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In the wake of the Holocaust, explicit anti-Semitism went into a kind of remission. The kind of nakedly anti-Jewish sentiment that had been so common prior to the genocide images of Jews with hooked noses and greedy eyes; conspiracies about Jewish power and financial domination became politically taboo, particularly in Europe.
As the consensus that such forms of anti-Semitism were beyond the pale took hold in the decades after World War II, a form of criticism of the State of Israel emerged that went beyond critique of particular Israeli actions or policies to attack the foundations and legitimacy of the state. Some began describing this as “the new anti-Semitism.”