What is antisemitism? Reading Jewish history: A book review excellent to read on the holy day of Yum Kippur

I read this article on the holy day of Yom Kippur. 

My experience with the Jewish people goes directly the nurse training I received as a Gentile (non Jewish) student at the Sinai Hospital of Baltimore. 

At that time, the nation was experiencing what the author Buruma describes as "Loyalty to Israel easily reconciled with loyalty to the United States. Holocaust remembrance could even be seen as an aspect of American patriotism—hence, later, the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Not only Israel but the United States would protect Jews against another Shoah."

Unfortunately after reading this book review about "On Antisemitism", book by Mark Mazower, review by Ian Buruma, I now wonder how the Jewish people can possibly survive.  Their identity is now bonded to the Holocaust and become like the cliché, "they have fallen and they can't get up." 😞🕎✡️

"Assimilation, intermarriage, the move away from Jewish neighborhoods, and the weakening of religious ties all made the fate of Israel and the memory of the Holocaust more central to secular Jewish identity. Since the nineteen-sixties, both Jews and non-Jews, especially in Germany, came to see the Second World War through the lens of the Holocaust. The Uses and Abuses of “Antisemitism”

How a term coined to describe a nineteenth-century politics of exclusion would become a diagnosis, a political cudgel, and a rallying cry. Published in The New Yorker by Ian Buruma.

Exactly who the Jews are—often a fraught question—has rarely been a mystery to their enemies.

Stalin cast them as “rootless cosmopolitans” colluding with “American imperialists” to undermine the Soviet Union. In Hitler’s fevered imagination, they were bacilli infecting the healthy “Aryan” race. They have been denounced as lecherous predators and as omnipotent conspirators, as arch-Bolsheviks and arch-capitalists. Increasingly, these days, “Jew” is conflated with “Zionist,” which, as a term of opprobrium, can mean anything from “settler colonialist” to “fascist” to “racist.” The older sense of Zionism—establishing a Jewish state to shield Jews from persecution—has largely slipped from view.

Of course, opposition to Zionism does not itself amount to antisemitism. And right-wing politicians who accuse pro-Palestinian students of antisemitism are hardly credible arbiters. The Trump Administration, which poses as a defender of Jews, has nurtured links to antisemitic extremists; Trump himself has dined with outspoken Holocaust deniers and once said that neo-Nazi marchers raging against Jewish “replacement” of non-Jewish whites included “some very fine people.” A hard-right government full of blood-and-soil nationalists which claims to be the protector of a Jewish minority would once have seemed very peculiar indeed.

When words lose their original meanings and are repurposed as verbal cudgels, the public sphere becomes a jungle of denunciation, intimidation, and even violence. Right-wing politicians who label all critics of Israel antisemites are the mirror image of those who assume that all Jews are Zionists and all Zionists are racists. One of the many virtues of Mark Mazower’s excellent and timely “On Antisemitism” (Penguin Press) is his effort to restore historical context to a word that has become a generic term of condemnation.

The Spanish Inquisition was a powerful institution founded by the Catholic Monarchs in 1478 to combat heresy and enforce religious uniformity, primarily targeting Conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) and Moriscos (Muslim converts), which lasted until its final abolition in 1834. Known for its severity, it utilized torture, forced confessions, and executions known as autos-da-fé, which were public ceremonies of punishment, leading to the deaths of thousands. 

There are Jews who believe that non-Jews have always hated Jews and always will. In this view, antisemitism is unique, permanent, and unchanging. Benzion Netanyahu, the great historian of the Spanish Inquisition, saw Jewish history as a “history of Holocausts.” His son Benjamin, the Israeli Prime Minister, dismisses all criticism of the country’s violence against Palestinians as just another instance of sinat Yisrael, the age-old “hatred of Israel.” His self-appointed role is to protect Jews from another Holocaust, even if the whole world condemns him. Indeed, especially if the whole world condemns him, for that will only bolster his conviction that those who criticize his policies do so “because of the simple fact that we exist.”

Mazower, a scrupulous historian, disagrees. Antisemitism is far from new, he observes, but the nature of this hostility has changed radically over time. In his survey of antisemitism, Mazower largely skips over the religious prejudices of pre-modern Christians.

Like Hannah Arendt before him, he treats Jew-hatred as a consequence of European modernity, which gathered force in the late nineteenth century, when many nation-states were formed. This was an age of political parties, newspapers, high finance, and the rule of law.

In much of Europe, emancipated Jews were now citizens in large cities, with equal rights, and no longer minority subjects of noble houses.

That equality, and the diminishment of obvious markers—peculiar clothes, a strange language, obscure traditions—could be disturbing, and not just to conservative rabbis who saw their authority fading. It represented, for some, an infiltration of untrustworthy outsiders into the mainstream. Not everyone welcomed the liberal, more egalitarian states that emerged from the French and American Revolutions. French conservatives longed for the ancien régime of church and monarchy, German nationalists for a community rooted in native soil. How one viewed the Jews had everything to do with one’s view of the modern state. The term “antisemitism” was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr in his campaign to reverse Jewish emancipation. Mazower sees in this “a kind of counterreaction to the accelerated rhythms of modern times that held out the promise of a better life, a return to older and more familiar ways.”

The twilight of empire was also a time of conspiracy theories about international Jewish cabals, said to manipulate power through money and shadowy networks in order to rule the world. The Russian fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” published in 1903, stirred agitation in many countries, though not always to the same effect. After staging an incursion into Siberia in 1918, the Japanese—introduced to “The Protocols” by the local population—became so persuaded of Jewish power that they later shielded Jews in Asia from Nazi deportations. Such a formidable people, they reasoned, had to be kept on one’s side.

In the eighteen-nineties, this tension came to a dramatic head in France with the Dreyfus Affair, when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was wrongly convicted of treason. France had been humiliated in 1871, by Prussia in a foolish war of its own making, and Dreyfus, accused of passing military secrets to the Germans, was a convenient scapegoat in a time of national malaise. Wealthy, multilingual, and born in the Franco-German Alsace, he fit the stereotype of the cosmopolitan Jew, whose patriotism was always in doubt.

But more was at stake. Dreyfus became the lightning rod in a clash between two visions of France. The Dreyfusards, his defenders, were largely liberal supporters of the secular, democratic Republic; the anti-Dreyfusards were mostly Roman Catholic reactionaries who despised everything the modern state represented. They hated liberals, leftists, cosmopolitans, and Jews, though not necessarily in that order.

Although Dreyfus was eventually exonerated, the pairing of Jews with cosmopolitan liberalism endured. Left-wing antisemitism, which cast Jews as greedy capitalists, existed as well, especially in France, but Jew-baiting remained primarily a right-wing pursuit, the work of illiberal nativists who saw a tiny minority as polluting the purity of their racial or religious communities. 

Amid the nineteenth-century tension between nation and state, those who sided with the nation included many antisemites. Before the Holocaust, this could pass among conservatives as a respectable position.

One witness to the Dreyfus Affair was Theodor Herzl, a liberal, assimilated, secular Austro-Hungarian Jew who covered the trial in Paris as a journalist. Watching Dreyfus stripped of his rank before a jeering crowd, Herzl (about whom Mazower has surprisingly little to say) concluded that the only way Jews could live in safety was to establish a nation-state of their own. He sensed the danger of surging nationalist sentiment in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews under Emperor Franz Joseph had no nation to fall back on, unlike the Czechs or the Hungarians. The empire had offered all its subjects a degree of protection, which is why Jews were among Franz Joseph’s last and most loyal supporters.  Joseph Roth, a Galician-born Jewish novelist, wrote “The Radetzky March” (1932) as an elegy to that lost world. Once the empire collapsed, after the First World War, Jews became prime targets for nationalists.

Their view was partly molded by the fact that Jacob Schiff, a Jewish banker in New York, had helped to finance Japan’s war with Russia in 1905. A similar calculation surfaced during the First World War, when Allied powers sought Jewish financial aid. Mazower suggests that this influenced Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, who in 1917 pledged support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Not all Jews welcomed the gesture. J. H. Levy, a British economist, argued that if “we proclaim ourselves aliens . . . I am at a loss to understand on what ground we can cry out that we are being unjustly treated as foreigners.” In his view, “the one thing that Zionism seems likely to attain is the manufacture of a logical basis for anti-semitism.”

The battle in France, and elsewhere, between two concepts of the state—one liberal and democratic, the other rooted in blood, faith, and soil—was mirrored in Jewish responses to antisemitism. One answer was to build a Jewish state; the other, to fight for the emancipation of all oppressed people through universalist, often left-wing, politics. Karl Marx imagined that the “Jewish question” would vanish once the proletariat ruled. For many Jewish immigrants in the United States, Marxism would, in the twentieth century, replace Judaism as a common faith.

Alas, Jewish skeptics of Zionism who preferred to think of themselves as cosmopolitans found no reprieve. Antisemites denounced Jews both as capitalists and as communists—two creeds international in scope. Businessmen and revolutionaries alike tended to disregard borders. Hitler was obsessed with the notion of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda minister, claimed that “only in the brain of a nomad who is without nation, race, or country could this satanism have been hatched.”

Jochen Hellbeck, a historian of Russia, argues in his arresting and deeply researched new book, “World Enemy No. 1” (Penguin Press), that Hitler’s paranoia about Judeo-Bolshevism was the chief cause of the Holocaust. Hitler sought to annihilate the Jews, Hellbeck writes, because he needed to destroy Bolshevism. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, in this reading, turned all Jews into Bolsheviks. Hellbeck makes much of the virtues of Marxist internationalism—perhaps a little too much. He claims that anti-racism was a prominent feature of Soviet life, and that the heroic resistance to Nazi Germany was driven mainly by Communist conviction.

Hellbeck’s thesis is interesting but overstated. Stalin, mainly for political reasons, was hardly a friend of the Jews. Jews were purged from the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1939, when the Soviet Union signed a pact with Nazi Germany, and antisemitic show trials followed not long after Germany’s defeat. Soviet propaganda, in any case, cast the war against Germany in patriotic, not ideological, terms. People fought for Mother Russia more readily than for Stalin or Marx.

Hitler’s idée fixe about Judeo-Bolshevism was real enough, but so was his belief that Roosevelt and Churchill were puppets of “finance Jewry.” He was convinced that Washington and London were “Jewified.” This had been a common belief among nativists and racists. Houston Stewart Chamberlain—who was born British, became a German citizen, married Richard Wagner’s daughter, and admired Hitler—was among those who saw the U.K. and the U.S. as horribly tainted by their immigrant populations. The far greater savagery of the Nazi war against Soviet citizens, compared with that against the Anglo-American Allies, had less to do with ideology than with race: the peoples of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were, in Nazi eyes, “inferior races,” rather than merely dupes of those rich, all-powerful Jews.

What shifted the balance between a universalist fight against antisemitism and the drive for a Jewish homeland was the Holocaust. For hundreds of thousands of survivors—languishing in displaced-persons camps, homeless and unwelcome almost everywhere—Palestine was the only refuge. An idea had become a necessity. The State of Israel, founded in 1948, was meant to answer centuries of humiliation and exclusion which had culminated in mass murder. 

Nevertheless, it would take time before allegiance to Israel and remembrance of the Holocaust became twin pillars of Jewish identity, in Israel and abroad.

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, had little interest in dwelling on Europe’s recent catastrophes. He wanted to raise a new kind of Jew, the heroic son or daughter of the ancient soil. 

In a conversation with Nahum Goldmann, a founder of the World Jewish Congress, Ben-Gurion admitted that Israel’s conflict with the Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and everything to do with land. Yet, he still invoked the Nazi analogy for public effect: on the eve of the Suez crisis, in 1955, he told the Knesset that “Nazi dogma” was “being sounded anew on the banks of the Nile.”

Many Jews from Europe and the Middle East moved to the new state out of idealism or desperation. Most Jews in the diaspora, though, did not yet see Israel’s fate as bound up with their own. Whatever Gentiles might have thought in private, the Nazis had made overt antisemitism unfashionable, even odious. As Mazower notes, “American Jews benefitted from postwar prosperity and joined in the consumerist boom and the joys of suburban life.”

Ben-Gurion nonetheless cast Israel early on as the homeland of all Jews. In 1952, his government declared, “The State of Israel regards itself as the creation of the entire Jewish people.” He saw the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi administrator of the Holocaust, held in Jerusalem, in 1961, as an opportunity to tether Israel’s fortunes to the memory of genocide. In his opening speech, the prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, said that he was not standing alone: “With me are six million accusers.” Hannah Arendt, who was present, wrote that the trial was meant to show young Israelis “what it meant to live among non-Jews, to convince them that only in Israel could a Jew be safe and live an honorable life.”

Mazower might have said more about this moment. The larger message w
as aimed not just at Israelis but at Jews everywhere: a threat to Israel was a threat to all Jews. Still, perhaps he is right not to overstate its impact. Diasporic Jews still vastly outnumbered Israeli Jews, and Jewish activists were prominent in the American civil-rights movement, keeping alive the liberal-left, universalist approach to fighting racial prejudice. Arendt, for one, disapproved of using the Eichmann trial for the purposes of Israeli state propaganda. She thought that Eichmann should have been tried by an international court, since his complicity in genocide was a crime against humanity, not just against the Jews.

A decisive shift came in 1967, when Israel defeated its Arab neighbors in the Six-Day War and occupied Arab lands in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Jews, especially in the United States, felt a new solidarity with the Jewish state. They took pride in Israeli prowess on the battlefield, and this time—more than during the Eichmann trial—the traumas of the past came into play. Mazower cites the sociologist Marshall Sklare, who studied a generic Chicago suburb that he calls “Lakeville.” The response there, Sklare wrote, reflected the sense that its Jews had been spared the Holocaust “by fortunate circumstance.” But now the Middle East war “brought to the forefront of consciousness the possibility of a repetition of that history—the possibility of another Holocaust.”

Loyalty to Israel could easily be reconciled with loyalty to the United States. Holocaust remembrance could even be seen as an aspect of American patriotism—hence, later, the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Not only Israel but the United States would protect Jews against another Shoah.

Assimilation, intermarriage, the move away from Jewish neighborhoods, and the weakening of religious ties all made the fate of Israel and the memory of the Holocaust more central to secular Jewish identity. Since the nineteen-sixties, both Jews and non-Jews, especially in Germany, came to see the Second World War through the lens of the Holocaust. 

Memoirs, monuments, films, and history projects brought it into public view. As Black Americans called for remembrance of slavery to forge political solidarity, Jews could turn to the Holocaust as a source of collective recognition.

Only after the 1967, war, Mazower writes, did American Jews begin to “embrace the idea of the Holocaust not merely as history but as a warning for the future and an integral part of their sense of themselves.” Once threats to Israel were cast as existential threats to Jews everywhere, the line between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, or of Zionism itself, began to blur. In Mazower’s words, “The era in which antisemitism could be discussed without reference to Israel was about to end.”

He rightly calls “preposterous” the claim that American universities are hotbeds of institutionalized antisemitism. Still, to adapt an old Jewish joke, some anti-Zionists dislike Israel a little more than is necessary. Much of this, too, goes back to 1967. Especially once Israel occupied Arab lands beyond the 1948 borders, the Palestinian struggle was folded into a global fight against colonialism and neocolonialism. Since colonialism is often treated as the West’s original sin, Israel was made to bear the guilt of five centuries of European empire. The state had not been founded to build an empire—Jews had no imperial metropole—but the settlement of Jewish communities on Arab land after 1967 did turn Palestinians into colonial subjects of a kind.

To describe the occupied territories as representing “apartheid” or “settler colonialism” may be contentious, but it is not, in itself, antisemitic. Calling the mass killing of civilians in Gaza a genocide is contentious as well, but even patriotic Israelis disgusted by their own government have begun to use the term. David Grossman, the novelist and longtime critic of Israeli politics, and a humanist in the liberal Jewish tradition, recently told an interviewer that he could not help but do so.

Still, there’s reason for unease when critics of Israel use the Holocaust as a rhetorical weapon against the Jewish state. 

Mazower describes Jew-hatred as largely a right-wing phenomenon, but placards showing Anne Frank in a kaffiyeh or Stars of David defaced with swastikas send a blunt message: Jews are as bad as Nazis. Such gestures predate Netanyahu’s current government. In 2002, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago compared the plight of Palestinians in Ramallah to that of Jews in Auschwitz. Such comparisons are too easily drawn, with too much self-righteousness, as though the guilt for what was done to the Jews could be lightened just a little by likening them to their own murderers. As the German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder once said, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

At the same time, something strange has happened to the State of Israel. Ben-Gurion was a hard man, who never denied that Jewish settlement would involve violence. Even he might have been shocked, though, to see an Israeli government bent on ethnic cleansing through bombing and starvation. 

Grossman, reflecting on the brutality unleashed under Netanyahu, traces this, too, back to 1967: “The occupation has corrupted us. . . . We’ve become very strong militarily, and we’ve fallen into the temptation that comes with our absolute power: the idea that we can do anything we want.”

Perhaps the rot set in earlier. Moderate, left-wing political Zionists never intended Israeli politics to be shaped by racist aggression. From Herzl onward, many of them hoped for a peaceful modus vivendi with the Arab population; a dwindling number of liberals still dream of a two-state solution. Harder-line thinkers dismissed the idea from the start. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of revisionist Zionism—a more militant, maximalist current within the movement—argued in 1923, that there could be “no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,” because there was no “solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population.”

Jabotinsky would probably have agreed with today’s campus protesters that Zionism is a colonial enterprise. What he might not have foreseen is that Israel would one day become a model for politicians of the far right in Europe and the United States. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, enjoys warm relations with Netanyahu, each lavishing praise on the other, even as Orbán traffics in antisemitic conspiracy theories drawn straight from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The anti-Dreyfusards, one suspects, would find more to like in the current State of Israel than the Dreyfusards would.

When Shimon Peres lost the 1996, election to Netanyahu, he is said to have remarked, “The Israelis lost, the Jews won.” He seems to have meant that Israel had split into two nations, like France in the Dreyfus era: “Israelis” as citizens of a modern state, “the Jews” as members of a blood-and-soil community. It was one way to describe the collapse of secular, left-of-center politics in Israel.

What’s clear is that traditional roles have been oddly reversed. The Jewish state has embraced ethno-nationalism, while many of its international critics, including quite a few Jews, claim to fight for the oppressed everywhere. 

To call all these critics antisemites makes no sense. What about the effort to apply the label to figures such as Mahmoud Khalil? Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student (and a green-card holder), was arrested by ICE officers in March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests on campus and locked up for more than a hundred days. Trump tweeted that he was a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student,” warning of more arrests of those engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

In fact, Khalil had been negotiating on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that sees Israel’s violence against Palestinians as part of a global system of capitalist, colonialist, racist oppression. “Palestine,” in its view, “is the vanguard for our collective liberation. . . . We support freedom and justice for the Palestinian people, and for all people.”

This may sound simplistic or wrongheaded, but it is not antisemitic. Indeed, it fits squarely within the left-liberal, universalist tradition of Jewish resistance to antisemitism. 

Khalil himself—a Syrian-born Palestinian married to an American—might even be called a rootless cosmopolitan. That he should have been jailed by an “America First” Administration in defense of a government filled with racists who condone the killing and starving of civilians is damaging to the United States, disastrous for the Palestinians, not good for Israel, and certainly bad for the Jews. ♦








Published in the print edition of the September 29, 2025, issue, with the headline “You People.”