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- [00:00]
Mark Mazower
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Roland Clark
Hello, my name is Roland Clark, and I'm here today on the New Books Network talking to Mark Matzauer about his new book on A Word in History. Mark is Ira D. Wollach professor of History at the Columbia University and a specialist in modern Greece, 20th century Europe, and international history. He's absolutely prolific and a brilliant writer, and some of his more recent books include the Greek Revolution of 1821 and the making of Modern Europe and what yout Did Not A Russian Past and Journey Home. So welcome to the program, Mark.
- [01:41]
Mark Mazower
Thank you very much. Glad to be with you.
- [01:44]
Roland Clark
So, Mark, this is a history book, but the politics around antisemitism are really very topical these days. What was it that inspired you to write the book?
- [01:53]
Mark Mazower
Well, the book was driven by teaching at Columbia through the drama of the last few years after October 7, 2023, and in particular, as the encampment at Columbia became an international story, watching the ways in which it was reported in the media and becoming increasingly confused and frankly, pretty disturbed by the ways in which it was being reported. And accusations of antisemitism were fairly central to that.
- [02:34]
Roland Clark
So this was a way to think about what is antisemitism, which is a word that's being used constantly?
- [02:40]
Mark Mazower
Yes, I mean, I'm of a certain age and So I remember growing up in North London in the 1970s, and antisemitism was fairly clear what it meant to us growing up there. I think it meant, you know, Skinhead's National Front, DMs trouble around certain football teams had nothing to do with Israel, really. And yet at Colombia in 2023, it appeared to have everything to do with Israel. And I was genuinely interested intellectually in how this shift had taken place. So that the phenomenon that I was used to thinking about was being somehow was coalescing into this other set of concerns about politics in the Middle east and what you could say and you couldn't say about Israel. That was the conundrum.
- [03:35]
Roland Clark
Can you take us back to the beginning of your story, which is not 1970, but 1870? How is modern anti Semitism different to the Christian anti Judaism that's been around in Europe for centuries?
- [03:47]
Mark Mazower
So any historian will tell you that the argument that you make depends on where you choose to begin your story. And there is, of course, a very long history of anti Jewish prejudice that dates back to before Christian times. And so the decision to begin in the 1870s has a certain point. The point is not to say that there was no anti Jewish prejudice. And if you want to call that anti Semitism, I guess that's okay before then, nor that it, or that it never led to pogroms and expulsions and massacres, as it sometimes did, but that something qualitatively changes in the last third of the 19th century. What is that? The short answer would be the coming of politics, the coming of mass politics in the sense that we live it and understand it today. The historian David Sorkin at Yale has an excellent history of Jewish emancipation, which I recommend, in which he says quite categorically, the central event in modern Jewish history is not the Holocaust, nor indeed the creation of the state of Israel. It is Jewish emancipation, meaning the process by which Jews were to be given the vote as full citizens of one or other state in Europe and elsewhere. And that, of course, was part of a much larger process of emancipation of all kinds of groups who had been excluded from the franchise, as most people and most groups were at the beginning of the 19th century. Why is that relevant to our story? Because the term is coined by a group of people who have a political agenda. It's not merely that they dislike Jews or have negative views about Jews. An awful lot of people, no doubt the majority of people in Europe in the middle of the 19th century had negative stereotypes about Jews. There's nothing new there. What was New was to into the basis for a political program. And that political program, that political program was the program of ensuring that Jews were not enfranchised or where they had been, to disenfranchise them. They called themselves something new. They called themselves anti Semites. And for me, that is the beginning of the term.
- [06:20]
Roland Clark
But one thing you point out in the book is that 19th century antisemitism looked very different. If you go to France or Germany or the Habsburg or Russian Empire. What was different about antisemitism across Europe?
- [06:34]
Mark Mazower
Well, there were many differences because there were many national cultural and intellectual and religious traditions. And so the politics of antisemitism varied from place to place. For instance, in Germany, the predominant and the most critical form of antisemitism was a highly racialized version which defined the Jews in biological terms and in so doing offered a view of the Jews that both Protestants and Catholics could, if necessary, share. In France, antisemitism was an ardently Catholic phenomenon in a country that was already divided as a result of the revolution and the war of 1871. So it varied a great. In Russia, antisemitism was closely bound up with the Orthodox Church and so on.
- [07:35]
Roland Clark
So even at the beginning, antisemitism was a way to fight local battles against local political opponents.
- [07:42]
Mark Mazower
Correct?
- [07:43]
Roland Clark
Rather than like this global word at all.
- [07:47]
Mark Mazower
Yes, that was the start. But then there's an interesting global dimension that becomes part of the story very, very quickly, because after all, the late 19th century happened also to be the age of international organization, or the beginnings of international organization. And so that within a few years, the very first anti Semites are looking to support one another in Germany and Romania and Hungary, for instance, and they attempt to construct a kind of international organization. And they have conferences, and none of it amounts to very much. But what's interesting is that as a result of that, Jewish organizations, and particularly in the United States, realize that they have to mobilize and see this as an international problem because they're particularly concerned about what's happening in Central and Eastern Europe. And so there is a kind of international politics of mobilization on both sides that takes place almost instantaneously.
- [08:49]
Roland Clark
And that's 1880s and 1890s. But once you jump forward to the 1930s, when most people hear the word anti Semitism, the first thing they think about is Hitler and the Nazis. What's the international impact of Hitler's rise to power?
- [09:04]
Mark Mazower
Well, if you tell the familiar story of Hitler's rise to power and interwar Europe through the prism specifically of antisemitism then you see just how important it is, because Hitler personally and his party are heirs to the anti Semite tradition of the political fringe groups of the 1870s and the 1880s. And they genuinely believe that an anti Jewish policy is, as it were, the clue to world history. There's not much evidence that huge numbers of the German population share their obsession with this, but they're willing to go along with the Nazis, as you know better than I do, for other reasons. And so the result is that the most powerful and militarily dominant state in Europe is run by a group of obsessives who will take the country to war, convinced that their fight against the Jews is a fight of world historical significance. And that means that everybody has to think about the Jews and antisemitism in a way that simply was not true politically 30 years earlier.
- [10:12]
Roland Clark
And once you get to the Second World War, anti Semitism seems to be everywhere with the Holocaust. But then Hitler loses and it's supposed to suddenly disappear. Did Western Europeans stop being anti Semitic overnight once Hitler was out of the picture?
- [10:28]
Mark Mazower
I think it's important to make the distinction that David Feldman and others have made between antisemitic prejudices and anti Semites. The prejudices, as I've said, go back a long way into history, and they do not disappear. They may diminish in intensity, they may indeed be held by fervent people, but they don't certainly don't disappear. Prejudices of various kinds, stereotypes do not rise and fall so quickly. The anti Semites were people who politically mobilized around this issue, and they are unquestionably discredited by the catastrophe of the Second World War, the genocide of the Jews and the defeat of the Nazis. The defeat of the Nazis above all, I would say. And so what you have in Europe after 1945 is a discrediting of the politics of antisemitism. You cannot henceforward, if you are an ambitious politician, hope to get anywhere putting yourself forward as an anti Semite. Does that mean that antisemitic prejudices are dead? Far from it. And in fact, there's a lot of anxiety on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid to late 1940s, precisely that the Nazi defeat has not ended antisemitic prejudice. And a lot of thought goes into how those prejudices can be combated. That is, in a way, the beginning of our contemporary concern about fighting race prejudice.
- [11:57]
Roland Clark
So anti Semites, they were particularly powerful in Western Europe within Hitler's empire, as you caught it in one of your books. But what about in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, where actually most of the Jewish victims come from during the Holocaust? So are anti Semites still powerful in the Soviet Union?
- [12:16]
Mark Mazower
So as we know, the Soviet Union is a kind of haven for Jews. During the Second World War, if you were Jewish and you had the choice, you move from the German zone into the Soviet zone, you might be targeted for other reasons, on class grounds, but you would not have been targeted on the grounds of your race or ethnicity or faith. What happens after the Second World War is that the politics of antisemitism re emerges behind the Iron Curtain, but in a context where it was never politically or ideologically acceptable to profess yourself to be an anti Semite. Lenin had ruled that out from the start. And so what you find in the show trials in eastern Europe in 1948 and actually in Moscow as well, initially against the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee and later in the doctor's trial, is that there is an anti Semitic politics, but it calls itself by a different name. They use the code word anti Zionism. And so they target people on the grounds that they are Zionists, meaning to everybody reading the newspapers, those people are clearly Jewish. Most of these people have nothing to do with Zionism, nothing to do with the state of Israel. So they are using anti Zionism as a kind of COVID for an anti Semitic politics.
- [13:40]
Roland Clark
The other thing that happens after the Second World War is huge numbers of Jews move to Israel and America. What was life like for Jews in the United States? Did they still face antisemitism there?
- [13:51]
Mark Mazower
So one of the things that helped me understand what I was trying to say and the shift I was trying to demarcate is to get a handle on the extraordinarily radical demographic change in the century from, let's say, 1925 until now, as a result of the Second World War. 1925, if you look at the distribution of Jewish population around the world, 4/5 of the world's Jews live in Europe as a result of the Holocaust, above all, and other things, but almost entirely the Holocaust, that proportion changes massively. So that today we're in a world where barely 10% of the world's Jews live in Europe and 4/5 of the world's Jews live in the United States and Israel. And so after the Second World War, when we talk about antisemitism, we're not talking about the old world or the old issues, that is to say, the issues of Jews as a minority in European nation states. We're talking about a world in which the principal populations live in the United States and Israel. And the relationship between those two groups is transcendently important. Now, as regards the Jews of the United States, suddenly they wake up, as it were, in 1950 and they find that they are now the most numerous Jewish population in the world. In the United States, antisemitism, which had been, I would say, and others would disagree with this, but I would say a negligible political phenomenon in the 19th century. You could write a serious political history of the United States and not really mention antisemitism and not miss a huge amount, suddenly becomes an important phenomenon. In the 1920s and 30s. There are politicians. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulate widely. Henry Ford is the best known case of a prominent anti Semite. And the result is a sweeping number of discriminatory antisemitic measures. Rarely legislation, but measures in housing and employment restrictions on where you can live, being barred from hotels and golf courses. This sort of thing's quite open in the United States and it comes into being mostly in the interwar years and it does not immediately go away. And so there is this very interesting, concerted and very thoughtful effort that is spearheaded by the American Jewish Committee, which at that time was a very serious organization and the most prominent of the American Jewish organizations, who employ a number of social scientists of some standing and embark on a kind of anti racist program to get rid of this discriminatory legislation. And they do that in the context of a larger vision of racism as a threat to democracy. And so they see this as a multi pronged strategy where they should ally themselves with black groups in particular in fighting discriminatory legislation in general. And between 1945 and 1970, they're massively successful. Most of this discriminatory legislation as it applies to the Jews in particular, is dismantled. And so by the 1960s, Jews in America, according to the opinion polls, their own opinion polls, are facing the future with some optimism.
- [17:22]
Roland Clark
One of the things that they. One of. Apart from the optimism, one of the things that Jews in America witness is this horrific persecution of black people after their own experiences of persecution in Europe. Did they side with African Americans or with whites once they. Once the 1950s hit.
- [17:42]
Mark Mazower
So the logic of the American Jewish Committee's campaign against discriminatory legislation mandates coalition. It pushes towards coalition with black civil rights groups. I wanted in the book, because there's a lot of very good work on this, I wanted to demystify and de. Romanticize the relationship. But the fact of the matter is, and the relationship was never straightforward. And it's never. One could not simply say that Jewish groups immediately fell to kinship with black groups. Quite the contrary. So you don't want to romanticize a much more complex reality. But the truth is that as a result of the second World War, a larger anti racist coalition is forged between the most important groups on either side because they see themselves as heirs to the situation that's been brought about by the defeat of fascism. They identify fascism with racism in general. And they see racism in general as a threat to democracy. And that is common ground for the NAACP and the AJC and other such groups. And they mobilize and work together very effectively in the 1950s and the early 1960s. And of course, there's a good deal that's been written about Jewish participation in the civil rights movement in the south and so on. That coalition was always a little fragile and asymmetrical because of course, the, the disabilities that faced the black population, especially in the south, were much, much greater than the disadvantages that accrued to the American Jews, south or North. And so the struggle for the black population was of a different scale and on a different dimension. And of course, there's a lot of racism in the United States on all sides, frankly. And Jewish groups were not immune to that. And for that matter, sometimes black groups were not immune to that either. So it was not an easy relationship, but it was an effective one. The real test comes when you have the major civil rights victories, legislative victories of the mid-1960s, what to do after that. And for various reasons, that coalition between black groups and Jewish groups falls apart.
- [20:05]
Roland Clark
Because Jews are basically. They're seen as white people in America.
- [20:09]
Mark Mazower
Well, the white black thing comes a bit later. That's the language we talk now, perhaps, or some people do. I think that comes a bit later. I would say it comes out of a number of concerns. One is that black nationalism emerges as a generational succession to the older leadership of the civil rights movement. And black nationalism is critical of the leadership role that their elders have allowed American Jews to play. So there's a certain sense of saying the new black nationalist, saying to American Jews, we don't. Yes, you're white, we don't need your help anymore. But there's also, I think, a more profound strategic disagreement about how to follow up the civil rights victories of the mid-60s. And the Jewish American majority American Jewish view is these are major achievements. No more needs to be done. The view of the, of the, of some of the more important black groups, not on the black nationalist Fringe. But those who are willing to go to Washington and lobby is actually, we now need to lobby Washington for monitoring mechanisms that will ensure federally compliance with the provisions of the Civil Rights Act. And that's the origin of today's anti racist monitoring machinery. And that singles out minority groups for special treatment on the grounds that they need. The federal government needs to demonstrate that they are indeed being protected. When this happens, you get a lot of American civil servants scratching their heads or saying, hang on a second, you've been telling us for the last 10 years that we should eradicate racial and ethnic labels and now you're telling us that we should put them back in so that we can monitor the extent to which we're becoming an anti racist society. And on the whole, the black leaders come round to the view that they want these labels in order for this monitoring to be effective. And Jewish groups, American Jewish groups by and large are reluctant to be singled out in this kind of way and do not want this. Now, 25 years later, they're going to have a change of heart. And one of the things that one heard at Colombia and elsewhere in 2023, 24 was American Jewish groups and students saying, this is very unfair. You have monitoring mechanisms in place in universities and elsewhere to ensure discrimination against disadvantaged minorities. Why don't you have such monitoring mechanisms for us forgetting this entire paradoxical history of the previous 50 or 60 years? So the breakdown is complex. The breakdown between the black organizations and Jewish organizations has multiple roots and it gets steadily worse over time.
- [23:25]
Roland Clark
That's the perfect historian's answer, is you ask a question, the answer's always, it's complicated.
- [23:31]
Mark Mazower
If only it wasn't.
- [23:32]
Roland Clark
Yeah, we wouldn't have jobs. So you mentioned that by the 1950s, something like 4/5 of the world's Jewish population lived in America.
- [23:41]
Mark Mazower
No, no, do not live in Europe.
- [23:44]
Roland Clark
Well, don't live in Europe.
- [23:46]
Mark Mazower
Well, it's not quite as much as that then. That's the proportion now, but yes.
- [23:50]
Roland Clark
So Israeli politicians like David Ben Gurion, how do they see Jews who, they're supportive of Zionism, but they choose not to move to Israel because they're quite happy in America.
- [24:02]
Mark Mazower
So I think in some ways the most fascinating and counterintuitive chapter in the story is the story of the arguments between American Jewish leaders and Israeli leaders in the 1950s, because with the creation of the state of Israel, the Zionists around Ben Gurion expected all those who profess to be Zionists to emigrate and come and settle in the new Jewish state. And of Course, this didn't happen, and Ben Gurion doesn't really know what to do about this, but he doesn't like it. And in fact, because he's very worried, as the other leaders of the Jewish state are, by the precarious position and desperate to increase numbers and not by and large desperate to increase numbers from Europe because they have a more or less eugenicist view in which they think that those Jews who've survived the Holocaust are going to be damaged by this. They would rather have Jews emigrate from Europe. They invest a great deal of time and energy in trying to persuade American Jews to emigrate to Israel. And it just doesn't happen on the scale that they anticipate. And so a kind of war of words breaks out between Ben Gurion and the leaders of the American Jewish community. The American Jewish community at this time is in a very different place from where it is today, much less complacent about its place in America or its acceptance by Americans. They've lived the antisemitism of the interwar years. They've lived McCarthyism, they've lived anti communism and the fact that many anti communists will associate Jews with communism and see Jews as drifting towards the left. And so the leaders of the American Jewish community are very alarmed when Ben Gurion starts making speeches that suggest as though the primary allegiance of all Jews anywhere is to Israel. That's exactly what the anti Semites in America accuse them of. And so they have a series of really rather acrimonious discussions or arguments in which the leaders of the American Jewish community say, we are here in America, we're Americans, we're going to stay here, we're going to support you, but we're here. We don't want to hear this nonsense about the fact that we owe you our allegiance or that our children should be coming over and settling in Israel. This is destructive and harmful and we want you to cut it out. And Ben Gurion sort of says, yes, yes, yes, yes, but he doesn't really change. So there is this cleavage, this divide, fascinating, the 1950s between an American Jewish population, which is of course delighted that there's a Jewish state willing to help it, a Jewish state, by the way, which is approximately one fifth the size of the Jewish population of the United States at that time. So it doesn't have any kind of authority of numbers. They're delighted that it exists. But they do not want the leaders of Israel to be jeopardizing their place in America because they don't want to leave it. And so what grows up over time is a completely new understanding of what Zionism means. Zionism no longer means that you are in favor of the establishment of a Jewish state to which you intend to go, because it's the only place in which Jews can express themselves. Zionism now means, in the American context, one of the obligations of being an American Jew is to support Israel. And that's a real shift in what it means.
- [27:51]
Roland Clark
Talking about the way that the words evolve. Last year in Colombia, a lot of people talking about Arab antisemitism, and we hear a lot about Arab antisemitism today. Did Ben Gurion and other Israelis in the 1940s and 50s see Arab hostility towards Israel? Did they think that was anti Semitic?
- [28:11]
Mark Mazower
It's interesting, isn't it? Because as you say, it's become a bit of a trope over the last 30 or 40 years to attribute antipathy to Israel in the Middle east to antisemitism. And what's so fascinating is that when you go back to the early Zionists, they didn't think antisemitism had anything to do with Arab enmity towards Israel. And in fact, if you look at the leading Zionist thinkers of the 20s and 30s, it's not that they don't think antisemitism is important. It's rather they see it as a European phenomenon. And so Jabotinsky, for instance, who is probably the most prominent Zionist thinker between the wars to accept that there's bound to be Arab hostility to Israel, to a Jewish state, does not attribute this to antisemitism. And in fact, the word antisemitism appears nowhere in his famous essay on the Iron Wall. That is the articulation of this view. And this is important, I think, actually, because the early Zionists have a strong belief that there is something abnormal about Jewish life, and that is that it exists in the Diaspora. And antisemitism is an expression of that. And that therefore, when you create a Jewish state, you will normalize Jewish life and antisemitism will go away. Now, they say, obviously that doesn't mean that when we've established this Jewish state, we will have no problems with our neighbors. Every state has a problem, they say, with its neighbors. That's normal, and we will too. But that's not antisemitism. They're very, very explicit about this. And Ben Gurion goes on thinking this into the 1950s. And so we have to explain to ourselves, how does it happen that the founders of Israel have a very clear view of what antisemitism is? An experience of it. They understand the hostility of the Arab neighbors to Israel, and they do not attribute it to antisemitism. And yet 40 or 50 years later, it will become absolutely commonplace that any Arab criticism of Israel must be motivated by antisemitism. That was something I tried to explain.
- [30:26]
Roland Clark
And even More curious, in 1975, you have Israeli journalists describing the United nations as, as I quote, a racist anti Semitic organization. So what's happened to the meaning of the word antisemitism by 75 that the UN is now being accused of antisemitism?
- [30:45]
Mark Mazower
The UN is being accused of antisemitism because, of course, the UN in the 1960s, 1950s and 60s is growing in stature internationally, largely as a result of the role it's played in the process of decolonization. So the General assembly membership has swelled, doubled and trebled in number. And there's enormous sympathy for the Palestinian plight and a willingness in the General assembly, not in the Security Council, but in the General assembly, to see the Palestinians as the last anti colonial cause and therefore for at least some of the promoters of this view, to see the Israeli state as the heir to European imperialism and perhaps even for some of them to Nazism. And so this outrages Israelis, understandably, perhaps. The relationship to colonialism is, I think, real, but a complex one. And so the Israeli antipathy to the United nations begins quite early with these notorious UN resolutions. I'd have to say. It's then fanned and it becomes much, much more significant, as anything to do with the internationalization of antisemitism does from the 1990s onwards. But the roots are already there in the 1970s, and they're part actually, it's actually not the most important part of a much bigger shift, which is the rupture between the United States and the United nations that takes place in these years over Vietnam and other things. There's a parting of the ways and Israel is very much with the United States and against the General assembly of the United Nations. There's never an actual break, but there's a kind of estrangement to move back.
- [32:36]
Roland Clark
To the United States. You said in the 1940s and 50s, the everyday life for American Jews was they had much less discrimination than they did in the 20s and 30s, and by the 1980s, that's even less again. So why do we find organizations like the Anti Discrimination League or the American Jewish Committee still making really alarmist claims about anti Semitism well into the 80s, when the amount of discrimination most Jews were facing was actually better than it had been for hundreds of years.
- [33:06]
Mark Mazower
So the great shift, the dismantling of discriminatory legislation is happening through the 50s and the 60s. And yes, there's no question that it puts American Jews in a position to become much more successful, much more upwardly mobile, much more centrally involved in national life than they had been before. And yet, as you say, by the 1980s, the early 1990s, all the indicators showed American Jews were becoming more anxious, more pessimistic, more worried about antisemitism. The reason we know this is there was a sort of cottage industry that grew up within American Jewish life of sort of monitoring itself, of sociologists and social scientists taking endless opinion polls and collecting data about how people feel about themselves, about what they thought themselves to be. Because there was a growth of concern about Jewish identity, which was part of a larger American obsession with ethnic identity that emerged at this time. The emergence of a notion of an American Jewish ethnic identity was taking place at a time when there were soaring rates of intermarriage and when religious observance was declining. And so the question was, well, what is it to be ethnically American Jewish if it's not to worship in a certain way? And increasingly, you find the answer in two areas that have previously both been very marginal to American Jewish life. One was Israel, support for Israel, and the other was the Holocaust. And these years coincide with the emergence of an interest in the Holocaust to a new degree. The best example of this would be, of course, Jimmy Carter's commitment, eventually realized, to construct a U.S. holocaust memorial museum. It's a marker of the way the Holocaust is emerging and taking on this kind of central role in cultural life that it will then have for the next 20, 30, 40 years. So the American Jewish social scientists are confused, genuinely confused. They say to themselves, what is going on here? This community is more successful than ever before. All the indicators of income, entry into professions, university, education, and so on are soaring. And yet people are coming more anxious and more worried about antisemitism, even though the indications of antisemitism in the United States are also shrinking. And then look around for an answer to this question, and there are number of different answers that offer themselves. One is that this is actually. And maybe these answers all come to the same thing in the end. One is that those American Jewish organizations who had been very active in fighting antisemitism since the 1920s, if not earlier, are sort of in danger of finding themselves out of a job because the phenomenon is subsiding. It's moving to the margins of American life. And so there are executives in, let's say, the American Anti Defamation League, which is the best known of the American Jewish organizations concerned with fighting race prejudice, who are conscious of this. But they say the fight is not over. You shouldn't become complacent. And starting in the mid-1970s, they are instrumental in proposing that antisemitism has simply shifted its form. We used to associate it with the far right. Now, in fact, you should be looking on the far left because the form that antisemitism has now assumed is anti Jewish, sorry, anti Israel polemic. And so that's the beginning of a discourse, what they call a new antisemitism, meaning leftist criticism of Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians. And so that's the moment at which the concept drifts over and starts to take the shape that we know it to have today.
- [37:35]
Roland Clark
And one of the core documents that's frequently used to talk about left wing antisemitism is, is the definition by the International Holocaust remembrance alliance of what is anti Semitism. You criticize that definition quite a lot in the book. But why is it so popular and what's wrong with it?
- [37:55]
Mark Mazower
Well, you know, it's interesting, isn't it, how often when you're telling an episode in history, do you find that there is a political argument of any importance over the question of a definition? Not very often. I guess this is a case where actually the politics of a definition are absolutely central to understanding what's going on now. And it's very peculiar. And I think it's probably the fact that normally we don't think definitions are very important things. Normally they aren't. That allows it to assume this importance really before anybody has woken up to what is going on. So there is a definition that has been adopted by governments that probably were run by politicians with other things on their mind of antisemitism that is being urged upon cultural institutions and people in public life and universities that professes to define antisemitism and therefore to guide people who are having to decide when speech steps over the line from criticism of Israel into an unacceptable antisemitism. But unfortunately, this definition is worse than useless. It's worse than useless because it doesn't only give a kind of bad definition or it doesn't actually give a bad definition. It really creates confusion. And it's the confusion that suppresses speech and stifles people because people are encouraged to avoid the subject for fear that they are going to be accused of antisemitism. This definition has a history that I talk about in the book, the History starts in a completely irrelevant, marginal part of the EU bureaucracy, which is monitoring hate and monitoring antisemitism, and where a number of American Jewish agencies and Israeli government, Israeli government agencies get involved in pushing upon it a definition that will include reference to criticism of Israel. Actually, it's so poorly worded that the agency itself decides not to go ahead with this definition. But what I find fascinating at that point is it wasn't as though everybody involved gave up. On the contrary. And remember, we're talking now about the period of 2000s, 2010s, when there was a good deal of concern about Holocaust remembrance. And I see this as sort of piggybacking, piggybacking on the concern about Holocaust remembrance. The people peddling this definition did not give up. They basically went around looking for an international organization to sponsor it. That's the second thing that I find interesting, because there was nothing to stop either the Israeli government or the American Jewish Committee coming out and saying, we've come up with a definition of anti Semitism. It says this, this and this about what you can and cannot say about Israel. I think had they done that, that would have been honest, but it would have also made the definition less powerful because people might have said, well, they're obviously going to say that, aren't they? And so they went looking for an ostensibly neutral body and they found one in another completely marginal element in the international landscape, the International Holocaust remembrance alliance, that nobody had ever heard of and nobody would have heard of had it not been for this. And they get a vote passed through which says, we will sponsor this definition. I doubt frankly very much whether many of the delegates of this insignificant body knew what they were doing or cared very much about what they were doing. But at this point, the sponsors of the definition could go round international governments and say, here is a definition that will do what you need, which is allow you to discriminate between antisemitism and legitimate political discourse. And one after another, governments adopted it. And now we're saddled with it, and now the consequences of it have become clear. They find themselves in this invidious position of forcing upon people a form of words that in my view is suppressing legitimate political speech.
- [42:15]
Roland Clark
This is quite mind blowing when you think about how far the word antisemitism has changed over the 150 years that you're talking about. To what extent do you think antisemitism in 2025 is the same thing that Wilhelm Ma was talking about in the 1870s? Are we even fighting the Same monster here.
- [42:34]
Mark Mazower
Well, if you open the Oxford English Dictionary and you go look through this entry for this or that word, you'll often find a word has three or four different definitions or different meanings. And indeed, sometimes you'll find words where the meanings for various weird historical reasons are actually kind of contradictory. I think this is what's happened with the word antisemitism. The original understanding of the word that ethnic prejudice against Jews as an ethnicity is very much with us. It hasn't gone away. You can see it on the far right. And at the same time, this new meaning of the word has been popularized. And no doubt there are many people who genuinely believe it to be true. Which goes so far as to say that, you know, if I tell you that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, I'm anti Semitic. That's a completely different meaning of the word antisemitic. Let's call it antisemitism. B. So we are in this confused mess. How we get out of it, I don't know. But I think the first step to getting out of it is to understanding what's been going on.
- [43:51]
Roland Clark
And this book is very helpful for that. So that's about all we have time for today. But thank you very much for talking us through what is a very challenging and timely problem.
- [44:03]
Mark Mazower
My pleasure.
- [44:16]
Marshall Po
Limu Emu and Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [44:33]
Roland Clark
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [44:37]
Mark Mazower
They see us.
- [44:38]
Marshall Po
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com.
- [44:40]
Mark Mazower
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.