Lewis: The Left Needs to Handle Its Antisemitism Problem—NOW

2024/04/25 Leave a comment

Yes:

In recent days, we have witnessed chaos on and around the Columbia University campus, as threats against Jewish students have created an intolerable and combustible atmosphere.

A woman attempting to hide her identity held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward pro-Israel students that read “Al-Qasam’s Next Target,” a reference to Hamas’ military wing. Other protesters told students, “Go back to Europe. Go back to Poland.”

Another protester shouted, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” in reference to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Others sang a chant, which included the words, “We support Hamas’ fight!” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!” An Arab-Israeli journalist was allegedly assaulted by agitators. These are just a few of the alleged threats and assaults that have been documented on or near this campus.

While protests of all kinds are often marred by fringe actors—doing and saying terrible things that don’t represent the views of the larger group—it’s difficult to watch the videos and not conclude that there is blatant antisemitism at play among at least some of these pro-Palestinian protesters. Even if they’re a minority of the larger movement, what we’re seeing on and around the campus of one of the most hallowed institutions of higher education in America are not merely peaceful calls for a ceasefire or more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

There’s rank antisemitism, full stop, and it needs to be dealt with immediately.

One obvious step is for prominent Americans who have advocated for Palestinians in Gaza to forcefully condemn this behavior. Today.

If you are a prominent progressive influencer, pundit, or elected official (looking at you, Squad members), this is the time for you to go on the record and say that the antisemitic “fringe” of this movement—ostensibly in support of Palestinian rights and an end to the war in Gaza—does not speak for the larger group.

As it happens, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—an outspoken critic of Israel whose daughter was one of the students arrested last week at Columbia—doesn’t seem too interested in rooting out the bigots that share her passion for the cause. Frankly, she’s not even interested in admitting they exist.

Rep. Omar on Monday tweeted, “Throughout history, protests were co-opted and made to look bad so police and public leaders would shut them down. That’s what we are seeing now at Columbia University. The Columbia protesters have made clear their demands and want their school not to be complacent in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. Public officials and media making this about anything else are inflaming the situation and need to bring calmness and sanity back.”

That’s a lot of words to perform a Jedi Mind Trick: “These aren’t the antisemites you’re looking for.” (By contrast, Columbia Law Students for Palestine, to their credit, condemned the antisemitic incidents.)

Trust me when I say this matters. When racists on the right voiced repugnant ideas, some of us on the center-right stood up and condemned it. We did so because it was morally correct and because we hoped to prevent evil actors from co-opting and discrediting the conservative cause. Sadly, it was too little, too late.

The good news for mainstream Democrats is that these radical attitudes have not yet seized control of your political party. President Joe Biden, for example, has condemned the protests. There is still time to do the right thing.

But take it from me, parties can be hijacked more quickly than you can imagine. In four short years, the GOP went from Mitt Romney as the standard bearer to Donald Trump. You’ve got to identify it and uproot the cancer before it metastasizes. Because once it spreads, it’s too late.

If you’re still not sure this is a hill to die on, just imagine what you would think if such vicious antisemitism was coming from the right instead of the left. (Remember Charlottesville?)

Yes, there are some people who are looking to grab a short, out-of-context viral clip to make your entire movement look bad. Yes, some of these videos show events that happened on Columbia’s campus, while some took place outside the campus on a public street, where non-students were among the protesters.

But there are more than a few “bad apples” to deduce that the far left has an antisemitism problem. And honest brokers among that political tribe ought to be principled and courageous enough to admit it. Even if it’s only two or three people out of a hundred, it’s time to forcefully condemn it. Just say, “You don’t speak for us!”

This is your problem. This is your mess. Clean up your movement, before it’s too late.

Source: The Left Needs to Handle Its Antisemitism Problem—NOW

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Sean Speer: The Left has a self-policing problem

2023/10/28 Leave a comment

Yep:

A key feature of a political movement’s health is its ability to self-police against ideological excesses or reactionary forms of politics. It’s not easy to do. There are powerful incentives that tilt against it, including the risk of alienating prospective supporters, harming personal relationships, and granting political ammunition to one’s opponents. There are also practical limits in a distributive democracy where there are rarely points of authority that can plausibly claim to speak for a political movement as a whole. 

Yet just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that there isn’t some onus—particularly among elite actors—to call out and, where necessary, isolate radicalism within their ranks. 

At its apogee in the second half of the twentieth century, National Reviewmagazine played this role on the American Right. Its founder, William F. Buckley Jr., famously wrote the John Birch Society out of the mainstream conservative movement that he was assiduously building. He similarly published a scathing review of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, by one of the magazine’s editors, Whittaker Chambers, that signaled to the world that Rand’s objectivism didn’t have a home in it either.

In the ensuing decades, the American Right has ceased to self-police. At this point, not only are its political leaders merely trying to stay ahead of their most radical voices, but within the adjacent world of conservative ideas and thought, it can at times be hard to distinguish between the elites and the fringe. 

Canadian conservatism has generally had less of a reactionary problem. There are doubtless various factors including the Westminster model’s emphasis on top-down leadership and party discipline, the country’s more moderate political culture, and its lower racial salience. 

The Hub has nevertheless, in the two-and-a-half-years since its launch, taken seriously a sense of responsibility for calling out conservative excesses including the reactionary parts of the movement that disposed Jason Kenney as Alberta’s United Conservative Party leader, the conspiratorial impulsesbehind some of the conservative criticism of the World Economic Forum, and the growing trend of online ideas and voices radicalizing young men. 

We know that these instances have antagonized some conservatives who believe that it’s a tactical mistake to cede any ground to the Left. They’ve probably cost us some number of donors and subscribers. We also recognize that there are inherent limits to our ability to neutralize some of these excesses. No one is asking our permission before tweeting or driving their transport truck onto Parliament Hill for that matter. But we still think it’s ultimately healthy for The Hub as an institution and conservatism as a whole to speak out when we feel it’s called for. 

This notion of self-policing is something that I’ve thought a lot about in recent years. I wonder what I would have done if I had been a Republican in 2015 and 2016. I don’t know. It’s easy to look the other way or rationalize bad ideas on one’s own side. 

But the lesson of the past several years in the United States is that even if there are downsides for those who are prepared to be self-critical, there’s not a lot of upside for those who aren’t. Ask Republican congressional leaders like Kevin McCarthy or Jim Jordan. Do their choices in hindsight look better or shrewder than Liz Cheney’s? The answer is self-evidently no. 

I share this context because the reaction of the Canadian Left to Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel has revealed a self-policing problem. It’s become clear that the movement’s intellectual and political leaders have permitted radical ideas and voices to occupy an outsized place in today’s progressivism. The consequences have alarmingly played themselves out in recent weeks on university campuses, the streets of the country’s major cities, and even inside our mainstream politics. Put bluntly: the Left has an antisemitism problem. 

Even that however doesn’t seem to fully capture the magnitude and nature of the problem. It’s not merely the fringe expressions of outright Jew-hatred that we’ve witnessed. It’s actually something far deeper and more mainstream that may be the bigger cause for concern.

The Left’s strong attachment to radical ideas such as “decolonisation”, “oppressor versus oppressed” frameworks, and the so-called “right to resist” has created an intellectual context in which acts of terrorism and violence can find affirmation and support. 

There are different factors that have contributed to the problem. One is that progressives have so convinced themselves that the rise of the so-called “far right” represents an existential threat that they’ve been prepared to make alliances with radical political figures and organizations (“no enemies to the Left”) or opted to overlook the rise of radicalism within their movement. To the extent that they may acknowledge it, there’s been a tendency to minimize these intellectual trends as merely a form of campus politics or faculty lounge theorizing. 

Another is that the problem on the Left is essentially the opposite of the one on the Right. For conservatives, self-policing is mainly about conservative elites trying to constrain the excesses of the right-wing masses. For progressives, the excesses are among left-wing elites themselves. Radicalism finds its strongest expression among university faculty, law school students, and the panoply of non-profit organizations that comprise the modern Left. It’s not obvious therefore who’s supposed to be doing the policing. 

But it needs to happen. North American scenes of anti-Jewish rallies and full-throated defences of Hamas’s horrific terrorist attacks rooted in left-wing theories of anti-colonialism and anti-settler resistance are signs that radicalism has spilled out from university seminar rooms into the streets. 

These protests and rallies—including ones that have targeted Jewish restaurants and cultural centres—have exposed these problems for everyone to see. They’ve forced us to confront the interrelationship between these Manichean ideas about identity and power promulgated by left-wing voices and antisemitism. This should lead to a reassessment of the public good case for subsidizing various forms of critical theory education and scholarship which often seem like a thin veneer of academic rigour for what is otherwise a set of retrograde intellectual propositions about race, gender, sexuality, and society. 

But that’s probably a necessary yet insufficient response to what has played out in recent weeks. This is in large part a progressivism problem that progressives themselves must address. Progressive elites who lament the rise of the far right need to reckon with the rise of the far left and their own role in galvanizing it. Self-policing is hard—especially when it requires serious introspection—but it’s necessary. It’s time for the Left to police its own side. 

Source: Sean Speer: The Left has a self-policing problem

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Paul: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

2023/09/08 Leave a comment

Good column:

Elitism is a frequent target of criticism, especially in politics. Historically, Americans haven’t liked elitists. They don’t appreciate the hoity-toity who look down on everyone else.

These days that disdain emanates most vocally from the populist right. To these self-described down-to-earth folk without airs or fancy talk, “the elite” is shorthand for those who are more educated and have more power, especially cultural power, code for people they don’t agree with and resent.

But the left also has a beef with elitism. To those concerned with social inequity, “the elite” symbolize a flawed meritocracy. In their view, certain demographic groups get elevated over others and bar access to those historically deprived of power, especially political and economic power.

Whatever their respective merits, both critiques are hard not to read as variations on “I want what you have.” The word “elite,” after all, signifies something people aspire to. We admire elite athletes. We rely on elite research institutions to make medical advances. Most people wish they too could sit in first class. Until then, they hotly resent whoever does.

A more sophisticated and productive critique of elites comes from Fredrik deBoer, known to those who read his popular newsletter as Freddie. DeBoer, a Marxist, activist and the author of the book “The Cult of Smart,” is one of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always thoughtful and he pushes me to think. I hope his new book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,” will be read especially by those on the left, because the left is where his heart lies and the failings of the left seem to break his heart most. In this, he and I are fully aligned.

“It’s OK to call nonsense nonsense, even if you feel it’s on your own side,” he writes. “You can defend your values, be a soldier for social justice and be merciless toward conservatives while still admitting when feckless people take liberal ideology to bizarre ends.” As deBoer points out, it’s far better for those of us on the left to clean up our own mess than to hand it over to conservatives as easy fodder for mockery. To that end, he scrutinizes the self-interests of the nonprofit industry, the “elite capture” of the Black Lives Matter movement, the neglect of class as a primary category of political thought and other failures and shortcomings among progressive movers.

What drives deBoer’s argument here is the idea that on the left, elites are undermining progress for the average Joe. Worse, they’re doing it in the name of progress. It’s time, he says, to forcefully question exactly what elites on the left claim is best for everyone else, especially when evidence suggests otherwise.

One of the bravest chapters in his new book examines the elitism of the defund the police movement, which, deBoer argues, hurts the cause of racial justice. Research shows more policing has reduced homicides, which disproportionately affect Black Americans. Black Americans are about 13 percent of the population but make up more than half of homicide victims. As deBoer explains, “police abolition and incremental efforts to reduce policing could easily result in more hardship for the very community that we’re ostensibly fighting for.”

In deBoer’s view, this misplaced enthusiasm for police abolition is largely a result of the economic and cultural gulf between elite activists of all races and the vast majority of Black Americans. What’s easy for radical activists and academics to write on a placard turns out to be hard for many Black Americans to actually live with. Taking police off the streets may minimize the possibility of police violence against Black people, but it will do little to mitigate the far greater problem of all other violence against Black people.

Many Black people, particularly outside of elite circles, are all too aware of this. As deBoer notes, “significant majorities of Black Americans want not less policing but better policing.” In 2022, Black Democrats were twice as likely as white Democrats to say reducing crime should be a top priority. A 2021 survey found that white liberals were more inclined than Black Americans to support defunding the police: “71 percent of white liberals say they would support reducing police budgets and shifting funding to social services,” compared with 53 percent of Black Americans; a significant 44 percent of Black people oppose it altogether.

Yet for many on the left, to point out these facts is considered sacrilege, somehow racist and essentially tantamount to serving the enemy. Many white progressives are so terrified of being labeled “racist” themselves that they prioritize self-protection and fear of their critics over helping out the very people they profess to want to help — people they may not understand well at all.

For deBoer, police violence and other problems of social justice require action from people of all races and ethnicities, rather than heeding the empty diktats of elite discourse. “I feel strongly that there must be a way — there must be a way — to take police violence against Black people immensely seriously and to fight for major police reform,” he writes, “while acknowledging that crimes and violence committed against Black people by those other than police are far more common.”

Last month I met deBoer for lunch near where he lives in Connecticut. He talked a lot about the class disparities of the state, which contains many of the wealthiest pockets in the nation alongside extreme poverty. He sees himself writing in the tradition of leftist thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm, Todd Gitlin, Richard Rorty and Adolph Reed. It seems to pain him that the left so often shoots itself in the foot.

When I asked why he wrote this book, he said, “I really do believe that we live in a country and a culture with deeply entrenched racial inequality, and all decent people have a duty to try to confront that inequality.” However, he emphasized, it’s not only something we have a moral duty to do — we also have a moral duty to do it well. The number of people who genuinely thought there was a chance of police abolition was very small, he told me. “But by making that a centerpiece of their demands, it allowed them to say afterward, ‘Look at how awful things are now, we didn’t go far enough.’”

It’s a way for the left, deBoer explained, to look like “a beautiful failure.”

DeBoer doesn’t consider himself an optimist, but he nonetheless doesn’t want to concede that kind of defeat. The left, he told me, needs to return to the “up from below” approach of the socialist politician Eugene Debs: It needs to invest in real change for those in need rather than heed elite rhetoric. To my ears, all this does sound quite optimistic, considering the polarized discourse and politics of 2023, where shouty or performative extremism often gets in the way of duller and more difficult action. But as deBoer says, a bottom-up approach may be the best, or only, option for meaningful social progress.

Source: The Problem With ‘Elites’ May Not Be What You Think It Is

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , ,

The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

Good overview of how far the centre has shifted:
Denmark’s center-left Social Democrats came in first in the country’s June 5 parliamentary elections—the third Nordic country where voters recently backed a left-leaning party in a Europe otherwise marked by social democracy’s decline.

Wednesday’s outcome broke with the past two decades of Danish politics. Social Democrats leader Mette Frederiksen, 41, became the country’s youngest-ever prime minister and the second woman to hold the job. Her party’s success—91 of the parliament’s 179 seats—upended a political landscape long dominated by the right. And on the heels of the European Parliament elections, in which populist, xenophobic parties saw important gains in France, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, the far-right Danish People’s Party saw its votes cut by more than half, after an unprecedented score in 2015.

But this week’s vote says less about the far right’s demise than about its steady creep into the mainstream. In something of a paradox, the center left returned to the scene only by lurching to the right. The Social Democrats, faced with waning support in the past two decades, have parroted the Danish People’s Party on immigration, backing hard-line policies they characterize as necessary to save the country’s prized welfare state.

Social-democratic parties across Europe have opted for that strategy, but in Denmark the dynamic is particularly pronounced. “While other social-democratic parties have adopted tougher immigration laws in times of ‘crisis’ and used anti-immigration and Islamophobic language, no party has so openly ran on a nativist and welfare-chauvinist agenda as the Danish Social Democrats,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who specializes on populism, said by e-mail.

Take, for example, the so-called “ghetto package,” a series of policies aimed at improving integration and reducing crime in low-income areas that the state categorizes as “ghettos” because, among other criteria, more than half of their residents are of “non-Western” background. The package, introduced by the Danish People’s Party but backed by the Social Democrats, included measures ethnic minorities consider discriminatory: One law doubles punishments for crimes committed in “ghettos”; another requires “ghetto children” from age 1 to 6, the age when public education is required for the general population, to attend mandatory courses in Danish values and traditions, as well as language courses. Families that refuse to comply risk being stripped of government benefits.

The “ghetto package” is among the slew of policies targeting immigrants—particularly Muslims—that Denmark has embraced in the past few years, often with the Social Democrats’ support. These include a 2016 law that allows authorities to seize cash and valuables from asylum-seekers ostensibly to help the state finance their benefits, or a 2018 ban on the burqa—the full-face veil worn by only about 200 Muslim women nationwide. A law making handshakes a mandatory requirement for citizenship followed, clearly targeting Muslims who refuse to shake hands with the opposite sex. Plans are underway to isolate foreigners who have criminal records and served their sentences—asylum-seekers among them—on a far-off island, currently home to a center for researching highly communicable animal diseases. In 2005, the government required UN resettlement to be based on “integration potential,” and in 2016 it withdrew from the UN resettlement program entirely, with the Social Democrats’ support.

“The Social Democrats have made it very clear: They realize they’ve lost elections since the late 1990s by being outflanked by the right on immigration,” Rune Stubager, a political scientist at Aarhus University, told me. “They knew they’d have to change their position on the issue to win.”

The Social Democrats’ rightward shift has earned it the moniker “Danish People’s Party lite” among some Danes, disillusioned with what they see as the party’s betrayal of its progressive ideals. “There’s no question: They saw that, without anti-Islam as a central part of their platform, they have no chance of success,” Naveed Baig, an imam and the vice-chair of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, told me, noting that Islam and immigration have become synonymous in current political debates. The climate has become so toxic, he said, that some Muslim families have considered leaving Denmark altogether.

Natasha Al-Hariri, a lawyer and minority-rights advocate, agreed. “It’s disturbing to see Frederiksen in the prime-minister spot,” she said. “She’ll adopt whatever position gets the most votes, even if that means aligning with the far right. When is enough enough?”

The Social Democrats say they’ll stick to their new line on immigration, which they describe as critical to maintaining Denmark’s welfare state, one of the most robust in Europe. “We need to have enough money and enough room in our country, to take care of our citizens,” Nanna Grave Poulsen, a party chairwoman, told me. “All of our immigration policies need to be put in the context of the welfare issue.”

But the number of migrants and asylum-seekers Denmark has admitted has actually declined in recent years, and its overall acceptance rate has been far below the EU average. The country’s economy is strong, and research indicates that strains to the welfare state stem from an aging population, not migrants, refugees, or Danes of “non-Western background.”

The mainstreaming of far-right views—and anti-immigrant rhetoric’s ability to capture the national attention—is evident in the emergence of two new parties to the right of the Danish People’s Party: the Hard Line and the New Right, the latter of which managed to enter parliament, just exceeding the 2 percent threshold. In the months leading up to the elections, the media fixated on Hard Line leader Rasmus Paludan, a lawyer who campaigned on a platform to deport all Danish Muslims. Paludan sparked riots in April when he threw the Quran in the air and let it hit the ground during a rally in a multicultural neighborhood in the capital. Since then, the state has spent around $6 million protecting him at his campaign rallies, during which he burns the Quran or stuffs it with bacon.

Although Paludan’s Hard Line didn’t end up entering the parliament, the media’s focus on his provocations propelled him to national significance. Before the April riots, he had garnered only around 5,000 of the 20,000 signatures necessary to present his candidacy; in the days that followed, he managed to multiply his following and enter the race.

The Hard Line and New Right have both solidified the Danish People’s Party’s position as a mainstream party and undermined its appeal. “It’s terrifying that these Nazis, knocking on Parliament’s door, make the Danish People’s Party look ‘meh,’” Al-Hariri said. “But at the same time, it would be incorrect to say it’s not part of the establishment.”

“All the focus on Paludan squeezed the Danish People’s Party, which suddenly seemed moderate on immigration,” Karina Kosaria-Pedersen, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told me. Electorally speaking, the party’s transformation—from the margins to the mainstream—didn’t work in its favor. Its cooperation with major parties and success in dictating immigration policies made it look “more like the elite it had claimed to challenge,” she said. That new dynamic, plus an ongoing scandal over allegations of misused EU funds, have curbed the party’s steady ascent.

The Social Democrats, the clear winners of this political climate, now have to determine just how they will govern. The party has stood fast on its immigration policies. “We don’t want to lose the voters we’ve managed to take away from the far right,” Poulsen, the party chairwoman, told me. But it has also moved to the left on welfare and the environment, two critical issues for Danes. Accordingly, Prime Minister–elect Frederiksen rejected a proposal from the outgoing prime minister to enter a “grand coalition” with his conservative Liberals party, which won 75 seats. Instead, Frederiksen intends to form a minority government, working with parties across the spectrum on an ad hoc, issue-specific basis.

That won’t be easy. “She will be at odds with the left-wing parties, who want her to make concessions on immigration,” Stubager, the political scientist, said. She’s also likely to clash with conservative parties, who seek concessions on the economy; during their campaign, the Social Democrats promised to increase public spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and make it easier for Danes to take early retirement after 40 years in the labor force. “It’s going to be a lengthy negotiation process,” Stubager said.

Stubager expects left-wing parties to “tie her down,” attempting to block Frederiksen from cooperating with the right on immigration. “They haven’t made it easy for themselves,” he said. “But I’m convinced that without their move on immigration, they wouldn’t have performed as well.’”

One Social Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the party’s slide had cemented Islamophobia into the center of Danish politics, but that Denmark wasn’t alone in this. “When it comes to our debate on immigration, the far right has won,” she told me. “The left has lost. The center has lost. This is true all over Europe.”

Source: The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

How The Jewish Left Learned To Stop Playing Defense And Fight Anti-Semitism

2018/10/22 Leave a comment

While I don’t follow the UK debates in detail, I found this commentary of interest:

It is no surprise that the British Labour party would ask an anti-Zionist to help fight anti-Semitism. Labor’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has long supported the Palestinian cause, and facing a long-running scandal over Jew hatred in Labor, it is natural that the British Left would turn to the Jewish Left. Indeed, Corbyn has long been friendly with Jewdas, the irreverent, non-Zionist left-wing group whose member, Annie Cohen, led an “interactive workshop” to “raise awareness of anti-Semitism” to a branch of Labor.

Rather, the surprise is that the Jewish Left is now in the business of offering anti-Semitism workshops.

For many years, the Left has responded to allegations of anti-Semitism defensively. The Left traditionally argues that claims of anti-Semitism are used cynically to delegitimize criticisms of the Israeli government.

I would know: I have made this argument many times.

Ours was a reactive analysis of anti-Semitism, which ceded the term to the Right and then frantically played defense, trying to stave off Leon Wieseltier’s or Abe Foxman’s assaults on this or that progressive figure.

But over the last five years, a younger, radical segment of the Jewish left has positively embraced the term “anti-Semitism” — along with fighting it.

These lefties, associated with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), IfNotNow, and portions of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), put anti-Semitism at the center of their political practice. “We show up for ourselves,” IfNotNow’s principles announce. “We acknowledge the existence of anti-Jewish oppression, in the world and in ourselves.”

And indeed, the group regularly runs trainings on internalized anti-Semitism. This is startling and audacious, given that for decades, “self-hating Jew” has been the term of abuse right-wingers use for critics of the Occupation.

Moreover, these groups tell a clear, coherent story about what anti-Semitism is, a story that is fully compatible with non- or anti-Zionism and which fits Jews into the Left’s broader analyses of class, race and gender.

The Left can talk about anti-Semitism in part because of the surge of right-wing anti-Semitism, especially since Donald Trump’s election. White nationalists are chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and George Soros has become the object of conservative conspiracy theories.

Such circumstances have eroded the link that the Right forged over the last half-century between anti-Semitism and Israeli politics.

When you ask a millennial to picture an anti-Semite, we imagine not a left-wing Muslim but an alt-right white man.

But the shift on the Left goes deeper than momentary politics, because it reflects a new theory and philosophy of anti-Semitism.

I first encountered that theory in April Rosenblum’s 2007 pamphlet, “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere,” which I read as a college student. Rosenblum argued that anti-Semitism had emerged from medieval Christianity, and that Jews provided ruling elites, whether in feudal Europe or under global capitalism, a convenient scapegoat for their crimes. She thus integrated thinking about anti-Semitism into the Left’s broader account of how power works across many axes of oppression.

Flash forward to 2017, when JFREJ released “Understanding Anti-Semitism: An Offering to Our Movement.” The document, which quotes Rosenblum, also extends her analysis: “Originating in European Christianity,” anti-Semitism has “functioned to protect the prevailing economic system and the almost exclusively Christian ruling class by diverting blame for hardship onto Jews.”

That is, Jewish middlemen make convenient targets for the rage of the oppressed. JFREJ also connects anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, showing how stereotypes about Jews and Muslims are parallel and intertwined.

In short, the document crafts a usable account of Jewish identity, one that places our history in a larger context of racial and economic exploitation and oppression.

Most notably, while JFREJ does take the standard line on Israel (“Criticisms of Israel and Zionism are not inherently or inevitably anti-Jewish), that gets only a page or two out of forty-four. They are consciously crafting a broader definition of anti-Semitism, one in which Israel politics are mostly a distraction. “Confronting antisemitism,” the pamphlet concludes, “is a necessary precondition for collective liberation.”

You can see the struggle between the two Left views of anti-Semitism playing out within an organization like JVP. The edited collection they released in 2017, “On anti-Semitism,” often seems at war with itself. Some of the essays emphasize the ephemerality of anti-Semitism, or the role of the Israeli government in exaggerating the problem of Left anti-Semitism and discrediting pro-Palestinian advocacy. One essay even declares that there is no anti-Semitism, strictly speaking, in the United States: anti-Jewish prejudice, sure, but no structural oppression of Jews.

On the other hand, many of the contributions of younger Jews were enthusiastic about fighting anti-Semitism, which they placed alongside homophobia, classism, and racism as a basic category of radical analysis. (It bears saying that much of the new theory of anti-Semitism comes from queer Jews and Jews of Color, who often do not enjoy the privileges of the white, mainstream American Jewry and who naturally speak the language of intersectional oppression.)

The JVP collection didn’t say much that was new, but it was fascinating as an index of the two, opposed impulses on the Left: to minimize the significance of anti-Semitism and to see it everywhere; to see it largely as ploy by the Israeli Right and to see it as fundamentally baked into Western civilization.

I have some worries about the new narrative of anti-Semitism. For many white Jews, I think, it is all too convenient to rediscover our own oppression at a moment when our whiteness and privilege make us increasingly uncomfortable.

The liberal interest in Steve Bannon’s alleged anti-Semitism seemed to me very odd: no one in the Trump administration is talking of deporting Jews or banning circumcision, after all.

This is not a critique of JFREJ or IfNotNow, both of which aim to be intentional and careful about race; it is rather my nervousness about how this new narrative circulates in the broader culture.

I have seen too many Facebook declarations to the effect of “I’m not white, I’m Jewish” to be entirely comfortable with re-emphasizing Jewish oppression.

Nonetheless, I think that a broader, proactive analysis of anti-Semitism is the better of the two options for the Left.

Our longstanding defensive posture on anti-Semitism largely failed, for obvious tactical reasons. It was fundamentally reactive, it allowed our opponents to set the terms of the debate, and it meant we were constantly apologizing for perceived faults.

The new Left approach to anti-Semitism, by contrast, puts the Right on the defensive. It is positive and aggressive.

Moreover, it offers Jews a usable identity in the age of Trump: a story in which the struggle for social justice is not merely a Jewish value, but a necessity for Jewish survival.

Source: How The Jewish Left Learned To Stop Playing Defense And Fight Anti-Semitism

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

The Right’s Reckless Racial Agitators: Noah Rothman

2018/10/17 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Rothman. Largely a “plague on both houses” on liberal and conservative hypocrisy regarding their respective extremists, he is particularly pointed in his critique on conservatives:

Like so many terrible things, it all began with a broken window.

Stewards of the historic Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side awoke on the morning of October 12 to see their institution vandalized. A brick had shattered two windows. The front locks were caulked shut. The entryway keypad was smashed. And the building’s two oversize wooden doors had been marred by graffiti—the anarchist’s wreathed “A.”

Source: The Right’s Reckless Racial Agitators

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The shame of antisemitism on the left has a long, malign history: Philip Spencer

2018/04/02 Leave a comment

Good historical context:

So, we’re back to the “Jewish Question”? The current antisemitism crisis on the left has not come out of nowhere. Instead, it has its roots in a tradition on the left itself, which, at best, has always had difficulty in responding swiftly to antisemitism and, at worst, excused or condoned, even promoted it. It is not, of course, the only tradition on the left, but unless we understand this history, we won’t get very far in resolving today’s crisis.

We need, above all, to think about why some on the left have always seen Jews as a problem and why they have helped the idea of a “Jewish Question” to re-emerge with such potency. At root is the thought that if antisemitism exists, it must have something to do with how Jews supposedly behave. That supposed behaviour may be described in different ways – sometimes it has an economic character, sometimes a social one, sometimes a political one. But what is common is the idea that Jews are to blame for antisemitism and that to protest against them is understandable, or even necessary.

This first became a serious problem on the left in the late 19th century, as antisemitism first became a political force in the modern world. Some on the left flirted with the response that there might be something progressive about antisemitism: that it was a kind of anti-capitalism, however crude, which could be harnessed to the socialist cause. They also thought that philosemitism was more of a problem, because it supposedly encouraged Jews to make too much of (or even fabricate) antisemitism and to resist assimilation. One criticism of this approach at the time was to call it the “socialism of fools”, a problematic formulation because it suggested that antisemitism was still some kind of socialism.

As antisemitism was radicalised by the Nazis – it no longer being enough to exclude Jews when they should be wiped off the face of the Earth – this way of thinking made it difficult for too many on the left to prioritise solidarity with Jews. Neither the Social Democrats nor the Communists in Germany made opposition to antisemitism a major issue, nor did the Resistance across Europe. The fear was that to highlight the fight against antisemitism would alienate potential supporters. This is not to ignore some wonderful examples of solidarity, though the repeated invocations of Cable Street can give a misleading picture. The Communist party soon switched to loyally supporting the Hitler-Stalin pact, which effectively delivered large numbers of Jews up to the Nazis.

When the Soviet Union was finally forced to fight the Nazis, the suffering of Jews was deliberately and repeatedly downplayed. But after the war, things got much worse. The Soviet Union not only suppressed knowledge of what had been done to Jews but launched its own vicious antisemitic project, one that would have culminated in another genocide had Stalin not died.

This campaign matters because it was around this time that some key elements of today’s antisemitism on the left were first formulated. The charge laid against Jews then was that they were cosmopolitans and Zionists. This may seem like a bizarre contradiction: how can one, after all, be both a cosmopolitan and a Zionist? But what connected them is the idea that Jews are a problem, that as cosmopolitans they are more loyal to each other across national borders and, as Zionists, are loyal to another, foreign state. The charge of cosmopolitanism is heard less frequently these days, though one finds echoes of it in the idea that Jews are responsible for the evils of globalisation. The charge of Zionism, though, has now become absolutely central to today’s version of the “Jewish Question”. What began as a Stalinist cry was taken up in some on the New Left, which helped shape the world view of Jeremy Corbyn and many of his supporters.

For both Stalinists and that part of the New Left, Zionism is a racist ideology that pits the interests of Jews against the interests of everyone else. Furthermore, the state of Israel is an integral part of the western imperialist power structure that exploits and oppresses the rest of the world and the Palestinians in particular, whose land Jews have plundered and colonised and whom they keep in a state of permanent subjugation.

The Soviet Union formulated its approach within the context of the cold war, when it often appeared to support anti-colonial, national liberation struggles, although only for strategic reasons. Those on the left who (rightly if often too uncritically) supported those struggles, especially in Vietnam, where the Americans were so clearly the enemy, slipped fatally, however, into embracing this anti-Zionism into their world view, even though the Israel-Palestine conflict had such clearly different roots.

At the same time, they found it unbearable to acknowledge what was glaringly obvious – that the establishment of the state of Israel was profoundly connected to the Holocaust, which had changed everything for Jews. To integrate anti-Zionism into an anti-imperialist, anti-western, anti-American world view therefore also meant either denying or (better) reinterpreting the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is not an accidental feature of today’s antisemitism, but it is more common to downplay what happened to Jews as Jews. So the Holocaust has to be thought about only in universal terms, as only one genocide among many and one that supposedly excludes the others. (Actually, of course, it is the other way around: thinking about the Holocaust helps people think about other genocides.) Indeed, some have gone further. Not content with accusing Israel of being like apartheid South Africa, it is supposedly guilty of genocide itself… against the Palestinians.

If such purported behaviour makes people antisemitic, it is understandable and part of a fundamentally progressive view of the world, which can be harnessed to the cause. We are back then to where we started, with Jews as the problem, only with this difference: what was previously attributed to Jews inside nation states is now attributed to the Jewish state on the international stage.

There has always been, though, another tradition on the left, which has never accepted the very idea of a “Jewish Question”. What it understands is that there is a question of antisemitism; that Jews are not responsible for antisemitism but antisemites are; that Jews are not a problem but antisemites are. Antisemitism is not something that should be excused or condoned. It has to be fought wherever it shows its face, even – and sadly now more than ever – when that face is on the left.

 Source: The shame of antisemitism on the left has a long, malign history

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