On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower review – the politics of prejudice
This nuanced analysis of what ‘antisemitism’ means explores the evolution of anti-Jewish discrimination, and how it became a driver for political activism
Adolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, “discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come”.
It is an arresting turn of phrase that makes reckoning with the Holocaust after the second world war sound more like a trend in public policy than a moral imperative. But that is the point. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, is talking about a particular manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiment that rose and fell in a relatively short time frame.