Jewophobia Now

The following piece first appeared in print in Salvage #9: That Hideous Strength, our Autumn/Winter 2020 issue. It follows from Barnaby Raine’s ‘Jewophobia‘ in Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen, responded to by Sai Englert in ‘Recentring the State‘ in Salvage #7: Towards the Proletarocene. 

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What would a critical theory of anti-Semitism look like today? That is: a theory grounded in the project of universal emancipation, a theory that reads this phenomenon as a reflection of particular features of the social totality, and by implication a theory attentive to the historical specificity of the anti-Semitism we face today. This might sound like a question of merely academic interest, but it is politically an urgent question. For much of the twentieth century, critical theories of anti-Semitism abounded. Today, it is the Right that has its theory of anti-Semitism: a theory without ambitions to meet those tests above, and one that has proliferated throughout mainstream discourse in Western societies. This is the theory of the ‘New Anti-Semitism’, which reads Jews as the victims of an onslaught by the radical Left and the colonised against ‘Western civilisation’. Where critical theories of the past asked how bourgeois society produced anti-Semitism, the theory of the ‘New Anti-Semitism’ makes Jews the purest manifestation of bourgeois society, such that hating Jews is the disease of the radical opponents of that society.

Faced with this new common sense, the Left in Britain during the Corbyn years felt pushed into choosing between two bad options. With anti-Semitism now defined as a problem of excessive radicalism, our first option was to contend that there was not much anti-Semitism to worry about – at least not outside the obviously bigoted far-Right, which we felt confident talking about. We thus saved our radicalism from attack (or so we hoped), echoing the defensive logic that once saw trade union bureaucrats deny the existence of misogyny or homophobia in their union cultures since such things could easily be weaponised by the bosses. Under pressure, the radical critique of patriarchy or anti-Semitism is implicitly abandoned, which understood how ills like these permeated our ranks and not just those of our enemies. As this denialist position became popular through a logic of trench warfare that insisted on refusing to give ground to allegations of anti-Semitism pitted against the Labour Party, there was a hint of what Trotsky once called ‘substitutionism’, treating the defence of the Party as synonymous with the defence of the socialist project.

Those of us less invested in Labourism ought to have been the first to highlight this substitutionism as a problem amid the revival of Left electoralism, and to work to disentangle anti-racist praxis from the defence of the Labour Party, though in reality tribal thinking can arise in strange places. In this case, an otherwise offensive submission of principles to organisational loyalty to the Labour Party was occluded by the lack of a theory of anti-Semitism which might tell us something about its persistence including on the Left; without that, activists could adopt a denialist position and not feel troubled by the thought that there really was a phenomenon that should have concerned them and which their denialism ended up dismissing. Our second bad option was also dependent on the absence of such a theory. This option was to agree that anti-Semitism is a problem and so (since it is a problem of excessive radicalism, on the dominant framing) to adopt Right-wing measures to combat it – the aggressive policing of anti-Zionism became the most prominent case, though not I think the only one. These two options, denialism and accommodation, are really two intolerable forms of defensive thinking since they both cede to the Right the ground of anti-racist militancy. This is the binary choice with which we are still commonly presented on the British Left today, and both options are worse than useless.

There is a third path. This is the choice to put the Left back onto the offensive in the battle against anti-Semitism by developing our own account of its resurgence: neither adopting Right-wing accounts, nor leaning on comfortable old truths from the anti-fascism of the 1930s, but renewing the work of analysing our moment which Marxist theory at its best has always attempted.

My close friend and comrade Sai Englert is a rare example of a scholar pursuing that much-needed path. Englert and myself both take for granted the claims of the radical Left in this debate, from which others regrettably retreat – that anti-Semitism is in part a politically and ideologically weaponised allegation against the Left; that the most militant support for and solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and against Zionist settler-colonialism is the only genuinely anti-racist position; and the list goes on – but we insist that our analysis cannot stop with these formulations, that we have to do more to understand both why anti-Semitism is a charge wielded against the Left today and what anti-Semitism really looks like today.

Without such a theory, we enter political fights at a considerable intellectual disadvantage when facing off against the Right, which has its account of what contemporary anti-Semitism is and where it comes from. My Salvage #6 essay ‘Jewophobia’ attempted to provide such a theory in broad outline. Englert’s response, which appeared as ‘Recentring the State’ in Salvage 7, builds on his earlier argument in ‘Judaism, Zionism, and the Nazi Genocide’, published in a 2018 special issue of Historical Materialism. Replying to his criticisms gives me an opportunity to set out in more depth how my approach might address the challenges of our present era, extending my discussion of ‘The New Philo-Semitism’, or ‘The New Anti-Anti-Semitism’ in the penultimate section of my previous, broader essay.

I approach today’s discourse about anti-Semitism as a ‘moral panic’. In Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his co-authors treat moral panics as paranoid reactions to wider crises in society: crises which both produce a real social phenomenon (the cluster of behaviours identified as ‘muggings’, say; or in this case, anti-Semitism) and also produce pathological fears about that phenomenon. The task, then, is to develop a theory capable of explaining both the real appearance of this phenomenon and the rise of bad ways of panicking about it.
To understand both of these realities at once, we must consider three dates: 1989, 9/11 and 2008. We live at the confluence of these three histories.

In 1989, we were told that History had ended and fundamental social transformation was impossible. Meaningful politics was over; we had entered that realm of ‘mere administration’ instead. Storming the Winter Palace and turning the world upside down were dreams now ruled out; they would only make things worse and lead to gulags. I have called this condition a kind of Panglossian pessimism: ‘we live in the best of all possible worlds, and it is shit’.

After 9/11, we learned that political antagonism was after all possible at the End of History, even in a West that had finally solved the social question. But the antagonisms that remained were cultural, pitting the Enlightened against those atavists who refused to accept ‘our way of life’. In the political language of the new imperialism, cultures produce politics: at its crudest, hamburgers face off against burqas. This is the rise of political culturalism – culture as both the determinant and the field of politics.

Since 2008, economic anxieties have returned to the forefront of debate. The simultaneous experience of these three conditions goes a long way in explaining today’s anti-Semitism. People look for antagonistic politics in a world that has rendered structural social transformation unthinkable (1989), where the predominant language for imagining political antagonism is culturalism (9/11). In the frustrating moment of loathing capitalists (2008) while fearing anti-capitalism or finding it inconceivable, where cultural antagonisms are the only antagonisms left, what better villain than George Soros?

The most important takeaway here is that anti-Semitic thinking is not a problem of excessive radicalism, as ‘the New Anti-Semitism’ theory has it, but rather insufficient radicalism – the failure to think structurally about problems of capitalism. If Islamophobia is political culturalism fitted to anxieties about security, anti-Semitism is political culturalism fitted to economic anxieties. The Left needs to take this seriously as a predictable ideological product of our moment, understanding that taking it seriously – including where it appears in our own ranks, just as other bigotries can – means being true to our principles and not betraying them. It exists and the answer to it is more radicalism, not less, though its existence also serves to pose extremely tough questions about the exhaustion of more ambitious horizons of social transformation in the late twentieth century.

Much of today’s anti-Semitism can be summed up as the pessimistic and culturalist rendition of anti-elitism in the shadow of both the War on Terror and the rise and crises of neoliberalism. Just as Islamophobia works to legitimate imperial adventurism whereas transphobia polices a porous gender binary, so anti-Semitism has its own distinct social function in directing anti-elitist discontent against ethnic ciphers, not against the social structure that really provoked the anti-elitism. The anti-Semite experiences social power and her personal powerlessness in a form almost like Freud’s transference, killing her ability to face the real causes of her woes. And her reduction of social and political problems to cultural or biological facts sets up a template fatal for the Left. Hence anti-Semitism is a potent and important enemy even if most Jews are safer today (though not, it should be clarified, entirely safe) than most other minority groups; its dangers are broader than just its immediate effects on Jews.

The same historical backdrop can, I think, explain the moral panic too. Rising anti-Semitism is the perfect anti-‘populist’ panic, since it can be imagined as the nastiest face of anti-elitist politics and a dark warning to all who would like to see the return of class antagonism. Mainstream technocrats see terrifying shadows and malicious conspirators lurking behind all radicalism. That angst works by deploying elements of the anti-Semitic worldview, which imagines small cabals of nasty people (Jews, or anti-Semites) as a cunning hand driving social changes that otherwise feel frighteningly difficult to understand.

Though campaigns to shut down critics of Israel play an important role, the deep structure underpinning today’s anxiety about the place of Jews in Europe among liberals and on the Right is this angst about the end of neoliberal technocracy. Implicitly or explicitly, establishment politicians buy into the bigoted picture of Jews as exemplars of a global elite, and they defend us on that basis; as the old Yiddish joke had it, ‘the philo-Semite is the anti-Semite who loves Jews.’ The crucial point here is that anti-anti-Semitism can become a widespread moral panic about radicalism only by following the anti-Semite in constructing Jews as stand-ins for bourgeois society. Hence Emmanuel Macron leapt to label the gilets jaunes a threat to French Jews, a Labour Member of Parliament in Britain opines that anti-capitalism is necessarily anti-Semitic and the headmaster of a private school sees complaints about the children of the rich dominating public life as analogous to Nazi anti-Semitism. The social function of this New Anti-Anti-Semitism is to lend a progressive, multicultural hue to the return of the repressed: the racial and the class angst of a postcolonial liberal capitalism in unstable times. The moral panic, just like the rising anti-Semitism it claims to fight, answers important needs for the reproduction of class society.

The panic does enormous damage. One of the most inspiring freedom struggles on the planet is denigrated and criminalised, cast under constant suspicion and castigated as potentially racist even as its protagonists – Palestinians – battle an apartheid state. An attempt is made to drive out of public life the one political force, the socialist Left, with a serious even if imperfect record of organised anti-racism. These two intertwined campaigns, against Palestine and against the Left, risk glamorising the allegation of anti-Semitism or inducing a contemptuous shrug about its seriousness just as it rises around the world. That is a significant price to pay for a few factional victories.

Moral panics often punish those they claim to protect because their supposed beneficiaries appear as their authors, and then get the blame for them; if a huge campaign accuses the Left of hating Jews, some people conclude, then self-interested right-wing Jews must be the source of the campaign. Sai Englert and myself have both suggested that is an error – that the agent of interest here is racist Christendom, whose self-image as the protector of a favoured Jewish minority allows gentiles to think of themselves as Enlightened in contrast to darker Others. Some of those who have prosecuted the moral panic have been Jewish, but many of its leading warriors have not been.

In the early nineteenth century, the intellectual or actual ancestors of these philo-Semites defined Britain against lesser, backward cultures by its humane rejection of slavery just a few years after profiting from the human trade themselves. Today, prevalent discourses about paedophilia see gangs of male vigilantes project themselves as protectors of the innocent, painting sexual violence as the preserve of a few freaks and so painting the authority of the patriarch as protective of the vulnerable rather than a violent threat to them. Feminists surely ought to raise an eyebrow. A critical orientation to that campaign would oppose it by affirming, not denying, the existence of child abuse – highlighting how the moral panic actually addresses crises quite different from the one it names. Such an orientation would not accuse children of fabricating the campaign.

In the case of anti-Semitism, though, it is all too easy for people to misread the callous conscription of Jews to the panic as evidence of Jewish power in organising the whole thing. At the very least, it seems to suggest that Jews hold sufficient clout to be taken more seriously than other minority groups by official anti-racism. In truth though, the use of Jews as a prop to serve other agendas is not really evidence of respect for Jews at all.

That brings us to our new times. I became interested in analyses of anti-Semitism amid its deployment as a spectral nightmare against a resurgence for Left reformism in Britain. I write now from the rubble of that resurgence. Anti-Semitism fears have been central to the making of the rubble: Labour’s new leader Keir Starmer sacked the lone Corbynite from his Shadow Cabinet and then suspended Corbyn himself from the Party, with anti-Semitism as the flimsy pretext in both cases. On the occasion of Corbyn’s suspension, the Blairite baron Andrew Adonis grinned that Starmer was pursuing a repetition of Kinnock’s war on the Militant Tendency while the Daily Telegraph seized the chance to call, in its editorial, for ‘Corbynism’ to be comprehensively drummed out of the Labour Party. In the months before that Labour fracas, the Campaign Against Antisemitism celebrated on its website a big victory when the BBC instructed its presenters not to show public support for Black Lives Matter (BLM UK). The latter had tweeted their anti-Zionism in a manner labelled anti-Semitic by their critics, so the rhetoric of defending Jews was easily appended to lend a progressive hue to the predictable marginalisation of radical anti-racism by an ideological state apparatus. Frequent claims that anti-Semitism is being ‘weaponised’, though, tend to reveal little about why that process is possible.

The idea of a moral panic, which takes real phenomena as fuel for its existing social angsts, can help in explaining why anti-Semitism becomes the particular tool of choice for burying the Left and (as Peter Mandelson had it) sealing the tomb. Rising anti-Semitism operates so effectively as a panic about rising radicalism in part because subaltern anti-Semitism is a form of anti-establishment anti-elitism on its self-understanding, and so the paranoid and fallacious leap to read all anti-systemic politics as tinged with anti-Semitism is all too easy for the Right and the liberal Centre.

This is partly (along with the post-Holocaust recoding of Ashkenazi Jews as white and the longstanding importance of Israel to the politics of global imperialism and anti-imperialism) why the charge of anti-Semitism had so much more popular purchase against the Left than, say, the closely analogous charge of anti-Indian prejudice that developed after Labour’s 2019 conference voted to support freedom for Kashmir. Indians are, like Jews, a group once maligned and systematically oppressed by European states. Like most Jews, most Indians tied security and emancipation in a postcolonial world to the construction of an independent nation-state then entangled in the oppression of others. In both cases, then, global concern for these new minorities – whose oppressors might yesterday have looked like abject victims – can be understood defensively and sceptically as a novel mask for the reproduction of old prejudices.

Sure enough, Labour Party members who campaigned in 2019 in parts of Britain with significant Hindu populations can likely attest to my experience; the allegations of racism against the Labour Party, and specifically the claim that solidarity with Kashmir was a fig leaf for an undercurrent of suspicion towards Hindu British Indians, all mirrored the anxieties among many British Jews. What wider society lacked, though, was a sense of anti-Indianism as a pungent supposed anti-elitism. Understanding why ‘anti-Semite!’ and not ‘anti-Indian!’ became the widespread charge of choice against Corbyn requires among other things understanding the specificity of anti-Semitic ideology, which allows it to play this role as a source of moral panic. Anxieties about the crises of technocratic neoliberalism explain both today’s global anti-Semitism and its use to sustain a panic that has very little to do with protecting Jews.

In this context, I have used the term ‘Jewophobia’ to highlight a point about historical specificity. ‘Anti-Semitism’, that late nineteenth century term, identified Jews as Semites at a moment of lurid Orientalism. This is, I think, only one way of marking and hating Jews, and it does not adequately describe the Jewophobia we face today. Importantly, by stressing the specificities of contemporary Jewophobia I am not at all interested in claims about the purported uniqueness of Jewophobia, its supposed fundamental difference from all other racisms.

This is perhaps the only area where I think Englert misreads my argument, and projects his anxieties about positions quite different from mine; as he acknowledges, I spoke in my previous essay about Jewophobia’s similarities with anti-Chinese racism and conspiracy theories about Russia now popular among American liberals. But I do think ‘racism’ can be an insufficient catch-all term, since Jewophobia sometimes has more in common with, say, conspiracy theories about freemasonry (not racism) than it does with most white supremacy (racism). I am deliberately avoiding claims about what Jewophobia ‘always’ or ‘necessarily’ is, precisely because I want to speak at a level of historical specificity, and geographical specificity too; American readers will doubtless notice that a tight intersection between white supremacy and Jewophobia in the 1960s backlash against the supposedly Jewish-organised Civil Rights movement is absent from my story, though it is a dynamic that now resurges in the United States through fears about Soros funding a migrant caravan to bring down white society.

Indeed, today’s scaremongering about ‘cultural Marxist’ anti-racism on both sides of the Atlantic highlights the endurance of Jewophobic frames for cohering narratives about the fragility of the Western nation-state on the Right. But I have focussed above all on explaining a particular process of subaltern Jewophobia, where the innate conservatism of this ostensibly anti-systemic politics is more veiled than in most Jewophobia on the Right.

What differentiates this from Englert’s account? I agree with the vast majority of what he writes. A concern with the hidden Jewophobic entailments of contemporary philo-Semitism from the imperialist and neoliberal Right and Centre drives both of our essays, and often we make the same arguments about these entailments. We are both in different ways interested in a critique of the shift in discursive constructions of Jews from Semitic outsiders to exemplars of Western civilisation. Englert has taught me a great deal, not least by showing how the celebration of Jews by the state is reliant not only on the state accepting Jewophobic ideas about Jews – as I have argued – but also on materially enforcing a conception of the good Jew onto Jews. Broadly, he and I are engaged in different sides of the same project. Englert wants to understand why state anti-Semitism became state philo-Semitism, and I want to understand why subaltern anti-Semitism persists by thinking through the forms of anti-elitist consciousness that people find appealing at different historical moments. To that extent, our analyses complement each other.

But there are differences between us. One of Englert’s most significant criticisms of my view is a good place to start. He writes that I offer no firm causal claim about the origins of contemporary Jewophobia. I think that is unfair, but it clarifies a difference between our approaches. In asking where Jewophobia comes from, Englert wants to know who it comes from. He suggests the post-1945 European state apparatus as the point of origin for contemporary Jewophobia, since imperialist states have used a particular reading of the Holocaust and their support for Zionism to construct Jews as their model minority: both material and rhetorical ‘shields’ when those states attack the colonised at home and abroad. I agree with the picture he paints, but I don’t think it can quite do the explanatory work that he wants from it. That is, I do not think that something called ‘the state’ created the ideological condition that Englert rightly and valuably pinpoints.

One premise of the tradition of ideology critique that Marx inhabits – both in The German Ideology and in Capital – is that bad ideas do not always require a cunning hand to plant them. In some social conditions, bad ideas can feel much more intuitive than good ideas. This is how Marx treats both German Idealism and classical political economy as ‘ideology’, and it also approximates those aspects of the commodity fetish that can properly be called ideational. In the twentieth century, this is how critical social theorists saw Jewophobia as a misguided form of subaltern consciousness. To take just one example among many, Fanon reads ‘Negrophobia’ as a pathology of patriarchal society in which fears about male aggression and sexual violence are displaced by being projected onto black men, and so he says that Jewophobia has an analogous function where capitalist society displaces its anxieties about compulsive accumulation by projecting them onto the money-grubbing Jew. Marx’s view in On the Jewish Question is very similar to this, absent the psychoanalytic influence.

It is true that more agentic analyses of Jewophobia, which focus on identifiable actors generating the problem, also have a pedigree in Marxism; Englert is a worthy successor to Lenin’s state-centric account of Jewophobia. My concern is as follows. Like me, Englert finds the focus on ‘the Israel lobby’ in the work of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt to be limiting; he writes that it reduces structural problems to more easily vanquished conspiracies. His focus on the imperialist state apparatus as the ultimate cause of contemporary Jewophobia (where I argued in my essay that it seizes on and exploits the phenomenon) remains unconvincing because its search for a nefarious agent does not move far enough away from conspiratorial thinking. Political economy is much more directly important here than Englert allows. In other words, that the experience of living in a capitalist society can organically generate social pathologies including Jewophobia, and shifts in the balance of class power can deepen that condition. Capital is not only a structure of impersonal domination. It is also a structure of ideological mystification, an alienation and a fetishism wherein social life is experienced as a war of competing individuals and so conspiratorial accounts of social power follow. The bourgeois construction of possessive individuality mediates the lived experience of capitalist society and Jewophobia reflects that form. I am enough of a Poulantzian, or Foucaultian, or admirer of Tim Mitchell – as I know Englert is too – indeed I might just say I am enough of a Marxist to be sceptical of theories that treat something called ‘the state’ as a single agent remaking the world as it desires.

If this is the whole of our disagreement, it need have no political consequence. Englert’s article details a process that concerns me too, and which I have also discussed, though he thinks that process has a particular causal power that I doubt. The strategic question is what the state’s role in the reproduction of Jewophobia (whether that role is to fuel it as I have argued, or its ultimate cause as in Englert’s account) means for anti-Jewophobic politics. Englert seems in the last section of his essay to suggest that pinpointing the state construction of Jews-as-‘shields’ as the origin of contemporary Jewophobia means the struggle against Jewophobia should prioritise disentangling that state construction. I too would like to see it undone, just as I would like to see the end of those features of capitalist society that I think produce Jewophobia, but the effective political struggle against bigotry never works only by addressing itself to ultimate causes. We battle symptoms directly too.

Moreover, if most Jews accept the state construction of them that Englert highlights, and if the battle against Jewophobia is to be overwhelmingly a battle against that state construction, can it be acceptable to say the fight against Jewophobia is a fight to tell Jews they must think differently about themselves? I mean here to raise a strategic objection, not a moralistic one. I am, like most left-wing Jews, very sympathetic to a view that universal emancipation would mean upending the existing mainstream of Jewish self-understanding. Like Englert, I consider the status quo in that regard to be deeply destructive. But I think that for the battle against Jewophobia to foreground a demand that Jews should change – even where this demand is placed at one remove by blaming ‘the state’ for constructing Jews in a particular way, not Jews themselves – comes a little too close to quietism. This may seem a surprising final charge to direct at an essay explicitly grounded in the imperatives of political struggle, as Englert’s is. But this is the counterintuitive sapping of energy from struggles that ensue when a radical says that phenomena must only be confronted at their roots. Struggles against symptoms arise, and matter, because ultimate causes are usually harder to overturn; we have to hone language to fight Jewophobic ideology even under conditions where our fellow Jews are not all as we would wish. Failing to do so leaves the door open to a comforting sleight of hand, a theory of Jewophobia that tells us there is little we can or should do to challenge Jewophobia close to home, since there is no hope of denting its appeal without the end of imperialism and its states.

Unlike Englert, I have concentrated heavily on the question, ‘how does subaltern Jewophobia think?’ It seems to me that we require much better, more fine-tuned understandings of how, and under what material conditions of possibility, this worldview makes sense to its adherents if we are ever to confront it effectively. I hope that tracking a long loss of faith in comprehensive social transformation as a key condition for the resurgence of conservative discourses of opposition to concentrated power and the experience of powerlessness might serve to focus socialist minds on the depth, the nature and the costs of our failure. It was once said that fascism is the shadow of failed revolutions.

The full, frightening magnetism of political quietism in such times is visible only once we see how many forms of thinking and living present themselves as resistance to quietism while in fact feeding from and reinforcing it. ‘Only a god can save us’, that Heideggerian impulse tempting on the Left, is a way of fearing that salvation is impossible.

The Left must now do the theoretical work that the Right did after 1967, when it honed its claims about a ‘New Anti-Semitism’. That is, we need a theory of Jewophobia that speaks to our present. Theories produced in and for an era of fascist challenges to bourgeois democracy in Europe won’t cut it, since consciousness mutates with changing social conditions. This has been one guiding impetus for my thinking, and for Sai Englert’s too. Secondly, we have argued that the resulting theory must document the centrality of Jewophobic attitudes in organising the ruling politics of the ‘West’. We must begin, that is, with scepticism towards the idea that the roots of Jewophobic thinking now lie with the wretched of the earth while the sumptuous, the comfortable and the sensible have become the great defenders of Jews. Dissatisfied by this new consensus, the most important plea that Englert and I have issued is to move beyond anger to analysis, to a theory that traces the real forms taken by Jewophobia today. It seems to me that must include honest reflection about how such forms can appear on the Left.

Analyses can point towards strategies, and the strategic implications of my and Englert’s arguments are perhaps not identical. We come to this subject from distinct areas of research – my interest as an intellectual historian lies in the decline of thinking about the end of capitalism over the twentieth century; Englert is a scholar of state and institutional power in the management of settler-colonial labour – and I suspect these different backgrounds help explain our differing emphases. But our most fundamental demand is the same. We demand that the first response to the Jewophobic critique of class, capital, the state and Zionism should be to say something like: ‘radicalise the critique!’ Talk of Rothschild and Soros is a conservative bid to save the image of capitalist society by reading its problems as external to it; and talk of Zionist lobbies can have the same conservative function, if it is not tied to an understanding of colonial fantasies and an imperialist world system as the foundations of the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Subaltern Jewophobia is the miserable attempt at firebrand politics birthed by a deeply anxious, conservative age. To beat Jewophobic anti-capitalism, we need a world with more anti-capitalism, not less. In the face of Jewophobic anti-Zionism, salvation for all lies in more anti-Zionism, not less. Take the prevailing wisdom in Britain today, in other words, and assume the opposite. This is to illuminate a tougher task posed by resurgent Jewophobia, and to explain both the reluctance and necessity of talking about Jewophobia on the Left. That difficult task is not simply to understand the world order that produces Jewophobia but to ask why nobler forms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism ran up against deep reefs – and how they might be resuscitated or born anew.

Barnaby Raine studies social and political thought at Columbia University, where he is writing his PhD on the decline of visions of ending capitalism. He is the co-host, with Annie Olaloku-Teriba, of Salvage Live, a partnership between Salvage and Haymarket Books.