Benjamin Balthaser at the Boston Review:
The German state has staked redemption for the Shoah on unquestionable support for Israel even as the far-right party Alternative for Deutschland, with an alarming record of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, increases its share of power in the Bundestag. Jews being arrested for insufficient loyalty to a Jewish state stands as a strange emblem of an absurdist present and a menacing echo of a fast-encroaching past.
It is this sense of inversion that historian Mark Mazower’s new book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History, seeks to chronicle and explain. Opening with Victor Klemperer’s account of the way language became “an instrument of power” under the Third Reich, Mazower suggests we are witnessing a similar kind of transformation today: a nationalist and imperialist right in Israel, Europe, and the United States—abetted by timid or overtly complicit liberals—changing the meaning of words not to capture a new reality but to transform it in the service of holding onto and furthering their power. The term “antisemitism,” coined by a far right eager to couch its own Judeophobia in the modern language of scientific racism and later used as a term of condemnation to name that deadly form of bigotry, is now widely associated with hostility to the state of Israel, especially from Arab and Islamic quarters. How did a word originally intended to justify the exercise of state power over a long-persecuted Jewish minority come to serve as a tool for justifying the power of the Jewish state to persecute vulnerable and stateless Palestinians? That is the story Mazower wants to tell: the way the word tracks the history of state power as much as the history of Jews themselves.
More here.
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