Opposition to antisemitism in the United Kingdom has historically been linked to
anti-racism, but in the 1990s, it began to diverge.
Anthony Lester, the drafter of the
Race Relations Act 1976, cited his
experience of antisemitism as his motivation for writing a bill combating all forms of racial prejudice. According to Gidley and colleagues, this divergence came about in part due to disagreement over Zionism and
anti-Zionism. The idea of
white privilege,
structural racism, and perceptions that racism is based on skin color and
colonialism made it harder to identify antisemitism, given that Jews are often considered white. In Hungary, right-wing parties such as
Fidesz and
Jobbik distanced themselves from antisemitism and expressed pro-Israel beliefs, although Fidesz also promotes
George Soros conspiracy theories. According to anthropologist
Ivan Kalmar, "Anti-antisemitism allows populists to promote Islamophobia openly without the fear of being labelled
Nazis." According to historian
Omer Bartov, political controversies around antisemitism involve "those who see the world through an antisemitic prism, for whom everything that has gone wrong with the world, or with their personal lives, is the fault of the Jews; and those who see the world through an anti-antisemitic prism, for whom every critical observation of Jews as individuals or as a community, or, most crucially, of the state of
Israel, is inherently antisemitic". Anti-antisemitism is "a defining marker of
post-war German identity".
Judith Gruber, a Christian theologian at the
KU Leuven, argues that the belief that Germany has successfully confronted
the Holocaust enables the projection of antisemitism onto the outside world, especially to Muslim immigrants—a subtle form of Islamophobia that coexists with the vehement rejection of antisemitism.
Hannah Tzuberi, research assistant at
Freie Universität Berlin's Institute of Jewish Studies, argues that in Germany, anti-antisemitism can extend beyond Germans' identification with Jews because it can even include the identification of Germans as Jews and the identification of Germany as Israel. Kuras notes that the German institutional effort against antisemitism is not accompanied by an equivalent effort against
Islamophobia,
racism, and
anti-Ziganism. ==Anti-antisemitism and philosemitism==