The following is the second part of a review of the recently 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.
The full introduction to this review can be found in Part 1.
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 second of which follows.
— World-Outlook editors
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(This is the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part 1.)
Where Hatred Lies (Part 2)
By Omer Bartov
Conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel
The best tool for the elimination of the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel has become the definition of antisemitism endorsed in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization created to promote education about the Holocaust.
Of the definition’s eleven examples of potentially antisemitic actions or statements, seven refer directly to Israel. They include denying Jews the right to self-determination, applying double standards to Israel that are not demanded of other nations, accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust, and drawing comparisons between Israeli policies and those of the Nazis.
Some may find these statements objectionable, but they are not in and of themselves antisemitic. Many Jews around the world have rejected Zionism for theological or ideological reasons; many supporters of Zionism have argued that Israel should be “a light unto the nations” and thus held to higher standards; and many critics of Zionism, including Israelis, have argued that Israel has politically instrumentalized the Holocaust and drawn their own comparisons between certain Israeli actions and those of the Nazis. That is why alternative definitions have been offered, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document, which carefully distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
Nonetheless, in May 2024 the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which requires the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to adopt the IHRA definition. A few days later, in a speech at a remembrance ceremony for victims of the Holocaust, President Joe Biden implicitly endorsed the analogy between protests against Israel’s brutal response to the attack by Hamas on October 7 and antisemitism.
In January 2025 President Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Additional Measures to Counter Anti-Semitism,” which draws on another order he signed in 2019 that requires federal agencies to consider the IHRA definition of antisemitism when enforcing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The new executive order demands that “all available and appropriate legal tools” be used “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”
This has enabled greater federal scrutiny of universities for allegations of antisemitism on their campuses, and the threat of withholding federal funding to compel universities to adopt new policies. For all intents and purposes, allegations of antisemitism have become a new way to muzzle opinion, silence speech, and curb academic freedom.
All of this has been described by Kenneth Stern, who was the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, as making it “more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma.”
There are two obvious problems with conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The first is the peril of confusing antisemitic prejudice with political opinions in response to the reality of Israeli occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing, and growing racism. Indeed, a good deal of protest against Israel’s actions might be seen as defending the very political values that antisemites have long sought to undermine.
If we are to pay any heed to the International Court of Justice’s 2024 ruling that described the occupation of the West Bank as unlawful and noted that Israel’s practices violate the prohibition against racial segregation and apartheid, then we must conclude that criticism of the brand of Zionism implemented by the Israeli government today is not only warranted but necessary for enforcing international humanitarian law.
Having once meant “the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights,” Mazower argues, now antisemitism is more often an allegation “used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”
Ultraright is main source of Jew hatred
The second problem with an Israel-focused understanding of antisemitism is that it leads to a faulty account of the main sources of anti-Jewish hatred, historically and in the present. Scholars and commentators who conflate anti-Jewish prejudice with anti-Zionist sentiment often focus their attention on antisemitism on the political left and in the Arab and Muslim world.
One can certainly find antisemitism everywhere, among socialists and communists as well as liberals and conservatives. Neither the political left nor the Muslim world, however, has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.
Those who try to locate antisemitism’s ideological wellsprings in the history of the left often use as a central example the history of anti-Jewish persecution in the Soviet Union. They point in particular to Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” purges of 1948, which reached their peak in the Doctors’ Plot in Moscow and the Slánský trial in Prague.[1]
Stalin’s paranoia in the last years of his life indeed had all the makings of antisemitic conspiracy fantasies, often filtered through the allegation that Jews’ allegiance to Israel made them a fifth column in the Soviet Union. In these years, sincere or opportunistic antisemites, seeking power and favor, turned against their Jewish comrades, who were often still well represented among Communists.
This murderous frenzy came to an end with Stalin’s death in 1953, but the prejudice itself remained endemic in the USSR and other Eastern European Communist countries.
In the post-Stalin era Jews in the Soviet Union occupied a strange position, as Yuri Slezkine writes in The Jewish Century (2004). “Overrepresented among white-collar professionals,” they were therefore “hurt by Soviet affirmative action,” which discriminated against ethnic Jews in favor of underrepresented “national minorities.” But unlike those other minorities, they lacked a national republic that could develop “its own culture-producing institutions,” an absence that contributed to “a deafening public silence about all things Jewish” and a deep suspicion toward Jewish national identity.
These are among the many factors that, between 1989 and 2006, led some 1.6 million Soviet Jews to emigrate, well over half of them to Israel. But the antisemitism that persisted under these conditions, while sometimes acute, hardly bears comparison to that of Nazi Germany.
One would be hard put to show that communism as an ideology promoted antisemitism: the Soviet Union issued a decree against antisemitic violence as early as 1918.
In the US and Western Europe, antisemitism has always been far more pronounced and widespread on the right than on the left.
It is true that some on the far left as well as the right have supported figures like the black nationalist leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, whose antisemitic statements have long been a matter of public record: he has, for instance, falsely condemned Jews for having “owned a lot of the plantations” and for being “responsible for all of this filth and degenerate behavior that Hollywood is putting out.” Yet however distasteful such expressions of bigotry may be, they are hardly representative — Farrakhan himself has always remained a marginal figure.
Perhaps the most prominent recent antisemitism scandal on the left focused on former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose critics accused him of tolerating antisemitic statements. In 2020 the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, which investigated antisemitism in the Labour Party, found the organization responsible for “unlawful” harassment and discrimination during Corbyn’s tenure as leader.
Corbyn stated that he was “always determined to eliminate all forms of racism,” described antisemitism as “absolutely abhorrent,” and insisted that the scale of antisemitism within Labour had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party.”
Labour had essentially mismanaged the familiar debate over whether criticism of Israeli policies and expressions of support for Palestinians were fueled in part by antisemitic sentiments. Notably, Corbyn was criticized both by his own supporters after Labour adopted the troubled IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2018 and by Israel supporters for adding the caveat that “this will not in any way undermine freedom of expression on Israel or the rights of Palestinians.”
Arab resistance to Jewish settlement was ‘struggle over land’
A similar story can be told about antisemitism among Israel’s Arab and Muslim critics. Israel’s own founding generation, as Mazower notes, recognized that Arab resistance to Jewish settlement in Palestine had its roots above all in “a struggle over land.”
Already in 1930 Chaim Weizmann, the president of the Zionist Organization and a future president of Israel, warned that growing nationalist feeling among Palestinians would create a generation “who, from their point of view, are as ‘Zionist’ as we are.”
Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Jewish Congress, recalled in his memoirs that in 1956 David Ben-Gurion had taken a similar view. “If I was an Arab leader,” Goldmann remembered the Israeli prime minister telling him, “I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.”
And yet in his public statements, as Mazower observes, Ben-Gurion made all the necessary allusions to Nazism and antisemitism: the previous year he had insisted that Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rhetoric “is known to us from Hitler’s day” and warned against “the Nazi dogma that is being sounded anew on the banks of the Nile.”
I still recall that as a child growing up in Israel in the early 1960s, when we made bonfires on the holiday of Lag B’Omer, we would burn effigies of both Nasser and Adolf Eichmann (then on trial in Jerusalem) as the greatest enemies of the Jewish people.
Mazower does not entirely dismiss the existence of antisemitic sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world. They crop up in the rhetoric of political and military elites keen to explain away their failures, as well as in the writings of Islamicist intellectuals and movements ranging from Ayatollah Khomeini to Hamas. Some of these figures have also engaged in Holocaust denial, often in an attempt to refute the justification for establishing Israel as a haven for Jews.
But as Mazower sees it, this sort of rhetoric proliferated in large part owing to the establishment of Israel and the violent expulsion of much of its majority population — some 750,000 people — in what Palestinians remember as the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.
That shock led some Arab leaders and intellectuals to embrace antisemitic conspiracy theories as “a means of understanding the otherwise almost inexplicable triumph of a Jewish state and — a little later — the swift rise of American power across the postwar Middle East.”
Moreover, Mazower notes, even Arab spokespeople who take pains to resist “the spread of conspiratorial antisemitism” — as the influential Syrian Palestinian diplomat Fayez Sayegh did in the 1960s — too often find themselves accused of anti-Jewish sentiments in any case because of their opposition to Zionism. “For me it remains almost the ultimate in irony,” the Iraqi Israeli historian Nissim Rejwan wrote Irving Howe in 1974, “that what Arab anti-Semites have been doing is nothing more horrible than accepting Zionism’s own definition of itself!”
There is, to be sure, an emerging tendency among anti-Zionist critics of Israel toward rhetoric that is openly anti-Jewish bigotry.
It is to be found most commonly, however, not on the left but on the vanguard of American conservatism.
Racist right main source of antisemitic violence
Mazower puts the matter succinctly: “The blanket condemnation of Israel’s critics as antisemites,” he writes, “overlooks a major long-standing source of antisemitic violence around the world today, which is the racist Right.”
In May 2024 a New York Times investigation concluded that over the past decade “many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots,” not least of which is the ancient allegation “that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.”
Now the chickens are coming home to roost. In December 2025 a Manhattan Institute survey of Republicans nationwide found that almost a fifth — “typically younger,” “disproportionately male,” “more racially diverse,” “more likely to be college-educated,” and “significantly more likely” to have recently become Republicans — either self-identified as racist and antisemitic or held these views without identifying as such.
That same month the institute’s publication, City Journal, gathered twenty Gen Z conservatives for a focus group and asked them, among much else, what they thought of Jewish people. “They’ve got Hollywood on lock,” said one. “Don’t they own, like, a ton of the media, and, like, just kind of everything?” asked a second. “I would say a force for evil,” said a third.
I don’t see why we support Israel. I think Israel’s a very evil state. The genocide in Gaza, killing all these poor people. And the only reason we really support them is because they are the biggest donors. We have AIPAC, and these are all Jewish-run organizations.
The responses were no less startling when members of the group were asked what they thought of Hitler. “I think he was a great leader, to be honest,” one said. “I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.”
The same respondent who called Jews “a force for evil” was no less explicit on this point: “I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America.”
Some of these views bear the influence of the white nationalist Internet pundit Nick Fuentes, who has amassed a social media audience of hundreds of thousands for openly racist, misogynistic rants that repeatedly return to conspiracy theories about the control of “organized Jewry” over American politics, finance, and media.
Perhaps the most politically significant spokesperson for anti-Zionism on the American right is the Christian nationalist Tucker Carlson.[2]
Tucker Carlson’s bigotry and antisemitism
Since departing Fox News, Carlson has built his independent show into a media phenomenon with an estimated online audience in the tens of millions, hosting a wide range of guests, including Fuentes last October.
“You cannot actually divorce Israel and the neocons and all those things that you talk about from Jewishness—ethnicity, religion, identity,” he told Carlson. American Jews, he went on, belong to “this international community—across borders, extremely organized—that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.”
Carlson regularly insists that his Christian faith requires rejecting group-based judgments and denies the charge that his rhetoric amounts to antisemitism. Yet he often relies on less explicit but nonetheless highly suggestive language about the Israel lobby’s threat to “Western civilization.”
In March, two weeks after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran generated a wave of discourse across the political spectrum about Israel’s influence over American political affairs, Carlson was interviewed by Piers Morgan. The “people who got Donald Trump elected,” Carlson said, are nontraditional Republican voters who voted for Trump because he promised not to keep doing the same thing. And one of the things he promised not to do again was to hand operational authority over to Benjamin Netanyahu, as other presidents have.
Trump’s collaboration with Israel in the war against Iran, Carlson stressed, is “a betrayal on the level that I don’t think people who aren’t in those groups can understand.”
Even worse, Carlson argued, that subversion of American sovereignty has clear domestic roots. Citing the Jewish, pro-Israel, right-wing commentators Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, he went on: “We’re not going to hand control of our foreign policy over to people like that, who don’t know anything and who don’t have America’s interests at heart or even in mind.” He claimed that “people like Levin” are engaged in a “totally immoral and dangerous” project of trying to split American society “into warring tribes,” including by “their endless harping on this antisemitism question.”
In the West, Carlson continued, “it’s a human right to be treated as an individual and not be held responsible for the sins of your parents.” Yet people like Levin and Shapiro don’t recognize that, because they are not Western in their orientation. They think that rights only apply to the groups they favor. And that idea — that evil idea, which was the basis of Nazism, by the way — that is the thing that will destroy the United States.
This is a remarkable twist on an old antisemitic canard. If the Levins and Shapiros of the United States are not Western, they must be Oriental in their orientation. They must then also favor only people who belong to that “orientation,” thereby laying the groundwork for a new kind of Nazism — presumably a Nazism rooted in the “antiwhite hate” that, according to Carlson, the ADL was not long ago “openly promoting.”
Because he is a mainstay of MAGA and a potential presidential candidate (which he denies), Carlson’s words should send chills down the spines of those very same adamant Jewish supporters of Israel who accuse the country’s left-wing critics of antisemitism. He is no longer expressing a shadowy, marginal view but a growing swell of opinion, especially among the young. Some would argue that it is now even starting to infect several of the most antiestablishment parts of the left, among which Carlson’s interviews regularly make the rounds on social media.
The advocacy organization Track AIPAC, for instance, has routed its criticisms of pro-Israel lobbying through nationalist rhetoric that echoes Carlson’s. “You can’t be [sic] claim to be America First while pledging allegiance to Israel,” the group tweeted last year under an AI-generated image of George Washington burning an Israeli flag. “Mossad Mike Lawler is paid to pledge allegiance to the genocidal Israeli regime,” it posted two months later about the New York representative Mike Lawler, sponsor of the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
‘New right’ has seized convenient opening
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.
This was the second of two articles. The first was The Judeo-Bolshevist Target, published in the July 23, 2026, issue of The New York Review of Books.
Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?
(This was the second of two parts. The first can be found in Part 1.)
NOTES
[1] “The Doctors’ Plot” was a state-sponsored, antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union from 1951 to 1953, driven by Joseph Stalin’s paranoia. It alleged that a group of prominent Moscow medical specialists — mostly Jewish — were part of a conspiracy to assassinate top Soviet leaders.
The Slánský trial was a 1952 Stalinist show trial in Prague against 14 high-ranking leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). The main defendant was Rudolf Slánský, KSČ’s former general secretary, who was targeted as the alleged ringleader of the conspiracy. The defendants were falsely accused of high treason, espionage, sabotage, and participating in a “Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist” conspiracy. Prisoners were subjected to intense physical and psychological torture until they memorized and repeated scripted lies, or coerced confessions, in court.
[2] For more information see Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream and Tucker Carlson’s Bigotry and Antisemitism.
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Categories: US Politics