On Antisemitism: A Word in History Author : Mark Mazower ISBN-13 : 978-0241722909 Publisher : Allen Lane Guideline Price : £25

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University. When protests began there against Israel’s war on Gaza, a whole swath of American politicians and commentators accused those involved of being motivated by hatred of Jews. Mazower was appalled at this “maligning of students of all backgrounds and creeds for speaking out against the terrible things that were happening in Gaza” which involved the ‘killing [of] innocent people on a scale that dwarfed anything seen previously in the history of the conflict".

Furthermore, he thought “preposterous” the increasingly shrill claims that “American universities were hotbeds of institutionalized antisemitism”. Mazower had written widely on modern Europe, including an outstanding history of Salonika, once home to Greece’s largest Jewish population, most of whom were murdered by the Nazis. He has examined anti-Semitism in many of his books, one of which, What You Did Not Tell, concerned his grandfather, a member of the Jewish Labour Bund, in Tsarist Russia.

But discussing the issue now felt to him like entering a “hall of mirrors. A term that began as a way to describe the hostility Jews faced as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs. Fighting antisemitism once meant battling ethnonationalism; now it often justifies ethnonationalism’s excesses ... even racists these days say they are fighting antisemitism.”

For many, in Ireland certainly, the issue is inevitably framed through the lens of Israel’s brutal slaughter of Palestinians and accusatio