He demonstrates persuasively how we might turn it from a weapon back into a word ... It is rigorous and lucid, and, like any good work of history, it absolutely bristles with primary sources. Even when Mazower’s writing is explicitly opinionated, he always shows the reader precisely what documents or events he’s basing his opinion on. In a book that deals so intensely with the manipulation of ideas and emotions, this transparency is an intense relief.
Fine-grained and bracing ... Something close to revelatory ... In clear and graceful prose, remarkably free of polemic or cynicism, Mazower soberly describes how and why the politics of anti-Semitism have metastasized in such maddening ways.
Consistently partisan, frequently incoherent and, especially in its final chapters, studiously unwilling to illuminate the present ... He consistently emphasizes it as an ideology of the right and plays down its popularity on the left ... Mazower’s book slides into self-serving polemic.
Mazower’s book contains many...distinctions – subtle twists of the lens that bring different shades of personal and ideological animus into focus. The underlying thesis is not controversial, at least not as historiography ... Mazower strives to be systematic in setting out legitimate reasons for political opposition to the actions of the Israeli state and identifying the place where a certain ferocity of condemnation shades into antisemitism ... Crowds of Israelis who protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government manage it all the time. Plainly they aren’t all antisemites willing destruction on themselves and their country ... As Mazower engages with these present-day arguments, his book takes less nuanced, more polemical and US-centric turns ... But it surely asks too much that a book on this subject, at this inflection point in history, might illuminate all angles equally. For Mazower to provide any respite of clarity on a topic befogged in rage and confusion is achievement enough.
