Fighting antisemitism

It's happened too often to be written off as a momentary slip: the Morning Star and its political masters at the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) have a Jewish problem. The paper has consistently claimed that allegations of antisemitism within Labour have been overwhelmingly "manifestly untrue and malicious" and the work of "not only British and Israeli state actors but an unscrupulous assembly of reactionary forces of all kinds" (quotes from a Morning Star article by Nick Wright, 22 October 2020). When the Equality and Human Rights Commission published its highly critical report into...

The National Union of Students has failed on multiple occasions since 2005 and prior to address the concerns of Jewish students, and to implement the findings of seven reports or investigations into concerns relating to antisemitism in the organisation. That is the finding of Rebecca Tuck KC’s report , published on 12 January. It was commissioned in May 2022 after the suspension of the then President-elect. The repeated failure, Tuck finds, has clearly impacted the culture in the organisation. The underlying reason for the poor relationship between NUS and Jewish students is given as attitudes...

Al Jazeera’s The Labour Files , much like its 2017 series The Lobby , contains neither the explosive revelations promised nor a convincing political case that “antisemitism smears” were the downfall of the Corbyn leadership. Over nearly four hours, we get only a handful of information that people active in the labour movement during the Corbyn period would not have known. The right-wing in the Labour party are devious and seek to disrupt left-wing activists from organising. MPs worked alongside the Labour bureaucracy to shut down local parties, shared correspondence and were more interested in...

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...

Academic freedom is contingent on the epistemologies and politics of the time. A case in point are the past debates in the University and College Union (UCU) for an academic boycott of Israel, which premises that Israel’s curbs on academic freedom for Palestinians should consequently negate academic freedom for Israel. A paper co-authored by the left-wing Israeli academic Oren Yiftachel and the Palestinian academic Asad Ghanem was submitted to the journal Political Geography in the spring of 2002. The paper, which identified the state of Israel as “dedicated to the expansion and control of one...

The Dreyfus Affair, which began in 1894, is a cause célèbre that refuses to go away. The framing of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges split public opinion in France into pro and anti Dreyfusard camps. What gave the case added resonance and placed it high on the list of historic miscarriages of justice was the overwhelming stench of anti semitism surrounding the entire episode. France was recovering from the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) and the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. Ultra-nationalists in particular were out for revanche (revenge) against Germany to win back the...

In discussing the case of David Miller and Bristol University, I chose the example of Helmut Hasse, a celebrated mathematician sacked by the British occupation authorities in Germany in 1945 because of his right-wing nationalist views, as a comparison test case. Partly because I knew about it, but partly because no reader is likely to find Hasse's views other than vile. Hasse, to my mind, provides a test case for how Miller's sacking could be considered wrong even while denouncing his political views. And likewise we can criticise Sussex University professor Kathleen Stock's noxious trans...

About 500 people attended the 3 October march and rally to commemorate the October 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when tens of thousands of East London workers and supporters defeated the police to block Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists from marching. Although members of the Communist Party of Britain were not particularly visible in the crowd, the event is very much a CP-organised affair, as was clear from the speakers at the end. Several puffed up the role of the Communist Party at Cable Street, when in fact the CP's role - as opposed to that of some CP members in East London, defying...

In the last year Workers’ Liberty has published material about both Shapurji Sakatvala and Dadabhai Naoroji – two opponents of British rule in India and, in their different ways, socialists elected to the UK Parliament a century ago (Naoroji was MP for Central Finsbury 1892-5 and Saklatvala MP for Battersea North 1922-3 and 1924-9). Saklatvala was very much part of the Marxist tradition and Naoroji part of our tradition in a broader sense. Naoroji was the first person from one of the Empire’s subject peoples beyond the British Isles to be elected to Parliament; Saklatvala the third. The second...

This article is taken from Woman’s Dreadnought , paper of the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, 26 May 1917, where it was an editorial under the headline “A pogrom in London”. It describes London’s East End of that era, which also produced the Poplar council revolt four years later (described in Solidarity 601 ); and the big wave of anti-migrant agitation which had already produced the Aliens Act of 1905. Woman’s Dreadnought changed its name to Workers’ Dreadnought in July 1917; the group soon after changed its name to Workers’ Socialist Federation, and in 1921 merged into the then-revolutionary...