Where Hatred Lies
Reviewed:
On Antisemitism: A Word in History
by Mark Mazower
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.”
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, 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—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. 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.
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.
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.
Protesters on the University of Virginia campus during the Unite the Right rally, where some chanted ‘Jews will not replace us,’ Charlottesville, August 11, 2017. Anadolu/Getty Images
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.”
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. 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.”
Asimilar 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. 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. 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.
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 is the second of two articles.
Portside moderator - The first article can be found HERE
Omer Bartov is the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?
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