On Antisemitism

"From one of our most eminent historians, a penetrating and timely examination of how the meaning of antisemitism has mutated, with unexpected and troubling consequences What are we talking about when we talk about antisemitism? For most of its history it was understood to be a menace from the political Right, the province of ethno-nativists who built on Christendom's long-standing suspicion of its tiny Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. When the twentieth century began, the vast majority of the world's Jews lived in Europe. For them, there was no confusion about where the threat of antisemitic politics lay, a threat that culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Now, in a piercingly brilliant book that ranges from the term's invention in the late nineteenth century to the present, Mark Mazower argues the landscape is very different. More than four-fifths of the world's Jews live in two countries, Israel and the United States, and the former's military dominance of its region is guaranteed by the latter. Before the Second World War, Jews were a minority apart and drawn by opposition to fascism into an alliance with other oppressed peoples. Today, in contrast, Jews are considered "white," and for today's anti-colonialists, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has become a critical issue. The old Left solidarity is a thing of the past; indeed, the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left, not the Right. Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, navigating this minefield through a history that seeks to illuminate rather than to blame, demonstrating how the rise of a pessimistic post-Holocaust sensibility, along with growing international criticism of Israel, produced a gradual conflation of the interests of Jews and the Jewish state. Half a century ago few people believed that antisemitism had anything to do with hostility to Israel; today mainstream Jewish voices often equate the two. The word remains the same, but its meaning has changed. The tragedy, Mazower argues, is that antisemitism persists. If it can be found on the far Left, it still is a much graver danger from those forces on the Right chanting "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville and their ilk. If we allow the charge to be applied too loosely and widely to shut down legitimate argument, we are only delegitimizing the term, and threatening to break something essential in how democracies function. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw that necessary line"--Provided by publisher.

WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021<BR>SHORTLISTED FOR THE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2022<BR>A NEW STATESMAN AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021<BR><BR>'Deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come' Roderick Beaton, Times Literary Supplement<BR><BR>In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece.<BR><BR>Mark Mazower's wonderful new book recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece.<BR><BR>Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.<BR><BR>'Exquisite, impressive' The Times<BR><BR>'Superbly subtle and thorough' Daily Telegraph

Europa im Jahr 1942: Hitler kontrollierte eine Landmasse, die größer als die USA, dichter besiedelt und wirtschaftlich produktiver als jede andere war. Das Ziel der Nationalsozialisten, "Herren in Europa" zu werden, schien nahezu erreicht. Auch wenn die Tatsache 1945 rasch in Vergessenheit geriet: Die besetzten Länder in Europa kooperierten, sie lieferten Deutschland, was es an Menschen und Material forderte. Mark Mazower schildert, gestützt auf eine beeindruckende Fülle von Quellen und Zeugnissen, wie Hitler sein Großreich errichtete, wie es funktionierte und warum ausgerechnet die Nazi-Ideologie selbst seinen Zerfall beschleunigte.

The history of a bewilderingly exotic city, rarely written about: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi occupation.Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries.Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research, Salonica evokes the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands of both Europe and the East.Mark Mazower has written a work of astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city. Magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with violent endings and new beginnings.