On Antisemitism: A Word in History, by Mark Mazower, Penguin Press, 2025. 274 pages. $26.56. ISBN 978-0241722909

Abstract

Historian Beth A. Griech-Polelle reviews Mark Mazower’s On Antisemitism: A Word in History which explores how the term came emerged in Germany in the last 1800s and how its definition has changed over time and across cultures, including in the US, the USSR, and the Arab world. Mazower considers the roles of geography, Christan and antisemitic Zionism, intellectual and political antisemitism, Nazism, anti-Zionism, imperialism, conspiracy theories, and anti-Israel sentiment in shaping how people have historically understood and do today understand the concept—and how such differences in understanding frustrated efforts to end antisemitism.