Antisemitism’s Afterlives

In April 2024, six months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and already with 34,000 Palestinians dead, German police forcibly shut down the Palestine Congress, a solidarity and human rights event in Berlin. One of the attendees, a member of a German group called Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, approached the cordon of police holding a sign reading “Jews Against Genocide.” He was immediately seized and arrested, as was Udi Raz, a Jewish Israeli co-organizer of the event. Upon hearing the sign-holder’s response, “Would it have been alright with you if it said ‘Jews in Favor of Genocide?’” the police reportedly “manhandled him even more fiercely.” According to Iris Hefets, herself arrested for holding a similar sign in 2023, it appears that Jews have been specifically targeted for arrest because they “get in the way of the narrative.”

As German police arrest Jews for protesting genocide, one feels that the world, or at least its words, have turned upside down.

One does not need to be a historian to recognize what is unsettling about German repression of Jews protesting genocide. While a court has since found the raid on the event unlawful, a climate of widespread censorship and harassment endures. As all of it is carried out in the name of protecting Jews and the meaning of the Holocaust, one feels that the world, or at least its words, have turned upside down. The German state has staked redemption for the Shoah on unquestionable support for Israel even as the far-right party Alternative for Deutschland, with an alarming record of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, increases its share of power in the Bundestag. Jews being arrested for insufficient loyalty to a Jewish state stands as a strange emblem of an absurdist present and a menacing echo of a fast-encroaching past.

It is this sense of inversion that historian Mark Mazower’s new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, seeks to chronicle and explain. Opening with Victor Klemperer’s account of the way language became “an instrument of power” under the Third Reich, Mazower suggests we are witnessing a similar kind of transformation today: a nationalist and imperialist right in Israel, Europe, and the United States—abetted by timid or overtly complicit liberals—changing the meaning of words not to capture a new reality but to transform it in the service of holding onto and furthering their power. The term “antisemitism,” coined by a far right eager to couch its own Judeophobia in the modern language of scientific racism and later used as a term of condemnation to name that deadly form of bigotry, is now widely associated with hostility to the state of Israel, especially from Arab and Islamic quarters. How did a word originally intended to justify the exercise of state power over a long-persecuted Jewish minority come to serve as a tool for justifying the power of the Jewish state to persecute vulnerable and stateless Palestinians? That is the story Mazower wants to tell: the way the word tracks the history of state power as much as the history of Jews themselves.

It is a necessary intervention, deflating the specter of antisemitism that has long been deployed to justify attacks on universities, free speech, and Palestine itself, more intensely than ever in recent years. It is also a welcome rejoinder to books that have helped to give this panic moral and intellectual legitimacy, among them Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism (2019) and Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). Both effectively accuse the Palestine solidarity movement of working to eliminate the Jews from positions of prominence in universities and government, or worse. Given such attempts to whip the public into believing that new tracks are being laid for a twenty-first-century Auschwitz, this time by the left, Mazower seeks to force the term back into the more orderly confines of history. Antisemitism marked a particular moment in European history, he argues—a moment that was neither inevitable nor is likely to return.

There is something very satisfying in applying a historical straitjacket to the paranoid style of American Zionist politics. One gets the sense that were cooler minds to prevail, perhaps much-needed clarity could be returned both to the word and to the larger discourse around anti-Jewish politics. Whether this approach is sufficient to place the sorcerer’s brooms back in the closet, however, is less clear. Neither Jewish Zionists nor actual Judeophobes, it seems, are content to leave the gravestones at Babi Yar unmolested. In an era of neofascism, marked by both ethnonationalist genocide against Palestinians and the muscular reassertion of far-right racisms, it is possible that history may be accelerating faster than the clear delineations of linear analysis will allow.

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To be sure, evidence of a transformation in the meaning of “antisemitism” is everywhere one looks. Mazower devotes significant attention to the career of the “working definition” developed in 2004 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization founded in Stockholm and now headquartered in Berlin.

Antisemitism, the working definition states, “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” As Mazower rightly notes, this “says less and does so less clearly” than the definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The controversy concerns the IHRA’s “contemporary examples” of antisemitism, which are alleged to include “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis,” and applying “double standards” to Israel “by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

While the definition was originally intended as a tool for monitoring and research, the United States, Canada, and all but one member state of the European Union have made it legally binding. In 2019 the Trump administration issued an executive order requiring the federal government to abide by the definition and its examples for “robust enforcement of Title VI” of the Civil Rights Act. Joe Biden never rescinded the order, and subsequently several U.S. states passed laws incorporating the definition as well. The definition, Jared Kushner explained at the time, “makes clear what our administration has stated publicly and on the record: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” While it is ambiguous what the definition’s drafters hoped it would accomplish, Kushner’s formula is a common refrain among those who endorse it.

There is thus a particular irony in the claim that Israel ought not be singled out for criticism: no other country besides Israel enjoys such protections in law or custom in these nations. Accusations of Slavophobia are never treated as civil or criminal transgressions, nor would alleging the settler origins of the Russian state or likening Putin to Hitler be deemed racist, any more than charges of Sinophobia are for questioning Han Chinese dominance over other ethnic minorities in the Republic of China. The consequences of adopting the IHRA definition have been severe, compounding existing legal instruments of repression such as anti-terrorism and anti-boycotting laws and supercharging attacks by pro-Israel or antisemitism watchdog groups, many of them backed by right-wing billionaires.

What makes this suppression of speech particularly perverse is that it is being pursued, both culturally and legally, in the name of fighting discrimination. In the words of a recent U.S. federal court ruling, antisemitism has been used as a “smokescreen.” The disorienting result is what might be called civil rights fascism, with far-right GOP politicians like Elise Stefanik and billionaire financiers like Bill Ackman leading the charge, claiming student protesters are calling for the mass extermination of Jews. Public pressure campaigns inspired by their accusations have led to the resignation of Ivy League presidents and fueled lawsuits and federal complaints against pro-Palestine demonstrations and encampments. Challenges to academic freedom have weaponized Title VI lawsuits alleging discrimination or hostile environments against Jews and Israelis. Even where cases aren’t legally successful, they change behavior, prompting risk-averse university administrators to suppress any speech they find liable to prompt lawsuits. The ultimate target isn’t speech codes at elite U.S. colleges but the entire liberal legal framework around race, religion, and the law. In one of the most remarkable of these cases, Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, a federal court found in favor of Jewish students who claimed that a UCLA student encampment, where protesters (including Jews) were violently attacked and ultimately forcibly cleared, violated their religious freedom when it limited entrance to anti-Zionist students. The ruling extends a long history of right-wing backlash politics that first emerged in response to the civil rights movement. In the highest-profile such case, again involving the University of California, a white plaintiff rejected from medical school, Allan Bakke, claimed that the school’s affirmative action program discriminated against white people. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) filed an amicus brief supporting Bakke, just as it now endorses the right-wing narrative that universities are “failing to fight antisemitism.” When the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke only against racial quotas—rather than all forms of race-conscious affirmative action—the ADL’s general counsel, Arnold Forster, expressed disappointment the justices had not gone all the way. Using Title VI to crush Palestine solidarity protests, threaten and extort universities, and ban student organizations thus must be seen as part of a wider, much longer campaign against racial diversity programs and indeed the whole legacy of the civil rights era writ large. In Indiana, these attacks were revealingly combined in two laws passed in close succession by the legislature, one designed to “promote intellectual diversity” in light of Republican distrust of universities and the other to “make sure that Jewish students feel safe and welcome.” Though the latter was vetoed by the governor, both framed their objective as protecting putatively white students against a woke mob of anticolonial students of color. In the Heritage Foundation’s words, “Jewish students having to barricade themselves in a college . . . has opened people’s eyes to the threat woke ideology represents to civilization.” Anti-DEI crusades and anti-“antisemitism” are here one and the same.

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Mazower responds to these alarming developments with his own definition of antisemitism. “The invention of the concept of antisemitism,” he argues, “was part of the birth of the modern.” In particular, it was “a reaction against modernity itself.” Mazower stresses a rupture from the past when the term was introduced in 1879 by journalist Wilhelm Marr’s League of Antisemites and subsequently absorbed into the heady political contestation of post-unification Germany.

Through the attacks of today’s far right, anti-DEI crusades and anti-“antisemitism” have become one and the same.

In this schema, “antisemitism” derives from the historical legacy of anti-Jewish bigotry or Judeophobia, which have their roots in millennia of Christian othering, but it is not synonymous with them. As Freud pointed out, Jewish continuity is a reminder of Christianity’s inability to shake off its ancient traces; Jews remain a kind of stain in the fabric of historical cleansing promised by the new religion. In Mazower’s telling, antisemitism instead names a certain kind of “politically organized” movement. Modern nation-states are born out of contradictory claims: universal citizenship on the one hand, the organic unification of a culturally and racially distinctive people on the other. The contradiction is both enhanced and exposed by a variety of forces, from the construction of a common market for global capitalism to military backing for private overseas imperial conquest. If the modern state is a universal form of belonging, it is also a committee, as Lenin famously said, for the organized bourgeoisie: it can’t be, and yet must be, both. According to Mazower, antisemitism, properly understood, emerged precisely from these contradictions, portraying “the Jews as singlehandedly responsible for pretty much every grievance contemporary life presented and did so using the preeminently modern vehicles of the popular press and party politics.” Antisemitism is thus a particular kind of movement—an organized intervention into particular political crises—that seeks to rid the modern state of its internal other, exemplified by the figure of the unassimilable Jew who threatens the organic unity of the new polity. For Mazower, France’s Dreyfus Affair clearly marks the difference between ancient Jew-hatred and modern antisemitism. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery captain in the French army of Jewish descent, was accused of treason by his superiors. The intelligentsia of the nascent left eventually came to his defense, sparking weeks of pogroms, violence, and street battles and entrenching the perception that antisemitism was the political vehicle for reactionary nationalism against an emergent socialism in a modern world seen as dislocating and oppressive. Cutting against the grain of depictions of antisemitism as eternal and unchanging, Mazower describes the wave of anti-Jewish terror that seized fin-de-siècle Europe, from the Kishinev Pogrom to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as a short-lived, if “shocking,” spasm of violence. Mazower uses the word again and again to describe attacks, beatings, murders, emphasizing their apparently surprising and arbitrary nature; the only people not surprised, in this account, are the Zionists, who thought “the hatred Jews faced from those around them was to be expected.” Indeed, “had the First World War never been fought at all,” Mazower imagines, the soi-disant antisemites might well have faded into history, much like royalists and speakers of Old Church Slavonic. It is an unusually large counterfactual to encounter in the work of a historian. “Where civil rights had been won,” he writes of Europe in 1914, “they had not been rolled back.” Until, of course, they were. With the vast industrial slaughter, marauding armies, and hypernationalism of the Great War, pogroms returned with a vengeance, killing Jews not in the hundreds but the thousands, even tens of thousands—the subsequent crises giving rise to fascism, and in particular to the Nazi Party. Mazower’s focus on the twists and turns, ups and downs of the antisemitic “movement” seems intended to dramatize how the Holocaust, or even antisemitism itself, was neither inevitable nor predicable. It “cannot be emphasized enough,” he writes, how much the Nazis changed everything, “suddenly” placing Jews at the center of politics and then of world history with their attacks on “Jewish power” and specter of “Jewish war.” Fascism thus appears to Mazower as rupture and discontinuity, throwing history off its steady progressive course. The implication is that but for the Nazis, antisemitism as a “world power” would not exist. Perhaps the Jews themselves, seen as a people whose lives and deaths have been the subject of empires and grand theory, would not have “mattered very much from the perspective of world history,” indeed might have remained a “small, venerable sect bypassed by power, not unlike the Parsis or the Jains.” Though in practical terms the Nazis succeeded in making Europe “Judenfrei,” at least west of Moscow, their demise dealt a major blow to the strange obsession with Jews and Jewishness. “Anti-Jewish prejudices survived,” Mazower concedes, “but antisemitism itself as a political movement was largely discredited in the region that had given birth to it.” It would endure, he argues, in the Soviet Union. But starting in the early 1970s, emigration to Israel became possible in larger numbers and then exploded with the fall of the USSR and in the ensuing decades. For Mazower, “a major chapter in the history of antisemitism closed” with this last flight of Russian Jews. The end of history, in this narrative, thus also marks the end of Jewish otherness. As Mazower notes, the centers of Jewish gravity have moved from Europe to the United States and Israel. In the latter, Jews became a demographic majority for the first time in the modern world, while in the former they found a society in which they could thrive, owing to what Mazower calls a “modern conception of all-inclusive citizenship.” These are strange words to read in a moment of resurgent anti-immigrant terror, hardly an isolated or marginal phenomenon in U.S. history. Though Mazower notes that some French commentators saw a new Dreyfus Affair in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage in the early 1950s, he downplays the event’s significance with the dubious alibi that most of the prominent American Jewish institutions “did not share the widespread suspicion of the internationalist left that the case was a product of antisemitic Cold War hysteria.” In this telling, antisemitism barely registers in the American march to equality and inclusion. By the early 1970s, American Jews were living in a golden age of acceptance, prosperity, and security, unparalleled in history. It is true that the late 1960s witnessed a sharp decline in antisemitic attitudes and the end of the last antisemitic housing, educational, and immigration restrictions. Mazower says the change “defies simple explanation,” but really it was part of a wider turn against racism and many other forms of bigotry following the peak of the civil rights movement and the rise of the New Left, which also secured progressive ideas of academic freedom and political expression. Yet American Jewish institutions—including its ostensible civil rights organizations such as the ADL and American Jewish Committee (AJC)—did not welcome these developments as much as they might have. Rather than see the New Left and Black freedom struggles as part of a more liberal, multicultural America, they perceived these movements as an existential threat to Israel. In one of many epochal changes in the American Jewish world, the U.S. embrace of Israel as a Cold War ally against the Soviet-backed Arab states, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, led to a dramatic institutional realignment from the lukewarm “non-Zionism” of the immediate postwar era to the muscular Zionism that still prevails—reframing Israel as the primary, even sole concern of American Jews. One consequence, Mazower points out, is that Palestinians ceased to be seen as displaced people seeking national liberation and instead came to be portrayed as antisemites: where they had once been a national enemy of an expanding Israeli state, they were now a bigoted enemy of a still-vulnerable global Jewish people. Meanwhile, leftist organizations went from being categorized as subversives to purveyors of racist and illiberal hate.

The greatest attack on Jews since the Holocaust took place not October 7 but in the late 1970s at the hands of the Argentine Junta.

This “new antisemitism” thesis was crystallized in a 1974 book by that name authored by ADL leaders Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Forster—the latter the general counsel who would go on to file an amicus brief on behalf of Allan Bakke. What gave the thesis force was that it attracted the notice of neoconservatives and Orientalists in the State Department and the Pentagon. Scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, along with Defense Department figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, were eager to cast Middle Eastern rivals and the Soviet Union as bastions of racism and to further discredit an already waning anti-imperialist left with charges of antisemitism. Perhaps the most absurd early episode of this alliance occurred during the Reagan administration, when the State Department called the pro-Palestinian Nicaraguan Sandinista government antisemitic in an attempt to persuade American liberals that the leftist revolutionary state was threatening religious and ethnic minorities in the country. Tellingly, the one Jewish American to be assassinated in Nicaragua was an American socialist, Ben Linder, who traveled to Nicaragua to help rural communities establish electrical power. He was murdered by the Contras in 1987. His death, needless to say, was not investigated by the Reagan administration as an act of antisemitism, or for that matter even a crime. But the new antisemitism thesis didn’t really kick into high gear, either in the United States or European Union, until after September 11. The Global War on Terrorism launched in its wake relied both on the liberal, democratic rhetoric of “freedoms” as well as on Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”—in particular, between a revanchist Muslim world mired in social pathology and a Western liberal world of enlightenment rationality and consumer plenty. A “new cadre of antisemitism watchdogs” flourished, Mazower notes, as nonprofits and Jewish institutions were absorbed into new governance structures such as the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe and the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Accusations of antisemitism became a tool for projecting American and European imperial power in the name of defeating illiberal Muslim states and loosely organized terror networks, just as it serves today as a tool for exercising state control over universities in the name of protecting Jewish students. The specter of the “Islamofascist,” so prominent after 9/11, combined the historic defeat of Nazi Germany with a new enemy of the American imperium, the figural Jew again needing to be saved—this time in the form of the state of Israel. If civil rights fascism is the logic of the new anti-antisemitism in the United States, human rights imperialism is this logic applied abroad. The effect of all this has been to cement the changing meaning of “antisemitism.” By 2016, the IHRA had formally adopted its working definition and examples. Monitoring the new antisemitism has become a matter of surveillance, discipline, and law, so much so that paying lip service to combatting antisemitism is all that is needed—from Trump to Viktor Orbán to Boris Johnson—to be welcomed into the polite society of Western nations. This has led scholars such as Enzo Traverso to claim that the structures of exclusion and marginalization once associated with the term have been wholly subsumed by Islamophobia. Others, such as Barry Trachtenberg, have concluded “antisemitism” is no longer a useful term at all and should be replaced by “anti-Jewish hatred.” Mazower ends by returning to Klemperer, who wrote of the process by which “a currently highly fashionable expression, one apparently never destined to be expunged, suddenly goes silent [and] disappears with the context that gave birth to it.” A long historical cycle, with the Holocaust and the fight against fascism at its center, is over, Mazower implies, and “antisemitism” might soon become just such a “fossil” as Klemperer imagined.

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All this goes a long way to substantiating what the likes of Weiss and Lipstadt get wrong. At the same time Mazower’s paeans to American liberal democracy ring hollow in the present moment. In hindsight, the “golden age” of Jewish assimilation he describes—part of the broader legacy of the civil rights era and the New Left the book says little about—looks to have been only a brief thaw in the longer arc of America’s post–Civil War attack on Reconstruction, racial equality, and the left. The book oddly conveys little of American antisemitism in particular, from Civil War forced removals to the Immigration Act of 1924 (which created the U.S. Border Patrol, prevented the vast majority of Jews from fleeing Nazi Germany, and barred immigration from Asia entirely). Perhaps the most familiar example of state-sponsored antisemitism, the midcentury Red Scare, goes by in a single sentence. Its central conceit—that a cabal of secretive communists was plotting to undermine America from within, in league with the Soviet Union—was only a slightly softer version of the Nazi’s own “Judeo-Bolshevik threat.” The greatest attack on Jews since the Holocaust took place not October 7 but in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Argentine Junta, backed by the United States and armed with weapons from Israel, killed at least 1,296 and possibly as many as 3,000 Jews in its own Red Scare. Mazower’s narrative effectively relegates all this to a distant past. All signs rather suggest that history is not quite over. While both liberals and conservatives target Palestine solidarity activists in the name of anti-antisemitism, the Republican Party has a vocal and growing antisemitic base. In Mazower’s own terms, this is anti-Jewish sentiment not only as ancient prejudice but as organized political movement—antisemitism, that is, in the modern sense. Trump’s Jew-baiting political ads and invocations of Soros conspiracy theories cannot be dismissed as shocking but isolated phenomena, paroxysms of a mad king. Not only are they voiced by the most powerful head of the most powerful state in the world; they represent a crucial plank of the far-right worldview. At a recent conference hosted by Turning Point USA (TPUSA)—the unofficial youth wing of the GOP—J. D. Vance contrasted his party of “free thinkers” to “a bunch of drones who take their orders from George Soros.” That was shortly after Steve Bannon said, to mass applause, that kippah-clad Ben Shapiro—himself a speaker at the conference—“is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads.” Last year, at another TPUSA event, a student pressed Vance about the unreasonableness of conservative support for Israel, concluding: “Not only does their religion not agree with ours, but [it] also openly supports the prosecution of ours.” The vice president, of course, has worked for years to renovate a white nativism obsessed with heritage and ancestry; at a revealing moment in a book event with Charles Murray after the release of Vance’s memoir in 2016, the two shared a laugh about what Murray called their “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood.” When news broke last year about a group chat of Young Republican leaders joking about Hitler and gas chambers, Vance made a point of refusing to condemn it. Meanwhile, popular podcasters such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes broadcast a toxic mix of far-right and Christian antisemitism to their millions of followers. When the center-right political establishment uniformly and brutally represses criticism of Israel, it is not hard to understand why some welcome the apparently bold truth-telling of Owens, Fuentes, and Tucker Carlson. The reality, however, is that they are mobilizing popular outrage at Israel to normalize an antisemitic, Christian nationalist view of the world. That the far right should hope to capitalize on this moment should come as no surprise. A long line of Jewish writers and intellectuals, from Hannah Arendt to Maxime Rodinson, Judah Magnes, and Isaac Deutscher, have warned that Israel’s crimes, including the violence and displacement at its creation, would fuel antisemitic reaction.

In our era of neofascism, history may be accelerating faster than clear delineations will allow.

Then there is the odd confluence between attacks on “woke” universities and pro-Palestine activists, captured succinctly in a headline from the Heritage Foundation: “How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It.” As Noah Berlatsky has noted in Jewish Currents, the trope of “cultural Marxism” began as the Nazi’s “cultural Bolshevism” and has since been picked up by Holocaust denier William Lind, mass shooter Anders Breivik, and antisemitic theorist Kevin MacDonald to decry the Jewishness of the Frankfurt School and the supposed Jewish origins of identity politics, cultural studies, feminism, and other poisons emanating from the academy. The second half of the headline opposes the “Marxists” to the “Americans,” implying, of course, that such ideas are not only radical and subversive but, like the rootless, cosmopolitan Jews who authored them, inherently foreign, intrinsically other. We thus have an even odder phenomenon than Mazower describes—Jews are said to be under assault, and defending them means peddling an antisemitic conspiracy theory coined and spread by neo-Nazis. One of the organizations most clearly targeted by Heritage’s Project 2025 is Jewish Voice for Peace, among the largest Jewish civic organizations in this country, with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of thousands of supporters. Far from antisemitism being over, then, we are witnessing its mutation into a new and contradictory form, one that dispenses with Jews even as it relies on the old specter of Jewishness for its potency. As Heritage’s strange fusion of antisemitism with anti-antisemitism makes plain, “protecting Jews” has become yet another way to advance a blood-and-soil nationalism for which the mythic and ephemeral figure of the Judeo-Bolshevik, in the guise of Soros or the shadowy cultural Marxist, is still an enemy. As this specter did for the Nazis, it permits a wide class of targets, in this case not only or even most Jews but migrants, socialists real and imagined, sexual and gender minorities, protesters of all stripes—anyone perceived and deemed a threat to the völkisch order. As Shane Burley and Ben Lorber make clear in their guidebook on fighting antisemitism, Safety Through Solidarity (2024), racism is relational, not nominal or definitional: how the right understands the migrant and Marxist is bound up in how they understand the figural Jew, the African American, the whole of multicultural and egalitarian America. Stuart Hall observed that one of the lasting myths of historicism—we might say of liberalism too—is the “smooth march of a historical evolutionism.” (“Surely if liberalism has a single desperate weakness,” even the liberal Lionel Trilling once noted, “it is an inadequacy of imagination: liberalism is always being surprised.”) Both Mazower, in this historicizing book, and those he rightly criticizes believe in an orderly march of some kind: for Mazower antisemitism is finished, and the term has been nearly evacuated of meaning; for Zionists and other wielders of state power, antisemitism endures, however transformed into anti-Zionism, which implies their own righteousness does as well. The two positions are mirror images, both narratives of hoped-for continuity. Neither can imagine where the unhoped-for continuities may lie.

The irony of contemporary antisemitism is that its increasingly contradictory, “smokescreen” quality exposes, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that antisemitism has never really been about the Jews: it has always been a discourse, the object of which is history and power itself. While Jews will remain its victims—in stochastic hate crimes, university firings, arrests by German and American police—Palestine and Palestinians are now its principal targets, along with U.S. civil society itself. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno got it right already in 1947: “the victims are interchangeable.” If we are puzzled by this contradiction, it is only because “the anti-Semitic psychology has largely been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole fascist ticket.” Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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