For decades after Israel’s founding in 1948, American policymakers worried about the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. But they paid little heed to domestic antisemitism. In 1972, Bertram Gold, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, one of the most important Jewish organizations, proclaimed “the virtual end of overt antisemitism.” That was then, however. In January 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order to combat “an unprecedented wave of vile antisemitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence against our citizens.”

Is the United States experiencing an “unprecedented wave” of antisemitism? Or has the Trump Administration, following the lead of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), equated public opposition to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza with “vile antisemitic discrimination”?  Historian Mark Mazower takes up these questions in a new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History. Mazower is well qualified to write about this subject. For one thing, he is an expert in that period of European history when the word arose. He also happens to be a professor at Columbia University, which was the epicenter of student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza and of the Trump Administration’s attempt to punish prominent universities on the grounds that they were failing to curb antisemitism.

Mazower has done an excellent job. He doesn’t succumb to the temptation, common among political scientists and advocacy groups, to treat antisemitism as a scientific term, like mitosis, that admits of an exact definition. Instead, he describes how the term’s meaning and use have changed over the last century and a half. As a result, he can show how subtle changes in its meaning have been used not in order to unearth grievous wrongs against American and world Jewry, but to discredit protests against Israeli policy in the West Bank and Gaza and to justify the Trump Administration’s attacks against liberal institutions. In the process, the Administration and its allies have ignored what may actually be a new wave of antisemitism.

Hostility to Jews and Judaism well predates the birth of Christ, but the term “antisemitism” dates from the late nineteenth century. As Mazower recounts, it was popularized by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, who in 1879 founded the League of Antisemites. (Semites were an ancient language grouping that included Hebrew and Arabic speakers, which makes the term “anti-Semites,” which by definition would include both anti-Judaism and Islamophobia, misleading.)

Marr and the League’s antisemitism differed in several significant ways from most prior hostility to Jews. They identified Jews primarily as a race or ethnic group rather than simply as a religious group whose individuals could abandon being Jewish by converting to Christianity. They condemned Jews to some extent for their religious heterodoxy, but principally for their control of finance and industry, which, the League charged, would turn Germany into a Jewish state. And they proposed not simply subordinating Jews socially and politically—as had been the custom in Europe and the Arab Middle East—but expelling them from Germany. Marr’s version of what Hannah Arendt called “political antisemitism” was the precursor of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism and of the hostility to Jews that became common in Central and Eastern Europe between the two world wars.

In the United States, there were no major antisemitic parties in the twentieth century, but there were organizations and prominent individuals who advocated a bigoted view of Jews, or what Arendt called “social antisemitism.” One such person was Henry Ford, who promoted the Russian hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent text purportedly revealing a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Ford, Mazower writes, “did more than anyone thereby to create a favorable climate for antisemitism in interwar America.” But the defeat of Hitler and the revelation of the Holocaust dealt a death blow to political and even, to some extent, social antisemitism, both in the United States and Europe. In 1956, sociologist Herbert Gans wrote that “[O]rganized antisemitism is already confined mostly to the lunatic fringe.” And that has remained the case until very recently.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, Israeli officials began to promote the idea of a “new antisemitism” that they identified with criticism of Israel. In 1973, Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister and a Labor Party member, wrote, “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.” In 1974, Benjamin Epstein, the national director of the ADL, and Arnold Forster, a former ADL researcher, published The New Anti-Semitism. While they acknowledged that the older right-wing antisemitism was declining, they charged that the “totalitarian political left” had failed to “comprehend the necessity of the existence of Israel to Jewish safety and survival in the world.” The authors, Mazower writes, “were especially worried by…the impact of the far-Left groups on political attitudes and campus life.” Plus ça change.

Over the past 50 years, the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and a host of leading intellectuals have promoted this new definition of antisemitism. Last year, the ADL reported “the highest number on record” of antisemitic incidents. But a clear majority of those, 58 percent, were protests directed at Israel. The definition of antisemitism has expanded well beyond opposition to Zionism. In 2021, Mazower notes, the Wiesenthal Center named the founders of Ben & Jerry’s, proponents of a two-state solution, as part of their “Global Anti-Semitism Top Ten” along with Iran and Hamas.

In 2016, the Wiesenthal Center was at the forefront of urging the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to adopt a quasi-official definition of antisemitism. The definition was vague and uncontroversial, but the IHRA elaborated it with 11 current examples of antisemitism. Seven of these concerned attitudes toward Israel, including “denying Jewish people the right to self-determination.” Mazower writes that in combination with the examples, the definition “blurs key distinctions such as that to be made between calling for the very extinction of Jewish life in Israel, on the one hand, and demanding an end to the denial of equal rights to the country’s Arabs on the other.” Under it, Jewish groups like the Jewish Voice for Peace or commentators like Peter Beinart could be declared antisemitic.

But the definition has been widely acclaimed and accepted by American government officials. In 2016, the U.S. Senate endorsed it; in 2019, the Trump Administration made it central to an executive order. The Biden Administration followed suit in its first year in office. Thirty-four states have also declared their support. The second Trump Administration has used it to bludgeon American universities: In 2025, under pressure from the Administration, Harvard and Columbia agreed to use the definition to ferret out antisemitism.

One could argue that by broadening the meaning of antisemitism, the groups have diluted its force. In fact, the opposite is the case. The average person who hears the term “antisemitic” doesn’t distinguish between the older references to Nazi death camps and Russian pogroms and the “new antisemitism.” Instead, the old still resonates within the new. Its presence endows the current charge of antisemitism with its power. The result is a travesty of language. Writes Mazower, “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.”

In Israel, beginning in the 1970s, a group of historians known as the Jerusalem School was also engaged in redefining antisemitism. According to Robert Wistrich, the best-known of these historians, antisemitism was “a historically continuous, unique, and potentially ineradicable phenomenon.” The “new antisemitism” flowed out of the old, and Arab antisemitism out of Islam, Central Europe, and the Soviet Union. “For these scholars,” Mazower writes, “Arab hostility in particular was neither…[a] natural reaction to the fact of Israel’s existence…nor the reflection of a sense of ethnic or religious solidarity with the dispossessed Palestinians…. It was the latest incarnation of the hatred that would never die.” That interpretation “turned diplomacy into a holding action or a fool’s errand.”

Mazower rejects a simple-minded equation of Arab resistance to Israel with antisemitism. As he shows, so did the founding fathers of Israel. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, regularly invoked the Nazis in publicly explaining Arab hostility to Israel, but privately he told Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country.”

That is not to say there was no antisemitism among Arab leaders and peoples. In 1929, the Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of the Arab Palestinians, cited The Protocols in his testimony before the British commission that investigated that year’s Jewish-Arab riot. After the Arab defeat in the 1948 war—the Nakba—antisemitism became rife among Israel’s Arab neighbors. But the conflict between Jew and Arab remained rooted in the Jewish control of what were seen as Arab lands. (Ben-Gurion told Goldmann, “Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs.”) As Jewish Israelis have denied Palestinians their freedom even in the slice of the former Palestine to which they have been relegated, land and liberty have remained the basis of the conflict. But if one believes, as many Israeli and American policymakers do, that the conflict is driven by Arabs’ demonization and irrational hatred of Jews, then diplomacy aimed at reconciling the parties to the conflict, becomes, as Mazower writes, a “fool’s errand.”

In the United States, there may indeed be a new wave of antisemitism, but it is not coming primarily from where the Trump Administration and Republican officials charge. There has been a succession of violent incidents beginning with the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and continuing most recently with the firebombing of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion, whose current occupants are Governor Josh Shapiro and his family, during Passover. Antisemitism has also flourished in the crevices of the right-wing populist movement that was partly inspired by Trump’s candidacy. In 2017, neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville. Groups like NatSoc Florida (“NatSoc” being short for “National Socialist”) and the Goyim Defense League formed. But antisemitism has even surfaced among Republican officials. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the California wildfires on space lasers created by the Rothschild banking family. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has claimed that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that attacked whites and Blacks but mysteriously sidestepped Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

The unofficial leader of this new wave of antisemitism is white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Leader of an organization called the America First Foundation, Fuentes has almost a million followers on social media. He marched in Charlottesville, endorses a version of the “great replacement theory,” and regards American Jews as an alien entity whose primary loyalty is to Israel. Jews “resist assimilation,” he told interviewer Tucker Carlson in October. Whatever evils Israel does, he told Carlson, cannot be separated “from Jewishness.” Activists in the populist right criticize Israel, but they do so as part of a broad antisemitism that resembles the older, nineteenth-century variety. Jews are seen as an unassimilable ethnicity within the United States that, along with Jews in Israel and Europe, enjoys remarkable power over finance and government.

The Trump Administration and Republicans like New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik have conveniently overlooked these instances of antisemitism. Instead, as Mazower notes, they have developed a “keen interest” in campus protests against American support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Mazower rejects their characterization of these protests. He doesn’t think anti-Zionism is antisemitism, and he doesn’t think the campuses are rife with antisemitism. “The claim that American universities were hotbeds of institutionalized antisemitism I knew from my own experience to be an accusation as preposterous as it was damaging,” he writes. “If any pro-Palestinian advocacy provokes shouts of antisemitism, then you have a created a formidable obstacle to seeing the other side of the struggle that is at the heart of all this—that is to say, the existence of a suffering Palestinian people and their desire for freedom—as something worthy of real attention at all.”

If Israelis’ identification of Palestinian resistance as antisemitism would seem to preclude good faith negotiations for a Palestinian state or for equal rights for Palestinians within a greater Israel, American politicians’ identification of protest against Israel with antisemitism would seem to preclude any national discussion of American policy toward Israel. Mazower’s book is a brave attempt by an academic from a university under siege to counter this misbegotten and cynical use of Marr’s controversial term.