Seeing Israel as representing male supremacy?

Kara Jesella’s Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History is the latest publication of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Jesella does not argue that there is an antisemitic current within the form of feminism now dominant in American academia (and elsewhere). Her argument is that that form of “feminism” is itself antisemitic — and anti-feminist.

Feminism used to be a matter of women striking for equal pay in car factories, fighting for union recognition in sweat-shop employers, and campaigning for abortion rights — a woman’s right to choose. That kind of thing.

But now, in its more recent queer iterations, it is more a matter of “the degradation of women, feminism, mainstream lesbians and gays, Israel, Zionism and Jews; and imagined identifications with Palestinians.”

Hence its response to 7 October 2023: “[It] didn’t just diminish mutilating and sexually violating women but legitimised it — as long as it was perpetrated against the right women. … [It stood] on the side of rapists and people who brutally and proudly murdered women and children.”

A brief — or even lengthy — review of the book cannot adequately summarise the various stages and manifestations of the “intellectual history” referred to in its title, which include women of colour feminism, double jeopardy, intersectionality, women-identified women, Women’s Studies, Whiteness Studies, Jewish whiteness, Gender Studies, standpoint theory, settler-colonial theory, postcolonialism, decolonialism, transnational and postcolonial feminism, critical race studies, disidentification, anti-identitarianism, critical trans politics, queer theory, queer of colour critique, feminist antizionism, queer antizionism .

Wealth

Nor can a review give a flavour of the wealth of writings cited by Jesella which functioned as staging posts in the feminist odyssey from sisterhood to antisemitism/antizionism:

“New feminist writing about Israel resonated strongly with historical antisemitic tropes about Jews as liars and unrepentant capitalists. Much of the writing by Black feminists portrayed them as wholly negative: Jewish American Princesses cosplaying at activism, Aryans stealing African ideas.”

In essence, Jesella’s book describes a convergence over time of three fundamental themes:

• Jewish women were white, and therefore on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed divide. In fact, they were worse than other white women: “The Jewish woman as a white woman as a liberal as a racist and as worse than almost any man had one last damning attribute: she was a Zionist.”

• Zionism and the Zionist entity (i.e. Israel) were the ultimate enemy of feminist and queer politics: “To support Israel was to be capitalist, racist, a white man – the worst thing a feminist could be. Israel came to be characterised as ‘a macho imperial stand-in for all of the world’s male supremacy’.”

• Uncritical solidarity with Palestinians became metaphysical self-transcendence: “Now that I have entered into a relationship with Palestine, I am a citizen of what I am thinking of as the queer international” (Sarah Schulman); “I was born a Black woman; and now I am become a Palestinian” (June Jordan).

Those responsible for the emergence of feminist antisemitism, argues Jesella, include some prominent Jewish feminists. Judith Butler makes her appearance as early as page eight of the book.

There is certainly much to challenge in some of the specific points argued by Jesella. And unlike other writers (such as Eva Illouz and Susan Neiman), Jesella’s book does not view feminist antisemitism as an aberration but as what “the left” necessarily stands for.

Even so, Jesella is right that an intersectional “feminism” which can stand up for pets but which cannot condemn the rape of (Jewish) women has clearly lost the plot.

Trends

Positive change, concludes Jesella, is unlikely to come from “feminist and queer academia, which rewards intellectual trends and in-group behaviour, and where ever wilder and more outré theory has proven itself an excellent career lubricant.”

Rather, it will come from feminists who “care about reproductive rights, equal pay, gender violence and other historical feminist issues more than they care about ostracising Jewish women, destroying the Jewish state, and bringing down the West.” §