"Adolf Hitler's defeat didn't end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower's judgment, discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come. It is an arresting turn of phrase that makes reckoning with the Holocaust after the second world war sound more like a trend in public policy than a moral imperative."
"The operative word, dissonant in the context of mass murder, is positive. People didn't stop hating Jews after 1945, but they found there was an electoral penalty for boasting about it. The loud, proud style of antisemitism was banished from the mainstream. Mazower's book contains many such 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."
Hitler's defeat did not eliminate anti-Jewish prejudice in Germany or elsewhere. The Third Reich discredited antisemitism as a positive political programme, producing an electoral cost for overt boasting and marginalising loud, public antisemitic rhetoric. Anti-Jewish hatred persisted privately and in varied violent episodes across history. Medieval massacres, Tsarist pogroms, Nazi industrialised slaughter, Soviet persecutions and attacks on Israel share Jewish victimhood but arise from distinct economic, religious and political contexts. Jewish identity has evolved over centuries, and its changing expressions complicate comparisons and resist reduction to a single explanatory word.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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