Beyond antisemitism

Of the writing of books on antisemitism there is no end, as Kohelet might have said had he lived in the 2020s. And verily, there has been an enormous outpouring of words on the subject in the last decade or so. Many of those words have been journalistic, ephemeral and not very analytic. But in recent years, quite a few have made it into book and report form, making it easier to examine them for their positions, assumptions and approaches. 

Such writing can be divided into three broad categories. First, there are those we might term “orthodox”, which present antisemitism as a major current crisis that requires immediate (preferably authoritarian or carceral) action. These texts take an approach that may be termed “eternalist” and “exceptionalist”: eternalist, as in treating antisemitism as an eternal, quasi-metaphysical hatred that has remained a constant over thousands of years; and exceptionalist, as in viewing it as a phenomenon that is essentially unique, separate from other types of prejudice and racism. Such writers combine both approaches when they discuss “classic antisemitic tropes” – connecting the ancient, medieval and modern worlds in a seamless whole of specifically anti-Jewish prejudice, distinct from tropes used against other ethnic and religious groups. 

Robert S. Wistrich was the classic writer of this type, but there are many successors who have come to represent the orthodoxy of contemporary antisemitism: Deborah Lipstadt, Julia Neuberger, Anthony Julius, David Hirsch and, most recently, Dave Rich, director of the Community Security Trust (CST). Rich’s book Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World – and How You Can Change It was published in early 2023, complete with endorsements from the leaders of this new orthodoxy in Britain – figures like Jonathan Freedland, Rachel Riley and Daniel Finkelstein. 

Second, and in opposition to the former, are those books that focus on the weaponisation of antisemitism, and how accusations of antisemitism have been used to damage left-wing politicians and bring down activists within the global Palestine solidarity movement. We might term this group “the dissidents”. These books – among which I would include both Antony Lerman’s Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the Collective Jew (2022) and Asa Winstanley’s Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (2022), even though their books are very different – do not deny the existence of antisemitism as a genuine phenomenon but do not centre it. Their focus is almost entirely on fake accusations of antisemitism and how antisemitism has been redefined to meaningful criticism of Israel, portrayed as “the collective Jew” in Lerman’s felicitous phrase. 

Lerman worked professionally to record and combat antisemitism during his long career at the Institute of Jewish Affairs (now JPR), and the title of his book implies that antisemitism was once a coherent and real threat but it has since been made strange and redefined beyond recognition – a process Lerman shows occurred principally after 2001. Winstanley, in contrast, is a non-Jewish Palestine solidarity campaigner, best known as the editor of the Electronic Intifada, whose book is a journalistic blow-by-blow account of the Labour antisemitism crisis. It doesn’t give any history of antisemitism – the only historical background is into organisations like the Jewish Labour Movement (formerly Poale Zion) and the Jewish Chronicle – and the book is wholly devoted to how an antisemitism crisis was manufactured for political ends. It doesn’t tell us anything about what antisemitism is or what it has become. 

Third, we have those books that try to do two things at once – to combat both antisemitism and its weaponisation, as the Diaspora Alliance puts it, i.e. to take antisemitism seriously as a contemporary and ongoing reality but also critique the way it is used as a shield by Israel and its supporters, particularly since 7 October. We might term this group “heterodox” as they are attempting to do several things simultaneously. Ben Lorber and Shane Burley’s Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (2024), written from a US perspective, fits into this category, as does Rachel Shabi’s recent and more UK-centred Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism (2024). These writers are leftists, horrified by Israel’s assault on Gaza, and to varying degrees rewrote their books in reference to it. They simultaneously seek to convince other leftists that fighting antisemitism should be a priority for them, while being part of the broader fight for Palestinian rights and against genocide.

These writers are forced to consider the question: what constitutes antisemitism today? Both Lorber/Burley and Shabi acknowledge that while antisemitism was once structural – it led to exclusion, expulsion, discrimination and murder of Jews – these factors have by and large ceased, primarily due to the horrors of the Holocaust and global revulsion at them. But if antisemitism is still a significant force in the contemporary world, what exactly is it? To answer this question, both books rely on the concept of conspiracy: the rich vein of claims that Jews are controlling the media, the banks, the government or the world. 

In a book that focuses more on subjective experiences of identity rather than strict definitions, Shabi puts it like this: “Antisemitism is first and foremost a conspiracy theory about power, who holds it and who uses it to dominate everyone else. If Jews are a secret, shadowy elite ruling the world, then pretty much by definition they would have to be privileged.” Lorber and Burley say at the outset that they will “focus mostly on antisemitic ideology – a conspiracy theory about supposed Jewish power and wickedness”. They argue that this ideology “at root claims Jews are exceptionally clever and powerful, that a secret cabal of Jews lurks behind the heights of power, pulling the strings from behind the scenes.” 

Conspiracies of Jewish power over society are largely a modern genre; to define antisemitism as primarily a matter of conspiracy ignores historic and modern forms that are rooted in contempt, exclusion and structural violence.

From stereotype to political programme

Furthermore, there is a lack of acknowledgment in both Lorber/Burley and Shabi’s books that in the post-second world war era, such conspiracies became untethered to any political programme. In the 1870s, when the term antisemitism was first coined (as “anti-Semitism”), believers in antisemitic ideology attempted to actualise it through political programmes: denying or removing rights, discrimination, forced migration, denying entry to Jews to a given territory, violence and ultimately mass murder. In the era of explicitly antisemitic movements and political parties, antisemitic ideology had literal and fatal consequences. But after the Holocaust – and the death of Stalin – antisemitic views and stereotypes persisted, without their proponents holding significant power, and without these views and stereotypes having much influence on Jewish lives. 

It is difficult to imagine a world in which stereotypes – of any group – die out entirely. Attempts to sanction anyone who holds, or unwittingly articulates, such stereotypes are likely to fail. The point is surely to guarantee that those stereotypes don’t go anywhere – that nobody is able to use them for a political programme, to deny rights and persecute those who the stereotypes purport to represent.

Both books discuss the fact that very recently – in the last decade or so – parts of the far right (or “alt-right”) have become more explicitly antisemitic, casting off the pro-Israel philosemitism that parts of their movement adopted in the 1990s and 2000s. This change has led to dramatic and sometimes lethal attacks by far-right or neo-Nazi terrorists on Jewish communities: the 2014 Kansas shootings at a Jewish community centre which killed three; the “Jews will not replace us” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, including a car-ramming attack that killed one person and injured 35; the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in which 11 Jews were killed and six injured; the 2019 Poway synagogue shooting in which one person was killed and three injured; and the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting which killed two people and injured two others. 

In cases like these, antisemitism has clearly been turned into a concrete programme of political violence, to deadly effect. But even in these cases, antisemitism is hardly being used in isolation; it is situated within a web of hatreds, among anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, hatred of migrants, misogyny, homophobia, hatred of trans people and more. Sometimes Jews are the victims of these attacks; sometimes Black people, Muslims, women or gay people are. In the Pittsburgh shooting, for example, the killer targeted Jews because the synagogue was associated with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which he saw as responsible for bringing immigrants to the United States. 

The commonality in such attacks is not antisemitism but white nationalism – white men who believe that a range of previously subaltern groups (Jews, Blacks, women, migrants, LGBT people) are working to wrest control from them and must be prevented from doing so, through violence if necessary. Yes, sometimes white nationalists see Jews as controlling the “great replacement”, but not always. The people at the top can often be framed as liberals, the Democratic party, the “global caliphate”, the European Union, critical race theorists and more. 

Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 shooting in Norway that killed eight people at a youth camp, filled his manifesto with right-wing Islamophobic Jewish voices such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or and Melanie Phillips. While it contains attacks on typical targets of antisemitism including “cultural Marxism” and the Frankfurt School, there is also plenty of far-right Zionism and supposed concern over the Islamic threat to Jews. Breivik’s primary enemy was Muslims, not Jews. 

Given how closely these forms of hatred are linked together in far-right sources, and how a diverse group of victims are targeted, does it really make sense to treat antisemitism as separate, as the Ur-ideology behind everything?

The orthodox hangover

Of course, to many orthodox antisemitism commentators, the key source of contemporary antisemitism is the Palestine solidarity movement, all the more so since 7 October. This view poses a problem for the heterodox writers: they want to both defend the movement and also make it more aware of antisemitic discourses that emerge within it, better equipping activists to deal with them. 

Lorber/Burley fall back on many aspects of orthodoxy here, highlighting the danger of using antisemitic tropes when ascribing excessive power to Israel, of failing to use the same terminology as when describing other oppressive regimes, and of relying on ambiguous language like “the Israel lobby”. To me, this approach is wrongheaded; it risks confusing factual mistakes – like the notion that Israel helps train a particular local police force, or an accidental echo of a medieval trope – with fully fledged anti-Jewish ideologies. It would be better to say that critique of Israel only crosses a line if it claims Israel is oppressive due to its Jewishness, rather than due to its settler-colonial or ethnonationalist nature. 

Lorber/Burley further argue that allies of Palestinians (not Palestinians themselves) should try to understand and sympathise with Jewish attachment to Zionism, arguing: “Most Jews worldwide feel a deep spiritual, familial, and/or communal connection to the Land of Israel and the Jewish civilization that exists there, intimately bound up with their concern for its safety and thriving.” 

Perhaps that’s true, and perhaps it would be tactically wise for the left to engage in this kind of empathy. But declining to do so in the current climate would also be entirely understandable, and it would not constitute antisemitism. Nor were coarse defences of anti-colonial violence in the wake of 7 October, which the writers condemn, necessarily antisemitic. The conflation of tactically unhelpful discourses and a lack of sympathy for Jewish concerns with antisemitism is one of the hangovers from orthodox thinking that the heterodox school needs to do more to overcome. 

Shabi deals with this subject far better – perhaps because she was born in Israel, to Iraqi-Jewish parents, although she was largely raised in the UK. She argues that settler-colonial accounts of Israel’s foundation, while containing much truth, omit the responsibility of Christian Europe, and the historical antisemitism that caused many Jews to flee from it. 

“Rights- and justice-driven support for Palestinian freedom has not always reckoned with the full impact of European colonialism and its ongoing reverberations in the Middle East,” she writes. “This story so far has yet to take into account how European powers saw Jewish people, first as not fitting into Europe and then as ‘fitting in’ with their imperial designs elsewhere.”

This analysis is most true of the 1930s when the rise of Nazism led to a mass exodus of Jews from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia – a migration without which the Yishuv could not have built a Jewish majority in Palestine. I’m not wholly convinced by Shabi’s argument; after all, it was the Zionist movement that sought imperial (German, Ottoman and finally, British) patronage rather than the other way around. And the rise of the nationalist idea in Eastern Europe was a major reason why Jews came to believe they needed a nation-building project of their own. But the claim that the west, and particularly Britain, needs to shoulder more of the blame for the oppression of the Palestinians is a smart and logical argument which offers to reshape the debate. 

Still, to reject this argument would not constitute antisemitism, and Shabi explicitly says as much. This alludes to the folly of trying to subsume too much under the heading of antisemitism. There are many discourses that may be simplistic, coarse, deaf to Jewish historical suffering, lacking in strategic foresight or simply uniformed, without being antisemitic. Just because (some) Jews find something uncomfortable, that doesn’t make it antisemitic. And just because something is not antisemitic, that doesn’t make it good, wise or helpful. But titling books under the rubric of antisemitism is not conducive to such nuance.

An antisemitism ‘out there’

Both Shabi and Lorber/Burley argue for left wing movements to combat antisemitism as part of larger intersectional battles, in which oppressed and racialised groups work together to fight against their collective oppression. Much of their aim, and Shabi’s particularly, is to demonstrate that Jews should have a place at the table of such oppressed and racialised minorities, and that they are not simply “privileged white people”. (I would suggest that whiteness is diffuse and multifaceted and that people racialised as white, be they Jews, Italians or Irish people, can still experience oppression as hatred). 

The highlight of Safety Through Solidarity is the suggestion that different racialised groups should run security for each other’s events, rather than each group solely protecting itself. This is a powerful method for practicing anti-racism in ways that don’t perpetuate nationalism or separatism. But there’s a catch here: if antisemitism is inexorably bound up with other hatreds, why separate it by writing a book about it? Why not consider all hatreds together? Should not the subject of these works be simply anti-racism, or better yet, collective liberation?

I can guess why Shabi and Lorber/Burley take this approach. They are trying to combat orthodoxy, which holds hegemonic control over anti-antisemitism work, and believe that the dissidents have had little success in overturning that hegemony because they have defended too many from charges of antisemitism. Shabi and Lorber/Burley assume that to shift the debate they must maintain the notion of antisemitism as a discrete phenomenon, posit that it exists on all areas of the political spectrum, not just the far-right, and state that it is most commonly found in tropes. This way, they hope to gain credibility and a mainstream audience. 

I suggest that this method does not work. It allows orthodoxy to set the terms of debate and prevents heterodox writers from developing new approaches. We should reject all three of the aforementioned assumptions and instead state that antisemitism is not a singular phenomenon, it exists largely on the far right and its essence is violence and discrimination against Jews. If we adopt the frame of antisemitism orthodoxy we will remain bound by its contours. As Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. 

As part of succumbing to the new antisemitism orthodoxy, these writers assume that it is possible to define contemporary antisemitism – that it has an essence, if only one could find it. This approach is intrinsically theological, positing a complete explanation somewhere out there, a God’s-eye perspective that may be revealed à la Torah min hashamayim. It also owes something to conspiracy theory itself, implying that antisemites at some level agree with each other, perhaps even collaborating with one another to perpetuate their nefarious agenda.

In an influential 2020 article, David Feldman, Ben Gidley and Brendan McGeever,  scholars who can also be considered heterodox, proposed an original definition, replacing common orthodox definitions of antisemitism as a “virus” with the metaphor of the reservoir: “a deep reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which people can draw with ease.” 

I suggest that this metaphor concedes too much to the orthodox approach. First, it locates antisemitism primarily in the world of discourse – stereotypes and narratives – rather than in discrimination, expulsion and violence. The 2021 Jerusalem Definition of Antisemitism, of which Feldman was a lead author, does much better in this regard, framing antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence” against Jews. 

Second, the reservoir metaphor is essentially static: a fixed body of water from which people draw. Yes, it allows for new stereotypes and narratives to be added, but what about those that disappear, no longer used, of purely historic interest? The reservoir metaphor reinstates eternalism through the back door, positing a relatively unchanging set of discourses that influence society over generations. The article argued for action against antisemitism rather than against antisemites, positing antisemitism as a coherent phenomenon found somewhere “out there”. 

But what if it isn’t like that at all? What if there is no essence, no single antisemitism that functions as a coherent whole? What if there are multiple antisemitisms at play, or more precisely, multiple “semitic discourses” (a term coined by Bryan Cheyette) that are used by a range of different people to mean radically different things? 

What if, just as a diverse group of people have come to call themselves “Jews” (a term that we should deconstruct too), an equally diverse set of people have developed an unhealthy fascination with some or all of them, which they express variously through forms of love, hate and instrumentalisation? And what if the results of this process include a diverse set of outcomes that are not necessarily connected: assaults, cemetery desecrations, name-calling, accounts that treat Israel’s oppressive practices as arising from its Jewishness, conspiracies, coarse Holocaust comparisons and use of language that unintentionally recalls historical persecutions (i.e. “tropes”)?

Bringing down the silos

In another recent book on this subject, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (2024), Jonathan Judaken proposes using a range of descriptors for different historical eras: ancient Judeophobia in the Greco-Roman world; early Christian Judeophobia; anti-Judaism for the religious hatred of the medieval era from the crusades onwards; anti-Semitism (Judaken makes a strong case for retaining the hyphen) for the race-based hatred of the modern era, beginning with the limpieza de sangre of the Spanish inquisition; and finally, post-Holocaust Judeophobia. 

This is a great step forward for nuanced historical research, but Judaken stops just short of a fully anti-essentialist approach, calling for “Judeophobia” to be used as the umbrella term for all forms of Jew-hatred. This, he says, encompasses five forms: denigration of Judaism, defamation of the Jewish character, discrimination against Jews, their racialisation and efforts to destroy the Jewish people altogether. These are vastly different phenomena, too broad to be covered by a single term. There is no inevitability that the former items of this group must lead to the latter, and they can each be defined and combatted separately. 

Moreover, Judaken’s worthwhile project of connecting Judeophobia to other phobias such as xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia and heterophobia (fear of the other) would be better served by discarding an umbrella term altogether. Would it not be better simply to talk of racism(s), prejudice(s), discrimination, racialisation and violent hate crimes as phenomena that can have a range of targets? 

A new report on antisemitism from the Runnymede Trust by Feldman, Gidley and McGeever ultimately falters on this issue. Its strongest section argues against reliance on state anti-antisemitism, which it describes as “vertical alliances”, and in favour of “horizontal alliances” with other racialised minorities. It notes that the state philosemitism combined with state Islamophobia and disinterest in structural racism “gives life to a competitive victimhood that further pulls apart the horizontal alliances and broad political coalitions required to confront all racisms”. The authors also critique over-emphasis on subjective experience of antisemitism, noting that it is susceptible to politicisation and tends to treat antisemitism as anomalous, leaving society “unable to comprehend the history shared between antisemitism and other racisms”. 

In a bold and refreshing conclusion, the authors place their hope for change in the growing number of British Jews who define themselves as non- or anti-Zionist, who will “conjoin Jewish support for anti-racism with a diasporic commitment to justice for Palestinians as well as to equality for Jewish people” through a “renewed, multidirectional politics of anti-racism capable of addressing the specificities and harms of antisemitism as well as the racism of the Israeli state.” I agree – kein y’hi ratzon. 

These strengths are marred, however, by the same reluctance as Shabi and Lorber/Burnley to fully break free from orthodoxy. The report continues to rely on the “reservoir” model of antisemitism, despite its implicit eternalism. It takes as its starting point the claim that antisemitism in Britain is rising significantly, based on police figures for religiously motivated hate crimes in 2023-24. 

However, 45% of such crimes against Jews (who are 33% of the category, while Muslims represent 38%) are classified under the amorphous sub-category of “racially or religiously aggravated public fear, alarm or distress” – i.e distinct from violence, harassment or threats – and it seems likely that many of these incidents represent police spotting banners they deem antisemitic, rather than threats to individual Jews. The authors’ claim of a significant rise in antisemitism in the last year is thus rooted in a desire to make the report palatable to the new orthodoxy, and to distinguish themselves from the dissidents in the hope that this will gain their more radical views a mainstream audience. 

Further concessions to orthodoxy include a section on antisemitism on the left, implicitly suggesting that this is a significant phenomenon. It is backed by orthodox material about Labour members sharing conspiracy theories on social media and concludes with a Baddiel-esque critique of leftwingers who see Jews as “unambiguously ‘white’ and therefore not among the victims of racism”. The report aims to shift orthodoxy but risks being consumed by it.

The biggest concession to orthodoxy, however, is the refusal to jettison the term antisemitism altogether. The report begins with a section on competing definitions – IHRA vs JDA – judging the former for treating antisemitism as a “stand-alone problem, unrelated conceptually, politically or ethically to other types of racism” while noting that the JDA considers anti-antisemitism “within the frame of universal and anti-racist principles”. The logical conclusion of this critique would be to cease considering antisemitism as a phenomenon separate from racism in general and stop using the term. Now devoid of its hyphen, and thus separated from its roots as a volkish 1880s conspiracy theory, the term does not add anything and erases a great deal; it is the intellectual scaffolding on which the separation of anti-Jewish racism from all other forms sits. 

It is a positive step to see the Runnymede Trust issue this report, published by a broad-based anti-racist and equality organisation rather than a Jewish body. But it is still a distinct report, written by anti-antisemitism experts based at an anti-antisemitism institute. Isn’t it time to go one step further and have antisemitism(s)/Judeophobia(s) considered as part of wider reports into racism and hate crimes against all groups? Wouldn’t this better expose the commonalities and the shared histories between them? 

Do we need to keep doing anti-racism in silos, with antisemitism terminologically separated from other racisms, and with specific bodies focusing primarily on the hatred of Jews? Couldn’t we bring all this work together, and use vocabulary that focuses on the collective liberation of all peoples? As the American-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus wrote, “We are none of us free until all of us are free.” ▼

Joseph Finlay is a historian of British Jews and race relations. He writes regularly on Jewish issues in his newsletter, Torat Albion.