Steve Cohen’s That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic: an anti-racist analysis of Left antisemitism, first published in 1984, was a seminal work. Workers’ Liberty is selling copies of the third edition, published in 2019: This “must-read” classic looks at the history of Left antisemitism from a socialist perspective.
Click on individual publications above for more info or to buy them alone. We also have a 2-pamphlet discount on "Two Nations, Two States" plus "Arabs, Jews, and Socialism".
Discounted copies of Steve Cohen's classic book on left antisemitism, alongside three of our pamphlets: on antisemitism on the left, on the Israel/Palestine conflict and the best approach to ending it, and on the development of our ideas on these issues. Discover what we think, equip yourself to combat left antisemitism and fight for a socialist approach to the situation in Israel/Palestine — and debate us where you disagree.
You may also be interested in two further books: "Confronting antisemitism on the left" (temporarily in this bundle, while our stocks last!) and "Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination".
"For years, the left - revolutionary or otherwise - has glibly held up its hands in horror at the very idea that it might be anti-Semitic. Anti-semitism is rarely mentioned except as an afterthought to ward off criticism from Zionists.
"Yet synagogues are attacked, even bombed; Jews continue to be persecuted in large parts of the world; and the left not only fails to mobilise people against the scourge of anti-semitism, but persists in using 'world conspiracy' arguments in its analyses of the Middle East conflict.
"Whilst few men on the left would insist that they are not at all sexist, few white people would deny any anti-black racism whatsoever, and few heterosexuals would deny any trace of homophobia, rare indeed is the left-wing gentile who admits the possibility that s/he might have inherited any of the deep-rooted antisemitism in western culture.
"Steve Cohen's book confronts all these issues, and exposes the latent (or not so latent) anti-semitism in much of what the left says and does.
"Its main point should be taken on board by all socialists: anti-semitism is a real and persistent problem' and the labour movement needs to be mobilised against it and in defence of the Jews. Antisemitic ideology is deeprooted in Western (Christian) culture, and has permeated many views on the left."
— Clive Bradley, 1984, a a review and brief debate from when it was first published.
From the early Labour movement's support for the Aliens Act 1905, the Left's inability to stem the influence of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the antisemitism that rears its ugly head in social justice organisations, the Labour Party and among anti-Zionists – Cohen charts it all.
Cohen wrote “It is intolerable that the socialist movement has never been prepared to look at its antisemitism in a self-critical way.”
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