Left antisemitism

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Challenge is better than bans

Rapper and left-wing activist Lowkey seems to have been pressured into withdrawing from a performance at National Union of Students (NUS) conference, after the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) objected on grounds of antisemitism. Lowkey is a long-time supporter of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War — but it’s not his commitment to those causes that is being attacked, at least directly. Lowkey is on the “ultra” end of left anti-Zionism, where it shades into left antisemitism. For example, he called Israel a “racist endeavour” in the middle of a row about the IHRA formula which...

A starting point on left antisemitism

David Osland reviews Daniel Randall's Confronting Antisemitism on the Left (£9.99 plus post, available here ) For something many socialists don’t even think exists, recent years have seen a surfeit of literature on left antisemitism. Three of this spate of books already sit on my shelves: Dave Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem , which includes a page or two on my own distant political past; David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism ; and Israel and the European Left by Colin Shindler. So the obvious question for any reviewer to start with is, why another? And my answer would be, because this...

A welcome contribution to a necessary debate

Daniel Randall reviews David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong (Routledge, 2021). David Renton's Labour's Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How to Learn from It is a welcome addition to a slowly but steadily expanding discourse that aims to develop a critique of left antisemitism that is explicitly from the left, and for the left. Renton and I corresponded while I was writing my own book on left antisemitism, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists , a correspondence I found useful and which I feel helped improve my manuscript...

Thinking again on David Miller

I found the article by Chris Reynolds in Solidarity 608 on David Miller and Bristol University very strange. I think choosing the case of Helmut Hasse as analogy is pretty strange, considering as this guy was a wannabe Nazi and certainly fellow-traveller of fascists. Our line is typically that we do support the removal and blockading of fascists for their politics. The implicit defence of Miller that his antisemitism is unrelated to his academic project, or is of the calibre of unthinking near-antisemitism seen on the left, is off the mark, too. PowerPoints from his lectures have been leaked...

Do not "defend David Miller"

Alex Callinicos’s defence in Socialist Worker of David Miller, the academic recently sacked from his job at the University of Bristol, poses the matter as one of “academic freedom”, in which not only academic freedom, but Miller himself, must be “defended”. Callinicos is right that there are questions of academic freedom involved. There have long been demands that Miller should be sacked for his views on Israel and Zionism — and, from some, that he should be sacked for his views on Syria, as he is a prominent apologist for Assad regime and has promoted denialist conspiracy theories about that...

David Miller and Bristol University

David Miller was sacked on 1 October from his academic job at Bristol University. The tight-lipped university statement explicitly refused to give details, but said that in light of the University’s “duty of care to all students”, “Professor Miller did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff”. Miller is appealing, but has given no details either, claiming only that “Israel’s assets in the UK have been emboldened by the university collaborating with them to shut down teaching about Islamophobia. The University of Bristol is no longer safe for Muslim, Arab or Palestinian...

Confronting antisemitism on the left

The double meaning apparent in the title of Daniel Randall’s new book Confronting Antisemitism on the Left expresses its two important aims: to confront antisemitism which appears on the left while at the same time confronting antisemitism firmly from a left perspective. Grabbing the baton from Steve Cohen’s important 1984 analysis of left-wing antisemitism, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic , and running much further, Randall’s book is not only sharp in its arguments about the nature of antisemitic forms of leftist discourse, but it’s also very well grounded in the history of the...

Labour and antisemitism: now open up for education and debate

The Labour Party held its first training session on “Understanding Antisemitism” online on 14 June. Anyone expecting a training session which denounced all criticism of Israel as antisemitic, or which cited the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) examples of antisemitism (much and wrongly denounced as banning criticism of Israel) as sole and absolute criteria, would have had their expectations confounded. The session covered too much in too short a space of time. It leaned towards handed-down “training” rather than to opening up education and discussion. But if it encouraged at...

Antisemitism on the left

I find it interesting that Colin Foster in his piece about the rise of antisemitism ( Solidarity 594 ) looks just at the aspect of far right antisemitism, concluding: “Antisemitic attacks have been increasing in Europe and the USA for some years. This increase is correlated with upsurges of the far right and in the USA especially of Trumpism.” Whilst I agree it is important to recognise this aspect and talk about it, as the rise and threat of the far right is very real, it’s not looking at the full picture. Historically it is the far right who are antisemitic and they’ve expressed this...

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