel. At a moment when many people’s thoughts and feelings about antisemitism are intense without necessarily being intelligible to others, and when accusations of antisemitism are tremendously forceful, Mazower’s book makes an immense contribution. In tracing the evolving meaning of “antisemitism,” he demonstrates persuasively how we might turn it from a weapon back into a word.
It helps that Mazower, as a scholar of nationalism, is used to negotiating the risk that his research and arguments may turn into what the legendary English historian Eric Hobsbawm called “a politically or ideologically explosive intervention” in the present. From the beginning, he’s clear that On Antisemitism, though it isn’t strictly about nationalism, will deal at length with Israeli nationalist—that is, Zionist—ideology. It has to. The intellectual arc Mazower traces is the transformation of antisemitism’s meaning from persecution of Jews on ethnic or religious grounds to any criticism of anything Jews do, even if the Jews in question are the government and defense forces of the state of Israel. That transformation is intertwined with the historical evolution of Zionism, and Mazower does not think that it’s good for the Jews.
Growing up, I understood antisemitism as a form of discrimination that nearly killed my great-grandparents. My grandparents faced it in serious ways, my parents in smaller ones, and I, an American Jew born in 1991, hardly ever encountered it at all. When I did, the experiences were minor, almost laughable. But during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, when I was in my early twenties, I repeatedly found myself in conversations where my interlocutor referred to Israel as “you” or “you guys,” as if I were directly involved in its choices and campaigns. I thought this was antisemitic. I still do. Over the course of that invasion, though, I came to understand that my concept of antisemitism wasn’t universal. It seemed to be the inverse of what some others believed. According not only to the acquaintances I thought were antisemitic, but to a good number of the Jews around me and to the Israeli government itself, my Jewishness meant I was automatically associated with Israel. My ethnicity roped me into its nationalist program, even though I had no desire to live there and was politically opposed to Zionism. In fact, that opposition, which frequently manifested as critique of Israel, was, according to the Zionists around me, itself antisemitic. I’d thought I was an American Jew, but apparently, I was an Israeli antisemite.
If we don’t agree on what antisemitism is, we—no matter who we are—risk having it used against us.
All of this was immensely confusing in 2014. In the last two years, it’s gotten much, much worse. Mazower writes in his introduction to On Antisemitism, “Anyone who takes antisemitism seriously as an ongoing problem must surely therefore be dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning.” In part, this is a rhetorical strategy for creating consensus, since many readers who do consider criticism of Israel antisemitic also take antisemitism seriously as an issue. It’s a clear way to assert the full stakes of his work, which Americans are now seeing in real time. Since returning to the presidency, Donald Trump has harassed and tried to defund universities—starting, not coincidentally, with Columbia—on the spurious grounds that they foster antisemitism. His Department of Homeland Security has illegally detained foreign students for supporting Palestinian rights. Powerful Democrats, meanwhile, have smeared New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani with groundless claims that he’s an antisemite. It doesn’t help “Jews or anyone else,” Mazower writes, “when the ongoing struggle against discrimination and prejudice is used opportunistically to try to destroy the autonomy of universities, political freedoms, and liberty of thought itself.” In short, if we don’t agree on what antisemitism is, we—no matter who we are—risk having it used against us.
Mazower has devoted his career to studying Europe, and On Antisemitism, like antisemitism itself, begins there. At the start of chapter one, he quotes an anonymous French journalist who, in 1881, reported that in Germany an “anti-Jewish party formed … and was called the antisemitic party.” In Mazower’s estimation, this is the beginning of antisemitism proper: that is, as an ideology that names itself and that manifests not only through “attitudes, symbols, or stereotypes, but with political actions, theories, organizations, and outcomes.” Already, this is a useful distinction in two ways. First, it is a reminder that an antisemitic individual’s presence in a movement or institution does not make that movement or institution antisemitic. Second, it underscores a truth I know from experience: Hearing somebody express an antisemitic attitude may unsettle me or make me unhappy, but unless that person decides to harm me physically or has the power to turn their ideas into policy, their attitude cannot limit my life.
On Antisemitism covers antisemitism in all of pre–World War II Europe, but it’s especially interested in what Mazower calls “the German lands”—Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In those territories, the nineteenth century was a time of intense nationalism, often of nation-founding. As new countries were established, the question of whether their resident Jews should receive full citizenship loomed large. Enlightenment values of equality and liberalism said yes; ingrained bias and antisemitic politics both said no. In Germany, the government tried to split the difference with a gradual, assimilationist approach, launching educational reforms designed to create a “new kind of Jew” who, while not actively worshipping, would be indistinguishable from a Christian. Reform and Conservative Judaism date back to this historical moment. As far as the history of antisemitism goes, so does the distinction between discrimination against Jews on religious grounds and discrimination on ethnic ones. By the end of the nineteenth century, many German Jews had “cease[d] to differ from their Christian fellow-citizens except in the matter of private faith.” Forty years later, their fellow-citizens exterminated them anyway.
Not all Jews in the German lands were enthusiastic about the assimilationist program. In the view of the very religious, it was a greater threat to their way of life than the overt discrimination to which they were accustomed. Among early Zionists, meanwhile, it was a project that could not mitigate Christians’ hatred of Jews—not that they necessarily wanted it to. Mazower situates Zionism, which emerged as an organized nationalist movement at the very tail of the nineteenth century, among other European nationalisms of the time. Like them, it “thought about the future with and through history. It saw the Jews not merely as those who shared a common faith but as a national unit, a People who had been plunged into exile.” But unlike its fellow nationalisms, Zionism had to reckon with a linguistically and geographically scattered flock. It did so, Mazower argues, by claiming that “miraculous combination of a positive and negative force had kept [the Jews] together through their many centuries of wandering and misery: The positive force was the promise of Israel’s return to Zion; the negative was antisemitism.”
In this analysis, Jews needed to be hated in order to remain Jewish. Accordingly, Zionists refused to believe that non-Jews would ever accept them—a view that trickled even into my highly assimilated twenty-first-century childhood. Among early Zionists, Mazower writes, there was debate over whether antisemitism was “merely another form of national animosity” or something “unique and timeless,” even biblical. Some suggested that it was God’s way of balancing the scales for his chosen people. A group of early Israeli historians, called the Jerusalem School, attached themselves to this vision, which became dominant. (More than dominant, really: It’s an apparent influence on the Jerusalem School historian Benzion Netanyahu’s son Benjamin, the current prime minister of Israel.) Mazower has no patience for it. With uncharacteristic sharpness, he writes that history, “as a secular discipline that seeks to explain events by reference to human action, is fundamentally incompatible with a theological worldview.”
Mazower’s scholarly objection to this semimystical vision of antisemitism isn’t the only one in On Antisemitism. He writes that left-wing and liberal Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worried that not only was hatred of Jews not timeless, it was a phenomenon that the creation of a Jewish state was likely to manufacture. Mazower quotes Jews from Poland to England expressing fears that the Zionist project would both create antisemitism in the Arab world and give non-Jews in every country but Israel grounds to treat Jews as aliens. When the Balfour Declaration was signed in 1917, expressing British support for a Jewish state in Palestine, the Anglo-Jewish economist J.H. Levy worried that “one thing which Zionism seems likely to attain is the manufacture of a logical basis for antisemitism.” Mazower argues that it did precisely that.
But first, of course, there was World War II. Mazower has written several books dealing, in full or part, with the Holocaust, and in On Antisemitism, he focuses on its colossal redistribution of both world Jewry and the world’s ideas about Jews. Before the war, most Jews lived in Europe. After, the surviving ones flocked to the United States and to the land that, in 1948, became Israel. In the United States, Mazower argues, stark nineteenth-century ideas about race were largely good for Jews, who were generally classified as white. (Contemporary American fascists have fixated on this classification, which they reject, but since their ideology contains but is not limited to antisemitism, it would seem to fall outside On Antisemitism’s remit.) Antisemitism rose in the twentieth century along with other reactionary fears about modernity, but after World War II, it was associated with Nazism and started to wane. At the same time, American Jewish organizations began to fight antisemitism by commissioning and disseminating research into the cause of racism of all forms. It was a strategy that both worked well in and of itself and led to significant left-wing Jewish involvement in civil rights coalitions through the 1960s. Jewish leftists in the United States also tended, after World War II, to be anti-Zionists. Because they saw antisemitism as a version of racism, they didn’t see how it could “be solved by turning another people—the Palestinian Arabs—into a homeless minority in turn.” Additionally, they disliked the idea that the United States wasn’t the right place for Jews, which they feared would give rise to a new American antisemitism. (They weren’t quite wrong, in that American Christians’ support for Israel often comes with the implication that Jews are better off there.) But the first problem they identified turned out to be the bigger one.
Here, Mazower turns to Jew-hatred in the Arab world, which he argues emerged largely from the transformation of Palestine into Israel. Sometimes, the fury this unleashed transmuted into what he calls “conspiratorial antisemitism,” as it did in the United States—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion gained traction in both parts of the world as their Jewish populations grew. But more often, it was rooted in anti-colonial anger or hostility over land. Mazower does not consider those sentiments antisemitic, even if they have turned some people who feel them into antisemites. Interestingly, he demonstrates that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, did not understand Arab hatred of Israel as inherently antisemitic either. Mazower quotes Ben-Gurion telling a colleague in 1956, “If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel…. There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see only one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”
And yet in public, Ben-Gurion cast Israel’s Arab enemies as the new Nazis, their dislike of Jews as a new form of the unique and timeless hatred that had dogged the Jewish people for all time. He did not distinguish between different forms of Arab objection to Israel’s existence or policy; nor did he distinguish between different Arab and Muslim nations’ objections. Mazower doesn’t either, since his main interest is tracking the transformation of Ben-Gurion’s rhetoric into an official stance taken by the Israeli state. By the mid-’70s, Israel was describing all its opponents as antisemites and all public opposition to its behavior as antisemitism.
Mazower presents this stance as, to some degree, a defensive one. Even as Israeli leaders called Arab leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser the heirs to Hitler, Arab nationalists “traced a connection between Nazi racism and Zionism [and] consistently argued that Palestine should not be asked to pay the price for Nazi anti-Jewish persecution.” In 1975, the year after the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat first addressed the U.N. General Assembly, that body adopted a resolution describing Zionism as racism and analogizing it to South African apartheid. In Mazower’s estimation, “racism” and “apartheid” are words as weaponized as “antisemitism”; by insisting its opponents were antisemites, then, Israel was fighting fire with fire.
It was also cynically recruiting American Jews to its cause. In the ’70s, antisemitism was no longer the force it had once been in the United States, and the institutions designed to counter it, rather than happily declaring their obsolescence, became increasingly interested and invested in the idea that criticism of Israel was what they called “the new antisemitism.” They continued to promote the idea that American Jews were continual victims of discrimination and even hate crimes, though data did not support this vision. The state of Israel, however, did. Mazower argues that Israeli politicians who sought to expand their population—and, crucially, to attract young, educated immigrants who were not traumatized by World War II or Soviet antisemitism—insisted that Jews could only live in true peace and freedom if they made Aliyah.
In the ’70s, Holocaust remembrance became a greater priority in both the United States and Israel. American Jews began to attach their identity increasingly to it, as well as to the state of Israel. Relatedly, they expressed an increasing sense of vulnerability, instability, and unease, although Mazower notes that, objectively, their conditions had never been better. In fact, they had become more successful and influential than any of the country’s other minority groups. By the end of the twentieth century, American Jews were the most powerful ones in the world and, likely, also in world history. Still, many of them were convinced that the United States was not a safe home for Jews.
As this idea gained traction, Israel began to argue more and more overtly that it was the only true defender of Jewish life. In 2018, it passed a Basic Law declaring itself the official nation-state of all Jews. Mazower describes this law, to which many Israelis objected strenuously, as “almost designed to encourage a confusion between Israel and Jews in general.” It seemed designed to replace “the traditional diaspora paradigm of antisemitism—understood as prejudice or bigotry against Jews as an ethnicity—with one [in which] an attack on Israel was by definition antisemitic because it implied criticism of ‘the Jewish people.’”
Mazower does not believe in this new paradigm. All the many threads in On Antisemitism come together to demonstrate why. Almost since antisemitism appeared as a political concept, Zionists have used it to argue that Jews can only flourish in a Jewish state. Once established, that state has invoked antisemitism not only to make the same claim, but also to shut down opposition and, at times, diplomacy. It has repeatedly manipulated Holocaust remembrance to serve its cause and to diminish the validity of Palestine’s. On this front, Israel is not alone. Germany is paranoically supportive of Israel as a result of Holocaust-memory rhetoric. The United States, Mazower writes, treats the Holocaust as “a guarantee of America’s commitment to Israel.” And the most commonly used definition of antisemitism today, one that many nations have adopted and that Mazower objects to strenuously, was generated by the intergovernmental International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016.
According to the IHRA, antisemitism is a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred.” This unclear definition comes with several examples, including the claim that it may be antisemitic to call the state of Israel racist. What this has to do with Holocaust memory is not specified. It is more broadly baffling, as Mazower points out, to “exempt [Israel] from normal free speech concerns,” given that “many other countries today are also decried as racist in their very origin.” It would seem, in fact, that treating Israel differently in this regard is applying a double standard to it—but that’s something else the IHRA says may be antisemitic. All these mays, Mazower writes, are all too easy to exploit. They have “become very useful to politicians who wish to use the issue of antisemitism to clobber dissent and assail civil liberties. For them, its flaws, confusions, and internal contradictions […] are in fact helpful, offering them cover to pursue their larger goals.”
On Antisemitism is the precise opposite of the IHRA definition. It is rigorous and lucid, and, like any good work of history, it absolutely bristles with primary sources. Even when Mazower’s writing is explicitly opinionated, he always shows the reader precisely what documents or events he’s basing his opinion on. In a book that deals so intensely with the manipulation of ideas and emotions, this transparency is an intense relief. Mazower knocks away decades of obfuscation of what antisemitism actually is to demonstrate, at the very least, what it is not: a unique prejudice, unchanging no matter its context, that affects all Jews equally while rendering the state of Israel above international law and immune to critique or protest. Perhaps that idea, elementary though it may seem, is where a good-faith conversation can start.
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