Want to Understand Antisemitism? Start With These Ten Books
- Yos Tarshish
- Jan 2
- 6 min read
I’ve lost count of the number of times students came to me over the years asking for a program that would teach them how to answer difficult questions about Israel or how to respond to antisemitism.
I heard this repeatedly during my seven years working for Hillel at Queen’s and Western, from summer 2018 through summer 2025. Sometimes it was framed as a request for advocacy training. More often, especially in recent years, it was about what to say in the classroom. How to respond to a professor. How to challenge a reading. How to push back without sounding naïve, emotional, or out of their depth, and every time, I found myself quietly baffled by the expectation.
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around what a student thinks they can learn in a 90-minute workshop from me that would meaningfully prepare them to engage an academic with a PhD. Even the books I recommend below are just a primer. To engage coherently with an academic on any issue that touches politics, history, geography, international relations, law, philosophy, anthropology and that’s only the beginning you need genuine intellectual investment across those fields. There is no shortcut to that kind of fluency.
Responding to antisemitism alone is rarely a strong enough motivator to develop that depth of understanding. But everyone has to start somewhere. Serious engagement begins with sustained learning, not reactive talking points. That conviction is what shaped the list that follows.
This will be the first in a series of bookshelf primers I plan to put together, each focused on a different area where surface-level discourse has replaced real understanding. This one starts with antisemitism because it is urgent, contested, and too often addressed with fragments rather than foundations.
1. Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew
Noa Tishby and Emmanuel Acho
This is not the most academic book on this list, and that is precisely why it comes first.
Noa Tishby and Emmanuel Acho are concerned with language. Not perfect language, but real language. The questions people actually ask. The moments where conversations derail. The discomfort that arises when people want to engage but don’t quite know how.
I listened to this as an audiobook and found it genuinely engaging. Many readers are familiar with Tishby’s book on Israel, but I think this is a significantly stronger contribution. It’s less about advocacy and more about conversational literacy. Before people can engage with frameworks or history, they need fluency and this book provides that starting point without talking down to the reader.
2. Antisemitism Here and Now
Deborah Lipstadt
Deborah Lipstadt is one of the defining scholars of antisemitism in our time.
She is a longtime academic at Emory University, successfully defended historical truth in her landmark legal case against Holocaust denier David Irving, and later served as the United States Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism. Few people combine scholarship, public engagement, and lived consequence the way she does.
This book is structured as a fictional dialogue between two characters: Abigail, a Jewish student, and Joe, a colleague at her university’s law school. Unlike Tishby and Acho’s real-time conversation, this loses some immediacy. But it gains something else.
The fictional format allows Lipstadt to slow the conversation down and approach antisemitism with scholarly precision. She can introduce complexity, nuance, and historical depth without worrying about conversational flow. The result is a framework-building book. One that helps readers understand how antisemitism mutates and why it continues to evade easy categorisation.
3. Everyday Hate
Dave Rich
Dave Rich is one of the leading experts on antisemitism in the UK and currently serves as Head of Policy at the Community Security Trust. I’ve followed his work for many years, starting from when I first connected with him during my UJS term.
Rich is not interested in fringe actors. He is interested in systems. Everyday Hate focuses on how antisemitism becomes normalised. How it embeds itself in institutions, professional cultures, and social norms. The most recent edition has been updated since October 7, which matters. It situates contemporary events within longer patterns rather than treating them as aberrations.
This book sharpens your diagnostic lens. After reading it, the question stops being “was that antisemitic?” and becomes “what function is antisemitism serving here?”
4. Jews Don’t Count
David Baddiel
David Baddiel’s strength lies in his refusal to overcomplicate what is, at root, a very simple problem. Jews Don’t Count examines how antisemitism is routinely sidelined in contemporary conversations about racism and inequality, particularly within progressive and left-leaning spaces. Baddiel does not approach this as an academic or a policy expert. He approaches it as a cultural insider who understands how language, norms, and social signalling actually operate.
The book is short, deliberately accessible, and unsparing in its clarity. Its power comes from naming contradictions that many people sense but have never been forced to confront directly. There is now a companion documentary that builds on these ideas, but the book remains the clearest and most effective entry point.
It is difficult to read this and continue claiming ignorance.
5. Contemporary Left Antisemitism
David Hirsh
David Hirsh’s work is careful, grounded, and rigorous, without being abstract for its own sake. Contemporary Left Antisemitism is a detailed examination of how antisemitism manifests within left-wing political cultures, particularly in relation to debates about Israel, power, and universalism. Hirsh draws on years of scholarship and engagement to show how antisemitic ideas can circulate even where people sincerely believe they are acting in the name of justice.
Rather than offering slogans or polemics, the book provides readers with ways of recognising patterns, testing assumptions, and thinking critically about environments they may already inhabit. It is especially valuable for people working in universities, activism, and public discourse, where these dynamics often play out most intensely.
This is a demanding book, but it rewards the effort. It teaches readers how to see clearly without resorting to caricature.
6. People Love Dead Jews
Dara Horn
This is one of the most important books on antisemitism I have read in years.
Dara Horn brings her skill as a novelist to this non-fiction work, guiding readers through a deeply unsettling truth: many non-Jews find it far easier to engage with dead Jews than with living ones. Jewish suffering is welcomed when it is safely concluded and stripped of agency.
This book has profoundly shaped how I think about antisemitism, memory, and Holocaust education. Horn forces readers to confront the ways Jewish history is often consumed as moral theatre rather than lived reality. Her accompanying podcast, Adventures With Dead Jews, is also excellent, working chapter by chapter through the book and expanding on its themes.
7. Uprooted
Lyn Julius
For starting your understanding of antisemitism in the Middle East and North Africa, this book is indispensable. Lyn Julius documents the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish communities across the Muslim world in the 20th century.
The history of these communities and what happened to them is routinely ignored or minimised, despite its scale and impact. Uprooted is academic, meticulously sourced, and visually rich, with photographs that anchor the scholarship in lived experience. I haven’t come across another book that covers this subject with such breadth in a single volume.
Without this history, conversations about refugees, justice, and Israel remain structurally incomplete.
8. The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
This is a different kind of entry, and an essential one. Art Spiegelman tells his father’s Holocaust story through the medium of a graphic novel, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Far from trivialising the subject, the format intensifies it.
Maus explores trauma, inheritance, and memory in ways traditional historiography cannot. It teaches readers how testimony is transmitted across generations, not merely recorded. You don’t finish this book unchanged.
9. Night
Elie Wiesel
Night is the quintessential Holocaust memoir. When it was published, it fundamentally altered how survivor testimony was understood. It remains one of the most devastating explorations of what unchecked evil does to human beings, to faith, and to moral certainty.
This book does not explain the Holocaust. It bears witness to it. That distinction is crucial.
10. Hostage
Eli Sharabi
I read this book in November and could not put it down. In under 200 pages, Eli Sharabi recounts his kidnapping from Kibbutz Be’eri on the morning of October 7 and his time in Hamas captivity in Gaza. The detail is vivid, harrowing, and unflinching.
As an Arabic speaker prior to his kidnapping, Sharabi was uniquely positioned to understand his captors, exposing the depth of ideological hatred driving their actions toward Jews, Israel, and the Western world more broadly.
Some will argue that this book does not belong on a list about antisemitism. I challenge them to read it and still say that.
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