Antisemitism did not end in 1945. The post-war assumption that the events of the Holocaust would render organised antisemitism politically untouchable was held with substantial confidence in the 1950s and 1960s. It was, in retrospect, premature. The pages in this cluster address what has happened to antisemitism since the war: the patterns of violence and rhetoric that have re-emerged in the post-war democracies, the role of denial as a vehicle for the broader phenomenon, the political and legal responses, and the wider question of why the post-war confidence has not been borne out by the documented record of the years since.
The shape of the question
Antisemitism in the post-war period has taken several distinct forms. Far-right antisemitism survived the war as the residual ideology of the defeated movements; it persisted at low levels in West Germany, Austria, France and elsewhere through the 1950s and 1960s, and rose again from the 1990s onwards in tandem with the wider revival of European far-right politics. Soviet-bloc antisemitism, often dressed up as anti-Zionism, was a documented feature of state policy in the Soviet Union, Poland (particularly in 1968), Czechoslovakia and elsewhere through the Cold War. Islamist antisemitism, drawing on a combination of imported European tropes and the specific politics of the Middle Eastern conflict, has been a substantial post-1979 development. Left-wing antisemitism, in which criticism of Israeli policy crosses into the older tropes about Jewish power, has been a more recent and more contested category, particularly in the British Labour Party of the 2010s and in the American academic left of the 2020s.
The wider phenomenon is documented in the work of the Anti-Defamation League’s annual surveys (which have shown sustained or rising rates of antisemitic incidents in most Western countries since around 2015), the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights surveys of European Jewish communities (which have shown substantial proportions of European Jews considering emigration because of antisemitism), and the national police and crime statistics where they distinguish antisemitic incidents.
Denial as a vehicle
Holocaust denial in its contemporary form is not the academic-style movement of the 1970s and 1980s that the dedicated deniers section of this site documents. It has become substantially a social-media phenomenon, surfaced algorithmically and consumed by readers who do not know the underlying scholarly debate. The relationship between denial and the broader antisemitism is direct. The deniers’ political function is to rehabilitate the regime that conducted the Holocaust; that rehabilitation is in turn the condition for the political return of the movements that supported the regime. The pattern has been documented in detail in the political science literature on the European far right.
The political and legal responses
The post-war legal frameworks against antisemitism include the criminal denial laws of Germany, France, Austria, Belgium and other European jurisdictions; the EU Framework Decision of 2008 on combating racism and xenophobia; and the IHRA working definition of antisemitism adopted by an increasing number of national governments and institutions from 2016 onwards. The frameworks have been variably effective. The pages in this cluster address each of them on its own terms. The wider question, of whether legal frameworks can address what is in important respects a cultural and political phenomenon, is taken up in the dedicated pages.