What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful vital new intervention from the
award-winning historian 'An immense contribution... In tracing the evolving meaning of
'antisemitism ' [Mazower] demonstrates persuasively how we might turn it from a weapon back
into a word... Rigorous and lucid' - Lily Meyer The New Republic' For most of history
antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe's political Right the province of
blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom's long-standing suspicion of its Jewish
population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare
of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The landscape is very different now as Mark Mazower argues
in this piercingly brilliant book. More than four-fifths of the world's Jews now live in Israel
and the United States with the former's military dominance of its region guaranteed by the
latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the
Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here seeking to illuminate rather
than blame. Very few words have the punch of 'antisemitism' and yet no term is more liable to
be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a
vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn.
