Jews in the anti-racist imagination

In Outcast: How Jews were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination, Camila Bassi seeks to reintegrate a critique of antisemitism into a critique of racism. Moreover, she makes a case for a more universalist, humanist anti-racism — a confrontation with racism that is also a critique of race. She does this through a confrontation with left-academic discourse around Jews, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine.

(A disclaimer at the outset: Bassi wrote a foreword for my own book on left antisemitism, and I provided a cover quote for hers. Both our books were published by the same imprint, No Pasaran Media. We are longstanding comrades in Workers’ Liberty, and clearly have substantial agreement on this topic. Substantial — but not total, as I will gesture towards briefly later in the review.)

Corbyn

Although they are occasionally referred to, Outcast does not attempt to autopsy the debates around antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Its focus is on trends in left thinking that predate that period. Its central argument is that, by adopting what Bassi calls the “colonial model” of racism, the left has both limited the scope of its critique and made itself vulnerable to lapses into antisemitism. To oversimplify somewhat for the purposes of space, the “colonial model” contends that “race” and “racism” have more-or-less fixed boundaries: “race” is a dualistic taxonomy of “Black” and “white”, and “racism” is what rich, powerful white people do to poorer, less powerful Black people. The accompanying historiography argues that racism was invented to provide an ideological justification for European empires’ territorial expansion and colonisation.

This model not only precludes any understanding of antisemitism against (white) Jews as a form of racism, but also flattens out the complex history of Jewish, and indeed Arab, nationalisms — both shaped by experiences of oppression and by relationships with competing imperialisms — in Israel/Palestine to a simplistic dynamic of white Jews participating in the exporting of white-supremacist colonialism to the Middle East. Bassi attacks this model as limited and ahistorical, arguing that racialised “otherings” haunted Europe even before the inception of the modern concept of “race” — especially a “Jewish Other” and a “Muslim Other”.

Drawing on the work of Marxist sociologist Robert Miles, Bassi further argues that European ruling classes often also saw their domestic oppressed and exploited classes as a racialised, biological “Other”. Bassi diagnoses a reconnection with humanism and universalism as the antidote to the political conclusions of the “colonial model”, which, she argues, imply an identitarian politics of resentment more than a collective democratic politics of universal emancipation. Following the political scientist Wendy Brown, Bassi argues that a “politics of ‘I am’” must give way to a “politics of ‘I want this for us.’”

Zionism

The book will be of value to anyone interested in debates on the left, in both activism and academia, about racism, antisemitism, and Israel/Palestine. On this latter topic, Bassi does the contemporary left a particular service by seeking to rediscover the analysis of Maxime Rodinson. Rodinson was a French Marxist scholar who pioneered the analysis of Israel as a “settler-colonial state”, but whose work has largely receded from view in contemporary Marxist thinking about the issue — in part because his conclusions do not gel with an “absolute anti-Zionism” which insists that Israeli-Jewish nationhood is a historical illegitimacy that must be extirpated as a condition of progress. Bassi’s survey of Rodinson’s work shows clearly how a radical critique of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinians and advocacy of equality need not imply hostility to Israeli-Jewish national rights.

On a left where a veteran activist such as Diane Abbott can casually dismiss the oppression suffered by Jews and Roma people as akin to prejudice against redheads, arguments such as Bassi’s are a necessary corrective. However, there is, perhaps, a danger of bending the stick too far the other way, so to speak. One cannot hold water in one’s hands; a too fluid conception of the construction and reconstruction of “race” risk depriving it of any explanatory value whatsoever.

In my own book, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, I questioned whether antisemitism as it is most often encountered on the left can meaningfully be understood as a form of “racism”. Leftists whose politics, by a series of logical steps, arrive at antisemitic implications because of conclusions they draw from historical narratives applied to Israel/Palestine do not, I argue, see Jews as a racialised Other. Indeed, they are often sincere opponents of that form of antisemitism. Their antisemitism is an ideological implication — more of a danger, as I have sometimes provocatively argued, to the left, in terms of the risk of political miseducation, than to Jews as such.

Racism

Bassi’s contention (and, again, to oversimplify) is that the “othering” left antisemitism applies to Jews is so intense, and maps so clearly onto historic forms of racialisation, that is has a racist effect, regardless of whether or not its adherents conceive of it in consciously “racial” terms. I remain unconvinced on this point; to me, the confrontation with contemporary left antisemitism is still primarily a matter of unpicking historiographies and analyses of imperialism derived from Stalinist campism more than it is a matter of exposing sublimated anti-Jewish racial biases.

It is also a matter of material reality that Jews in contemporary Britain are not victims of racist oppression in anything like the same way as, for example, an African asylum seeker or even a British-born black person. Deepening our understanding of how Jews have been, and in some ways continue to be, racialised should not blur out distinctions in how racialised power structures function in contemporary society.

For me, another limitation of Outcast is its academic register. This is perhaps inevitable, indeed, a conscious choice, in a book written by an academic substantially focused on critiquing academic discourse. But I fear that choice may limit its accessibility and lead to it being read by fewer people than it deserves. Nevertheless, the book represents an important confrontation with a limited and ultimately pessimistic anti-racism that ends up affirming the very social construction it should seek to dismantle. It is a powerful polemic for a much-needed reconnection with universalism, humanism, and consistent democracy.