“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-glass
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
When the Albanese government appointed the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion in late December it made clear that the government adheres to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Soon after her appointment as commissioner, former High Court judge Virginia Bell confirmed her inquiry would use the IHRA definition, which she described as “uncontroversial.”
Mark Mazower would disagree with that description. As his new book On Antisemitism: A Word in History documents and persuasively explains, experience elsewhere (especially in the United States) suggests that Commissioner Bell risks underestimating the threat the definition itself poses to “social cohesion,” free speech, and academic freedom. Mazower is especially concerned by how the widespread adoption of the IHRA’s formulation has been weaponised to conflate criticism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people with antisemitism. “How we came to find ourselves in such a quandary,” he writes, “is the question this book tries to answer.”
Unsurprisingly, as a distinguished British-born Jewish historian based at Columbia University, Mazower insists we must view antisemitism in its historical context. The term “has been used to mean different things at different times,” he writes. “Because words do not exist outside time and place, we need to understand them in their setting.”
His observations apply equally to his own book, written in the wake of the political retribution Columbia suffered as a result of its students’ pro-Palestinian encampments provoked by Israel’s Gaza onslaught. After Trump labelled these protests as “antisemitic” and imposed significant financial and legal sanctions on the university, Mazower was forced to ask “What had happened to the concept of antisemitism? A term that began as a way to describe the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs.”
On Antisemitism opens with a “historical sketch that looks at the rise and fall of antisemitism as a chiefly European political movement” before shifting gears to analyse the origins and spread of a reframed understanding of antisemitism that originated in the 1970s, “largely as a way to rationalise growing criticism of Israel.” In other words, Mazower’s primary focus throughout On Antisemitism is not with “attitudes, symbols, or stereotypes but with political actions, theories, organisations, and outcomes.”
Mazower sees the rise between 1880 and 1914 of antisemitic political movements in Europe — then home to 80 per cent of the world’s Jewish population — as a right-wing response to their increasing civic emancipation. (The prototype for these movements was the German “League of Antisemites,” founded in 1879.) Their success depended “not so much upon persuading people of negative stereotypes about the Jews — these were common currency — but rather in getting them to believe that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns.”
While most Jewish people welcomed their new freedoms, some were concerned greater emancipation would not only encourage increased hostility but dilute their own communal and religious solidarity as well. Still others were adherents of Zionism, a new ethno-nationalist movement which argued “freedom for Jews was impossible so long as they lived amid societies that hated them,” proposing instead the creation of their own nation-state in the Holy Land. But this distant prospect had little appeal, especially to those Jews living in Western Europe.
It was the first world war that proved to be a catalyst for a boost to the fortunes of both the Zionists — with British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s fateful pledge to support the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” — and the antisemites, with Hitler’s eventual rise to power in 1933. Nazism was originally a movement against Jewish emancipation, but once Jews were deprived of their freedoms, rights and economic opportunities the push was on to somehow rid Hitler’s ever-expanding Reich of them altogether. By 1945 half the total population of European Jewry had been wiped out, along with the antisemitic architects of their genocide.
The story of antisemitism was transformed after 1948 not only demographically — the US and Israel would supplant Europe as the epicentre of world Jewry — but geopolitically as well. Hence, as Mazower observes, Jewish life around the world would now “be shaped politically by the dynamics within and increasingly between these two poles.” One consequence of this shift was that “the concept of antisemitism acquired new political associations in new settings.”
The three million Jewish migrants entering the US prior to 1945 had immediately enjoyed full civic emancipation and were regarded racially as “whites.” By the 1920s, however, they were enduring both antisemitic prejudice as well as antisemitic ideologies promoted by the likes of industrialist Henry Ford, high-profile Catholic priest Charles Coughlin and various neo-Nazi organisations. Jewish defence organisations emerged in response, among them the Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the American Jewish Committee, which were careful to distance themselves from Zionism for fear of being accused of having divided loyalties.
In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, the prevalence of antisemitic rhetoric and restrictions shrank remarkably. Hailing “the virtual end of overt antisemitism” in the US, a director of the ADL observed in 1972 that the postwar decades were a “golden age” in which American Jews enjoyed security and social acceptance to a degree unprecedented in history. This was also, Mazower adds, the period when antisemitism “was not widely seen … as something that could or should be treated separately from other kinds of bigotry or discrimination.”
Likewise, the birth of Israel neither raised suspicions of where American Jews’ loyalties lay nor inspired them to emigrate en masse to the newly created Jewish state. In fact, a number of left-wing American Jewish commentators like William Zukerman were already deeply critical of Israeli Zionists’ violent dispossession of Palestinian Arabs. Attacked by American Zionist organisations as a “self-hating Jew,” Zukerman noted, criticisms of Israel were now being “denounced not only as anti-Israel but as anti-Semitic.” As Mazower notes, “the era in which antisemitism could be discussed without reference to Israel was about to end.”
Nevertheless, there was at this time “an extraordinary tussle for power between the community notables of American Jewry… and the Jewish state and its leaders.” While Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s priority was to win over non-Zionist Jewish leaders, he infuriated them with his repeated calls for American Jews to settle in Israel. Nor were they happy that “Israeli officials had begun the practice… of discussing antisemitic incidents abroad directly with governments over the heads of local Jewish communities, as though it were in fact their primary protector.”
What transformed the relationship between Israel and American Jewry was the Six-Day War of 1967. As one Israeli historian observed, “not only was Zionism ‘Americanised,’ American Jewry became ‘Zionised.’” One contributor to this remarkable turnaround emerged from research undertaken soon afterwards by the American Jewish Committee of a Midwestern Jewish community. Their heightened awareness that the state of Israel — the one good result of the Holocaust — could be destroyed was experienced as a threat to their own security and well-being. This increased vulnerability helped to catalyse American Jewry’s increasingly impassioned political engagement with Israel.
Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Mazower writes, a group of Third World countries “took up the Palestinian cause in the UN as part of the larger struggle against colonialism” — as did portions of the American left. This anti-Israel commentary inspired the ADL to castigate Americans’ “unwillingness to comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival in the world.” The source of the problem? The radical Left’s support for a “new antisemitism” manifesting itself as hostility to Israel.
Following what was perceived as Israel’s narrow escape from defeat in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, Mazower notes, “American Jews also started to embrace the idea of the Holocaust not merely as history but as a warning for the future and an integral part of their sense of themselves.” Hence political attacks on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and threats to Israel’s safety “were regarded by more and more American Jews as an attack on themselves.”
From this point onwards the political mobilisation of American Jews accelerated, building up “not only a widely feared lobbying apparatus to enlist politicians in support of Israel, but also a vast, sprawling network of communal philanthropic organisations.” The question was who would wield this power, how would it be deployed, and to what ends.
Beginning in the early 2000s, as Mazower documents, “a number of American Jewish organisations, American policymakers, and Israeli officials began to focus on raising international awareness of antisemitism.” The US got behind this push early. In 2004 Colin Powell announced the creation within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe of a new bureaucracy to track antisemitic incidents and advise members on new legislation, and Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, including the “vilification of Israel.”
By the end of 2023, twenty-four or more countries had set up similar posts, “creating a new cadre of antisemitism watchdogs… Their emergence had the consequence of splitting antisemitism campaigning from the larger world of antidiscrimination activism.”
The further conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel was ensured when, in 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation, strongly backed by Benjamin Netanyahu, to define Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” despite its significant non-Jewish population. The problem for America’s leading Jewish advocacy groups was that this ethnonationalist reframing of the Israeli constitution threatened “the cherished assumption that Israel could be both Jewish and democratic.” This mattered to many American Jews who, as Mazower reminds us, “tended to be more progressive and liberal” than the leading Jewish advocacy groups, “whose leadership and main donors tended… to show deference to whichever Israeli government was in office.”
Despite its many successes, what the American-Israeli alliance still lacked in its battle against the “new antisemitism” was a clear yet nuanced definition of what exactly antisemitism is — and what it is not. “Was it ethnic prejudice?” asks Mazower. “Was it a singling out of Israel for blame? Were these conceptions related and where was the boundary between them to be drawn? And perhaps the most important question of all: Who got to decide?”
Mazower believes two forces drove the search for and enforcement of a single uniform definition of antisemitism. First, the tracking of antisemitic incidents and enforcement of race-hate crimes required one for use by statisticians and the legal profession. Second, it was important for the dominant advocacy groups to devise a definition that legitimised their preferred meanings of antisemitism and prohibited others.
A suitable definition developed by the American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern was presented around 2016 to an obscure intergovernmental agency, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. As it happened, the IHRA’s subcommittee on antisemitism was chaired by a representative of the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre. (At one time the centre’s list of the world’s top ten antisemites included Ben & Jerry’s founders alongside Hamas and Iran.) After being lobbied by a number of Israeli and American Jewish advocacy groups, the IHRA adopted Stern’s definition of antisemitism in 2016.
The IHRA “working definition” reads as follows.
A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
Mazower finds this formulation imprecise and confusing, especially its use of may be, “since a definition generally tells us what something is.” Furthermore, “hatred is not the only and not necessarily even the most important expression of antisemitism.” Unfortunately, the definition’s accompanying examples only confuse things further, because they fail to define the circumstances in which they may (or may not) be considered antisemitic.
In Mazower’s view, there exist far better definitions of antisemitism, including the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism:
Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).
This declaration goes on to define explicitly examples of behaviour or beliefs that are antisemitic and those which are not. For example, it is not antisemitic to support “the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.”
However perverse it may seem, Mazower believes it’s precisely the confusing nature of the IHRA definition that recommended it to those seeking its adoption. “If organisations are told that contravening the IHRA definition will expose them to legal or bureaucratic jeopardy, and if they are unsure what exactly does contravene the definition, they will likely err on the side of caution. It is in this way that the definition threatens intellectual freedom.”
Nevertheless, the IHRA definition has been increasingly adopted by American and European public and private sector organisations in response to unrelenting pressure from both American Jewish advocacy groups and Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. As of June 2025 more than forty governments had endorsed it, including almost all members of the European Union. The US went one step further in 2023 when Congress passed an antisemitism bill that “explicitly rules out the use of rival definitions.” Meanwhile dozens of American universities and most in Britain have adopted “the IHRA” in one form or another.
For Mazower, one of the most worrying consequences of the widespread adoption, interpretation, weaponisation and enforcement of the IHRA definition has been to legitimate accusations of antisemitism against those who are protesting Israel’s efforts to dispossess Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank as a forerunner to the creation of Eretz Israel “from the river to the sea.” As a result, some countries (notably the US) are now “attempting to dictate what their own nationals may or may not say about another country. There seems to be little precedent for this, and the potential consequences for freedom of expression are profound.”
The promotion of the IHRA’s “highly contentious and problematic” formula has come at “a time when polls have consistently shown a long-term hardening of global opinion against Israel.” This is true even in the US, especially among young Americans and within an increasingly divided Jewish community.
Inevitably, this trend has been most visible on university campuses, where student protests have attracted fierce debate and opened up a new front for Jewish advocacy groups to clamp down on what they see as “rising antisemitism.” In the US, the ADL has devised what it calls a Campus Antisemitism Report Card — to grade universities on how well they are doing — which Mazower derides as both “a gimmick” and a sign of how far it has fallen far short of its “predecessors in tackling serious issues of discrimination.”
What does Mazower offer as more promising alternatives to turning down the heat and more seriously addressing the issues surrounding the current debate over antisemitism? For a start, “perhaps we need to question whether the idea of antisemitism is sui generis and best tackled apart from other forms of bigotry.” A revival of the broad anti-racist campaigns Jewish advocacy groups like the ADL supported in the 1950s — along with more effective counterterrorism efforts — would certainly tackle the very real hatred of Jews still to be found within both the neo-Nazi right and radical Islamic fringe groups.
But in this century it is Israel’s “cycle of wars” that has been the primary driver of spikes in “antisemitic incidents.” This is why one of the leading historians of antisemitism, Steve Beller, has suggested we have been “hunting the wrong elephant.” Put simply, as quoted by Mazower, he notes that “antisemitism was historically built around the ‘Jewish Question.’ What we have in Israel/Palestine today is not so much a Jewish Question as a Palestinian Question.” Until it is resolved there will never be peace for Israelis, Palestinians, the Jewish and Arab diasporas, indeed all of us.
Our own royal commission is currently holding a fortnight of hearings, a primary focus of which will be the nature and prevalence of antisemitism. But what I hadn’t fully appreciated before reading On Antisemitism is how profoundly the sweep and force of recent international history has shaped the commission’s creation and agenda.
Australian readers of this review might now better appreciate how and why so many of the steps taken by both our federal and state governments have mimicked the responses of their American counterparts over the last two decades to the “new antisemitism.” In 2021 the Morrison government adopted the IHRA definition. Three years later Albanese appointed Jillian Segal as “special envoy to combat antisemitism,” partly in response to the plethora of pro-Palestinian protests at Australian universities.
In February 2025 Universities Australia issued its own “working definition” of antisemitism, which drew on not only the IHRA definition but also recommendations from, among others, Columbia University’s Antisemitism Task Force. Segal welcomed UA’s statement as “an important first step,” with the implied caveat that it could do better.
Then, last December, Albanese announced an Antisemitism Education Taskforce chaired by David Gonski with Segal among its members. An important item on its agenda will be the development of an antisemitism report card to grade universities on their compliance with the taskforce’s recommendations. What the penalties might be for non-compliance is not yet clear.
Meanwhile, both the NSW and Queensland state governments passed laws that, respectively, restricted the rights of pro-Palestinian groups to protest and banned the use of the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” “when used to menace, harass, or offend.” The NSW law has since been ruled as an unconstitutional assault on the “freedom of personal communication.” The Queensland law has also been appealed.
Over at the royal commission, Virginia Bell might wish — in the light of Mazower’s well-documented history — to reassess her earlier judgement that the IHRA definition was “uncontroversial.” While it may be her view that “criticism of the policies… pursued by the government of Israel… is not of itself antisemitic,” the interpretation and use of the IHRA’s hopelessly confused definition in other countries suggests it will leave the door to such conflation wide open. •
A personal coda: I’d like to acknowledge that my account of Mark Mazower’s powerful and timely work reads more like a precis than a review. Apart from limitations of time and space, this piece reflects how much I share his commitment not only to a disciplined and engaged historiography but also to providing a history that speaks to the “better angels” of his subjects as well as his readers.
This is the approach I’ve attempted to follow for six decades. And during that time I have shared this journey with a number of American and Israeli Jewish historians, whose work and humanity I have loved and respected. Principal among them was my Harvard PhD supervisor, the late Everett Mendelsohn. Everett combined the vocation of history with his tireless work as a public intellectual both in the United States and Israel, where he was a prominent proponent of the Israeli peace movement’s efforts to seek a just resolution of the Palestine question. I hope this article reflects and honours the skills and values he transmitted to me and so many others.
On Antisemitism: A Word in History
By Mark Mazower | Allen Lane | $55 | 333 pages
