The following is a review of the just published book On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower. The review by Omer Bartov first appeared in the September 24, 2026, issue of the New York Review of Books.
Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?
Bartov lays out well-established arguments on why anti-Zionism is not implicitly antisemitism. World-Outlook has also covered this debate in Why Opposition to Zionism is Not Antisemitism, and In Defense of Free Speech: Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism, among other posts.
Bartov’s elaboration in this piece of the threat of Jew hatred from the right, however, is his most important contribution to this discussion.
As Bartov points out in the conclusion of his review,
“We have come full circle. Because the aim of today’s surging accusations of antisemitism is not to combat the actual phenomenon but to suppress anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel, the ‘new right’ has been handed a convenient opening. They have seized it. They now imply, and in some cases outright assert, that the Jews are the source of the rot in American society. Ironically, by presenting protest against the indefensible as malign, the self-proclaimed guardians of the Jews have done more than just warp the meaning of antisemitism. They have made it into a tool for those eager to revive the century-old hoax that, in their unequivocal support for Israel, the Jewish state’s defenders, and by extension the Jews as a whole, have stabbed their homeland — this time America — in the back.”
The “new right” Bartov refers to includes Nick Fuentes, “the white-nationalist commentator, Holocaust denier and antisemitic provocateur,” as the news site Politico recently described him; and Tucker Carlson, the right-wing political commentator and host of The Tucker Carlson Show on TV.[1]
Bartov’s arguments are not well understood among many who call themselves socialists or progressives in the United States. Some on the US left today hold that there is “common ground” to be found with Carlson and company in opposing the atrocities of the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people and its expansionist wars across the Middle East.
As the World-Outlook article Iran Stymies US-Israeli War pointed out, “Fascists and ultra-rightists always default to Jew hatred, one of the world’s oldest conspiracy theories. The Israeli leadership’s false claim that it speaks and acts for all Jews helps enable this. For those demanding an end to the US-Israeli war on Iran, it is essential to see that Carlson and company are no allies. They are deadly enemies.”
It should be noted that Carlson often explains — including when he is distancing himself from US president Donald Trump, a former ally, as he did in a May 2026 interview with the New York Times — that he is a good friend of US vice president JD Vance. Today Vance can be considered as the most likely successor to Trump as leader of the MAGA movement and the most likely Republican presidential candidate in 2028. Vance has already begun to seize the “convenient opening” that Bartov refers to.
Finally, we would be remiss if we did not point out what seems to us an egregiously mistaken idea in Bartov’s review.
“Over the course of the 1930s, as Mark Mazower writes in his incisive and timely study On Antisemitism, ‘the European continent was gradually dividing into two armed camps,’” Bartov writes near the beginning of his review.
“On one side were ‘the liberal victors’ of World War I, who supported democracy, capitalism, and the new League of Nations.
“On the other was a group of revisionist states that sought to create a system of racist or ethnocentric dictatorships geared to address social inequality after the Great Depression, combat materialism, and, not least, ward off communism.”
It seems naïve for a historian of Bartov’s stature to share Mazower’s view that the imperialist powers which imposed the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War can be described as those “who supported democracy.” This designation is false because the conditions the “liberal victors” imposed on Germany after World War I helped lay the basis for the rise of Nazism.[2]
Bartov’s description of the “other group” is not better. Their “addressing” of social inequality was demagogy, sometimes “anti-capitalist” demagogy that often permeated the speeches of Hitler and other leaders of his National Socialist party. But fascism is not an alternative to capitalism. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky explained in the last article he wrote before his assassination in 1940 by one of Stalin’s henchmen, “Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by means of the most bestial and monstrous measures.”
But this is a relatively minor point that does not detract from an otherwise excellent article.
We are publishing the review that follows for the information of our readers. The headline and text below are from the original. Subheadings (or breakers), photos, and notes are by World-Outlook. Due to its length, we are publishing this article in two parts, the first of which follows.
— World-Outlook editors
*
(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part 2.)
Where Hatred Lies (Part 1)
By Omer Bartov
New York Review of Books, September 24, 2026, issue.
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.
On Antisemitism: A Word in History
By Mark Mazower
September 2026, Penguin Press, 333 pp., $29.00
“I know two kinds of anti-Semites,” the unnamed narrator of For Two Thousand Years (1934), by the Romanian Jewish novelist Mihail Sebastian (born Iosif Mendel Hechter), tells a man he admires when unexpectedly confronted with his anti-Jewish prejudice. “Ordinary anti-Semites — and anti-Semites with arguments.”
One of the most common anti-Jewish arguments in the West between the Russian Revolution and the fall of Nazi Germany was that Jews were an inherent component of the global spread of communism — the myth that became known as “Judeo-Bolshevism.”[3]
Such claims ranged widely across geographical borders and political persuasions.
Winston Churchill, writing in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920, when he was the British secretary of state for war and air, warned about “the schemes of the International Jews,” whose “sinister confederacy” could be traced “from the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx,” making up a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation.”
That same year Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent began publishing a series of articles arguing that
in the confidence and secrecy of Jewish communication, or buried in the Yiddish dialect, or obscurely hidden in the Jewish national press, we find the proud assertion made — to their own people! — that Bolshevism is Jewish.
Hitler: ‘The Jews are all communists, and these are my enemies’
Such sentiments were perfectly in line with Nazi arguments that Germany, after World War I, had been “stabbed in the back” by a Jewish-led Communist plot.
In 1933, at a meeting with the physicist Max Planck, Adolf Hitler pronounced, “I have nothing against the Jews. But the Jews are all Communists, and these are my enemies. My life is against them.”
His minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed in a speech at a Nazi Party rally two years later:
It was the Jew who discovered Marxism. It is the Jew who for decades past has endeavored to stir up world revolutions through the medium of Marxism. It is the Jew who is today at the head of Marxism in all the countries of the world.
Over the course of the 1930s, as Mark Mazower writes in his incisive and timely study On Antisemitism, “the European continent was gradually dividing into two armed camps.”
On one side were “the liberal victors” of World War I, who supported democracy, capitalism, and the new League of Nations.
On the other was a group of revisionist states that sought to create a system of racist or ethnocentric dictatorships geared to address social inequality after the Great Depression, combat materialism, and, not least, ward off communism.
“Historians have devoted much effort to examining how important antisemitism actually was to the interwar and wartime European Right,” Mazower writes, noting correctly that the question has often been “more complicated than might seem likely at first glance.” (As he points out, Italian fascism initially showed little interest in the issue, and Mussolini introduced antisemitic legislation only in 1938 — with devastating consequences, long denied in postwar Italy, for its ancient Jewish community.) But antisemitism, he argues, undeniably helped give the revanchist bloc at least some of its ideological cohesion.
Jews represented to these revanchists everything that they opposed, be it capitalism, democracy, hedonism, or, most menacingly, Bolshevism. At that time no one would have disputed that antisemitism was a specifically right-wing and fascist hatred, intent on reversing Jewish emancipation and all that it stood for as a symbol of humanism, enlightenment, and the equality of all members of humankind.
Meaning of antisemitism undergoes odd transformation
None of this would need stating if, 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.”
Since Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza that followed, the association between criticism of Israel and antisemitism has become ubiquitous.
A growing range of scholars and other observers seem to agree with Mazower that even if “some anti-Zionism masks anti-Jewish sentiments, much of it does not.” But most major American Jewish organizations have stayed attached to the assumption that the main source of antisemitism in the world today is the anti-Israel left.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) contends that “anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) defines anti-Zionism as “inherently bigoted” and claims that, because its “end goal…is to undermine and eliminate Jewish rights,” the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is driven by “antisemitic motivations.”
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.
There can be no doubt that, as Mazower puts it, “Jews continue to be among those groups who are targeted these days for who they are.”
On March 12 a man rammed his vehicle into Temple Israel in Michigan and opened fire, injuring a security guard, before he killed himself. The suspect was identified as forty-one-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who was born in Lebanon; four of his family members had reportedly been killed in a recent Israeli air strike.
This was only the most recent in a series of obviously antisemitic acts of violence targeting Jews as Jews, including the Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Manchester in England, the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia, and the arson at a Mississippi synagogue.
Sometimes the attackers express rage at Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians; in other cases, such as the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where eleven people were murdered, the assailants have been right-wing extremists with histories of white-supremacist views.
Precisely because it remains “an ongoing problem,” Mazower writes, “anyone who takes antisemitism seriously” ought to be “dismayed by the confusion that exists around the term, not to mention the overuse that threatens to strip it of meaning.”
How did it “come to seem unassailable common sense to a lot of people” today that a prejudice once central to the ideology of far-right anticommunism now resides primarily on the left? And if that common sense is wrongheaded, how might we better understand the workings of this all-too-present bigotry?
Zionism’s original goal
In 1985 the former Israeli attorney general and Supreme Court justice Haim Cohn attended a seminar on antisemitism convened by the president of Israel. Over the course of three days participants lamented the rise of anti-Jewish prejudice. “The only dissenting note was struck by Cohn,” Mazower reports.
He questioned how it was that the creation of a Jewish state, instead of bringing antisemitism to an end, had led it to assume new forms. What, he asked, had gone wrong? Had their very assumptions been mistaken? If so, what was Zionism, really?
The original goal of Zionism, Mazower points out, was to normalize Jewish existence by creating a Jewish political entity and liberating the Jews from seemingly eternal persecution. Support for Zionism grew in direct proportion to violence against Jews: the first wave of secular Zionist settlement in Palestine was prompted by pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s; the slaughter of up to 100,000 Jews during the Russian Civil War, along with other pogroms in Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, further strengthened the movement.
In the interwar period antisemitism became a widespread phenomenon in Europe and ultimately a fundamental ideological tenet of its most powerful country, which got within a hair’s breadth of becoming its hegemonic power and murdered roughly two thirds of the continent’s Jews.
The result was a dramatic demographic shift. In 1900 more than 80 percent of the world’s Jews lived in Europe; by 1950 the Nazis and their fascist and nationalist collaborators had reduced that proportion to less than a third.
By 2010 that figure had fallen still further, to 10 percent, with some 80 percent in either Israel or the United States. It was developments in those two countries, then, that shaped how antisemitism was understood and experienced in the years that followed World War II.
In those decades American Jews enjoyed a remarkable degree of integration and upward socioeconomic mobility. “Antisemitic attitudes certainly did not disappear, and episodes of small-scale violence indicated its persistence,” Mazower writes, “but major discriminatory barriers to housing, employment, and college entry came down,” and starting in the early 1960s, studies showed openly antisemitic sentiments in the country steadily dwindling.
Discussions about antisemitism in the first twenty years after the war focused in large part on lowering what barriers remained. At an ADL conference on antisemitism in 1962, Mazower notes, “participants focused chiefly on right-wing extremism (which they saw as on the wane), Christian fundamentalism, and surviving patterns of social and professional discrimination.” Two subjects, he notes, “simply never came up. One was the Holocaust; the other was Israel.”
Holocaust: ‘one of modern world’s core cultural facts’
That would soon change. Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, as the onetime AJC president Robert Rifkind put it in 1996, the Holocaust became “one of the core cultural facts of the modern world.”
What Rifkind called “the centralization of the Holocaust in the imagination of modernity” started perhaps with the broadcasts of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 and accelerated over the following two decades with the appearance of Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews (1975), the broadcast of the NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978), and the initiative to establish a Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.
At this point, Mazower aptly writes,
American Jewish organizations, which had once resisted the calls for memorialization, now insisted on it; Israeli governments, which had once been loath to discuss the past, now pressed for it. And the Holocaust itself, a genocide perpetrated by Europeans upon other Europeans, had somehow become a guarantee of America’s commitment to Israel.
Maybe “most striking of all,” he goes on, “was how the memory of the Holocaust came to be combined with attachment to Israel across the increasingly diverse and secularized world of American Jewry as a marker of ethnic identity.”
A crucial inflection point in this regard was the Six-Day War of 1967,[4] which filled many Jewish Americans with a strong sense of identification with Israel. Mazower cites a study that the sociologist Marshall Sklare conducted in a Midwestern suburb he anonymized as Lakeville, where no other event in the past decade, in Sklare’s words, had an equivalent “impact upon feelings of Jewish identity.” In Sklare’s assessment, Mazower writes,
Israel’s creation and existence had restored what he called “a sense of meaning” for American Jews after the Second World War: At least for the inhabitants of Lakeville, it could seem that “something new, clean and good was born” out of the genocide.
But if Israel was a source of pride, the prospect of its destruction, first in 1967 and then during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, also generated profound dread in Jewish communities, deepening the sentiment that the state’s existence was essential for the diaspora. In this way an increasingly well-integrated and affluent American Jewry was adopting feelings of paranoia and vulnerability that had a history in Israel itself.
As Mazower notes, early Israeli political discourse made much of the biblical vision of the Israelites as “a people that dwells alone.” It was a view taken up in the state’s first decades by the historians of the Jerusalem school, epitomized by Shmuel Ettinger, whose Hebrew-language book Modern Antisemitism (1978) presented the phenomenon as a reincarnation of the everlasting historical hatred of Jews.
The Soviet-born, British-trained scholar Robert Wistrich helped popularize this line of thinking with his 1992 account of antisemitism as “the longest hatred,” distilling a quasi-mythical view of Jewish history as a narrative of unrelenting persecution.
Israel at first perceived itself as marking this narrative’s termination. But by the 1980s the country’s self-perception had darkened under the influence of an ascendant right led by Menachem Begin[5] — who drew on his memories of interwar Polish antisemitism — and of a growing religious sensibility that refocused Zionism on the uniqueness of the Jews as a chosen yet eternally persecuted people. Rather than the solution to antisemitism, Israel came to see itself as its main target.
It is hardly surprising, then, that within the US, “antisemitism was gradually becoming more and more linked to the question of Israel,” as Mazower puts it.
Publication of The New Anti-Semitism heralds shift
The publication in 1974 of The New Anti-Semitism, by the ADL leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, heralded the shift. Stressing “the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival throughout the world,” the authors called for the “redefining of traditional notions of anti-Semitism” to include hostility to Zionism.
Leftist critics of Israel, they alleged, were the primary culprits. Forster and Epstein singled out black nationalists, whom they depicted as antisemitic in part because their support for freedom fighters in Africa and their view of the Six-Day War as an “imperialistic, Zionist” undertaking led them to express sympathy for Palestinians.
This dynamic only deepened as Israel’s post-1967 settlement project in the occupied territories accelerated, with all the violence and racism — as well as Palestinian resistance — it entailed. The European left, American liberals, and many leaders of postcolonial nations took note, and in the ensuing years their denunciations of the occupation grew in force and influence.
In 1975 Arab, African, and Soviet-bloc nations supported the famous UN resolution that declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination” and equated it with the South African apartheid regime. Although the resolution was repealed in 1991 as a condition for Israel’s participation in the Madrid Conference, it had a lasting impact on who came to be considered the real enemies of the Jews.[6]
As Mazower shows, this transformation in the understanding of antisemitism was reflected in profound changes in American advocacy for Israel. Especially after the fall of communism, such organizations as the AJC and the ADL, alongside the newly established Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the AJC-backed UN Watch, became increasingly engaged in “monitoring” anti-Israel bias and undertaking antisemitism research.
In 2004 Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, leading to the creation of the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism within the State Department. Because the definition of antisemitism now included “vilification of Israel,” Mazower explains, “American diplomats had an obligation to act on behalf of another nation.” Putting it differently, it also meant that antisemitism— defined as “vilification of Israel” — had become anti-American.
(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part 2.)
NOTES
[1] For more information see Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream and Tucker Carlson’s Bigotry and Antisemitism.
[2] The Treaty of Versailles was a peace agreement signed on June 28, 1919, that officially ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers after the First World War. It forced Germany to accept complete responsibility for starting the war and causing all the damage.
Germany lost 13% of its European territory, including Alsace-Lorraine to France and parts of eastern Germany to Poland, plus all overseas colonies. The German army was capped at 100,000 men, a draft was banned, and an air force and major naval vessels were prohibited. Germany was also ordered to pay massive financial compensation for war damages.
Germany’s ruling class saw these harsh terms as humiliation, creating deep economic distress and political instability, which the Nazis used in their eventual rise to power that led to a second world inter-imperialist slaughter.
[3] See Bartov’s first article in this two-part story, The Judeo-Bolshevist Target, published in the July 23, 2026, issue of The New York Review of Books.
[4] In June 1967, following the “Six-Day War” with several Arab countries, Israel emerged victorious. It captured large areas, including Gaza, the West Bank, and two-thirds of the Golan Heights — territories it continues to occupy decades later. For more information see ‘The Jewish Tragedy Finds in Israel a Dismal Sequel’.
[5] Menachem Begin was a right-wing Israeli politician who founded the political parties Herut and Likud and was Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983.
[6] For more information see Zionism: ‘A Form of Racism’.
* See below PDF of pamphlet by Pete Seidman Socialists and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism.
** See below PDF of pamphlet by George Novack How Can the Jews Survive? A Socialist Answer to Zionism.
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Categories: US Politics
A very opportune and necessary piece about how Israel’s crimes, and its slanderous defenders who claim that all “anti-Zionism is antisemitic,” are only fueling antisemitism.
Your introduction makes a number of good arguments, among them the very important point:
“Bartov’s arguments are not well understood among many who call themselves socialists or progressives in the United States. Some on the US left today hold that there is “common ground” to be found with Carlson and company in opposing the atrocities of the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people and its expansionist wars across the Middle East.”
The political scientist, Norman Finkelstein, appeared in an extended, nearly two-hour interview on The Tucker Carlson Show published on September 14, 2026.
Finkelstein is well-known acerbic critic of Israel and its Zionist supporters. He is generally considered a liberal or leftist, and a critic of the US, and he is not alone in the mistaken belief that there exists some “common ground” with the ultraright.
While the real threat of antisemitism comes from the ultraright, there is no denying a grotesque increase in antisemitism among those who identify as liberals and leftists. I confess to being shocked by the grotesque antisemitism commonly spewed by so-called leftists and liberals, perfectly echoing ultrarightists and fascists.
Worse, they are increasingly joining with and praising ultrarightists such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others, as “truth tellers” about Israel and absurd claims of Jewish cabals and conspiracies that control mighty U.S. imperialism, forcing the poor Trump administration to go to war against Iran, etc.
As you stated in your earlier article, “…it is essential to see that Carlson and company are no allies. They are deadly enemies.”
This growing patriotic “anti-Zionist” convergence of middle-class leftists with ultrarightists and fascists around hatred of Jews is extremely dangerous to put it mildly. This blurs what should be a bright white line around ultrarightists and fascists. It legitimizes and makes more attractive ultrarightist ideas, inducing broader layers of people to become more susceptible not only to antisemitism but to reactionary ideas in general.
In its initial stages prior to taking power, fascism often comes disguised as “anticapitalist,” and will take positions that appear to be “progressive.” That is precisely to disorient and attract middle-class layers and some workers. Those who praise and collaborate with ultrarightists are only helping them sow confusion and recruit.
In my opinion this deadly dynamic needs to be sharply called out.