On Antisemitism: A Word in History [Audiobook]

From one of our most eminent historians, a penetrating and timely examination of how the meaning of antisemitism has mutated, with unexpected and troubling consequences. What are we talking about when we talk about antisemitism? For most of its history it was understood to be a menace from the political Right, the province of ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its tiny Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudoscience. When the twentieth century began, the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. For them, there was no confusion about where the threat of antisemitic politics lay, a threat that culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Now, in a piercingly brilliant book that ranges from the term’s invention in the late nineteenth century to the present, Mark Mazower argues the landscape is very different. More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews live in two countries, Israel and the United States, and the former’s military dominance of its region is guaranteed by the latter. Before the Second World War, Jews were a minority apart and drawn by opposition to Fascism into an alliance with other oppressed peoples. Today, in contrast, Jews are considered “white,” and for today’s anti-colonialists, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has become a critical issue. The old Left solidarity is a thing of the past; indeed, the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left, not the Right.