Review: Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the ‘Collective Jew’, by Antony Lerman

Tony Lerman's measured and sympathetic book is an account of the controversies that have taken place in Britain over the past forty years in finding an authoritative definition of antisemitism. The first fifty pages of his book warn against what he portrays as a tendency to speak of rising antisemitism using ‘dramatic, extreme, apocalyptic and frightening’ language. One of the effects of our contemporary discussion, he warns, is that it baffles the non-Jewish majority, who are increasingly puzzled by what this antisemitism is, which they are told is all around them and growing as never before.