ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the variant of twenty-first century antisemitism that has become widely, although not universally, accepted among people who think of themselves as egalitarian, liberal, and left-wing. Antizionism claims to be a respectable worldview. It thinks of itself as being hostile to antisemitism, but when it treats the Jewish state as central to all that is bad in the world, or as symbolic of it, it positions itself firmly in an antisemitic tradition. The Communist rulers in Eastern Europe and Russia made use of rhetoric about the evils of Nazism but they were careful to avoid talking about antisemitism or about the Holocaust. Jews define their own Zionism and their own relationship to Israel in many different ways. Essentially, none define their own Zionism as racism. Hannah Arendt could see why Jews often experience antisemitism in the present as little more than a continuation of antisemitism from the past, as just another episode of a single timeless hatred.
