A nuanced new history by Mark Mazower reminds us that antisemitism, an age-old threat to Jewish life, can be warped into a political tool—as we see today, when any criticism of Israel can be deemed antisemitic. excerpt - ...several decades after the end of World War II, the meaning of antisemitism in the West had not undergone an odd transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the US and Western Europe, ever more commentators and intellectuals started maintaining that, in Mazower’s words, “antisemitism was the same as opposition to Israel, and that it was therefore chiefly a problem of the Left rather than the Right.” To many in the American Jewish establishment, “a new form of antisemitism” seemed to have arrived on the scene, constituting, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would later put it, “vicious efforts to demonize the Jewish state and deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination.” Various factions of the political right, meanwhile, have been quick to turn these assumptions to their advantage. Some have used allegations of antisemitism as a cudgel against the left in order to, in Mazower’s words, “police the universities, end long-standing anti-discrimination and diversity initiatives, reassert ‘Western values,’ and reaffirm the role of religion in American life.” Others have conscripted anti-Zionist, pro-Palestine rhetoric into the service of a notion of “Western values” rooted explicitly in Christian nationalism, expressing suspicion and hostility toward American Jews rather than opportunistically claiming to protect them. full article - *https://portside.org/2026-09-06/where-hatred-lies <https://portside.org/2026-09-06/where-hatred-lies>*
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