Issue 372 of New Internationalist

October 2004

Judeophobia

It has been nearly 6o years since the end of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel. Today the global population of Jewish people is estimated to be 13 million of which most live in North America, Israel and Western Europe (though substantial communities exist in over loo countries worldwide). With public sympathy and widespread awareness of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people in the Second World War and the mass exodus of whole populations to the relative safety of Israel and North America, the decades since have seen some of the lowest incidences of antisemitism in over two millennia. But antisemitism may be on the rise again. Some even go so far as to describe a `New Antisemitism' which is gaining a foothold in the Left and Muslim communities worldwide as opposed to the traditional Far Right tendency. Others feel antisemitism is overblown and Jews and the Israeli Government use it as moral cover.