Hideous Jew Alana Lentin calls for open borders for Australia.
Good work, Cora. The jew in its natural habitat, trying to subvert countries from within by pleading for open borders. The malice and insanity this race of hook-nosed little shits have for us knows no bounds. Look at that huge kike shnozz on her, too.
Posts on Vanguard news network, 29 July 20131
On 8 March 2016, Michael Pezzullo, Secretary of the Australian Department of Home Affairs, felt compelled to defend the actions of his department against criticisms of a ‘contentious area of public policy and administration’, the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seeker children. In a press release, he noted, ‘recent comparisons of immigration detention centres to “gulags”; suggestions that detention involves a “public numbing and indifference” similar to that allegedly experienced in Nazi Germany; and persistent suggestions that detention facilities are places of “torture” are highly offensive, unwarranted and plainly wrong’. The use of the term ‘allegedly’ drew the ire of commentators on social media, leading the Secretary to issue a correction. He was concerned to clarify his approach to the seriousness of the Holocaust, while halting any questioning of the morality of the Australian government’s policy of indefinite mandatory detention for people seeking asylum. Lest there be any continued confusion that he condoned the Holocaust in any way, Pezzullo explained that ‘to allege that the Nazi regime promoted indifference towards its abuses is bad history. … The Nazi regime promoted racial hatred. Far from seeking to numb an indifferent public, it sought to vilify and persecute Jews and others, before engaging in the systematic and evil genocide of the Holocaust’ (New Matilda 2016).
In Pezzullo’s reading, it is ‘bad history’ to say that indifference accompanies an overt policy of ideological racism and a programme of mass genocidal extermination. But a key dimension of racial rule, as Fanon taught us (Fanon 1986 [1967]), is precisely the promotion of ‘indifference to abuse’ through the dehumanization of those in its sights and the disregarding of their exploitation, discrimination, incarceration, and ultimately death. The detention of thousands of asylum seekers in centres both within Australia and offshore has led to many deaths, including suicides and deaths from medical neglect. Detainees have been subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. This ongoing situation is indeed made possible, at least in part, by what Pezzullo calls ‘indifference’ (Boochani 2018).
White Jews, in contrast to asylum seekers, and to Indigenous, Black, Roma, and Muslim people, have been hyper-humanized since the end of the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. We have been pulled by both a western Christian establishment and the outstretched arm of the Zionist state into the Eurocentric and exclusionary borders of the human, a terrain which is always defined in racialized relation to the not-quite human and the non-human (Weheliye 2014). It is not the first time in history that Jews have been bestowed with humanization, a dubious gift which divides us from other non-Christians and non-whites. The emancipation of the Jews following the French revolution was experienced by the Orthodox Ashkenazi, who valued their autonomy over incorporation into the nation, as a ‘revolution from above’ (Traverso 1996). The expansion of the nation-state, liberal ideology, and colonial rule undergirded the post-revolutionary French state’s need to domesticate the Jews (Katz 2018). This need was evident, for example, in the 1870 Crémieux Decree, which granted French citizenship to colonized Algerian Jews but not to Muslims. This formal inclusion in the body politic did not, however, erase the political antisemitism of the late nineteenth century, which mapped onto older forms of Christian Judeophobia (Judaken 2018; Postone 1980). Many Jews have also been willing participants in this integration into civilization, which meant giving up what we had in common with other racialized peoples; our shared ‘barbarism’ (Slabodsky 2015).
Today, the strategic significance of the state of Israel and its heavy promotion of a link between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, with the support of the official bodies of world Jewry and the majority of the world’s states, means we must be careful about drawing analogies between the acme of social and political antisemitism in Europe and the present day. Nevertheless, the political antisemitism that is finding new levels of acceptability in the West is evidence of the tenuousness of the top-down humanization and exceptionalization of European Jews – but not Arab or Black Jews – and the problems that arise when the majority of white Jews accept this state of affairs. Jews’ participation in the whitening of Jewry weakens the line of defence against the coloniality that produced the notion of Jewish, and other, racial difference (Gordon 2018b).
The general failure to theorize antisemitism in relation to racial rule and colonialism (Judaken 2018; Slabodsky 2015), and the allied solidification of European cultural supremacy, reduces it to a cipher for performative outrage. Denunciations of racism are dismissed as soon as any association is made with the Holocaust, Nazism, or fascism. As I argued in Chapter 2, the function of freezing racism in ideal-typical examples from the past is to shield contemporary racists from accusation, thus freeing almost all but the Nazi genocide itself from the taint of racism. Expression of opposition to antisemitism functions as a ballast against denouncements of racism. In the present moment, publicly performing opposition to antisemitism and support for Israel – the two having been made equivalent – has also become a proxy for politicians and public figures’ commitment to antiracism. Leaning on antisemitism as the sine qua non of racism and associating it singularly with the Nazi Holocaust, reinterpreted as a unique and aberrant event rather than the manifestation of a 500-year process, silences any questioning of this professed antiracism.
In April 2019, British Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg mocked Black Labour Member of Parliament David Lammy for comparing the right-wing European Research Group he chairs with the Nazis, ‘an organization and creed that killed six million Jewish people’.2 Interviewed on the BBC by Andrew Marr, who has long shed his Maoist roots to become a mouthpiece for nativist discourses, Lammy pointed out that Rees-Mogg condoned Nazism by posting a video of the leader of the Islamophobic German Alternative für Deutschland party on his webpage and attending a dinner with the far-right Traditional Britain Group, which says that Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered Black teenager Stephen, ‘should be requested to return to [her] natural homeland’ (Usborne 2013). In an attempt to distinguish the mainstream from the rightist fringes, Marr counters that ‘it’s a dangerous thing surely to accuse him [Rees-Mogg] of being close to Nazi ideology’, adding that ‘a lot of people would be absolutely outraged’ by Lammy’s suggestion that Boris Johnson is courting white supremacism by ‘hanging out with Steve Bannon’.3 The outrage of ‘not racism’ multiplies manifold when the aberrance of Nazism and white supremacism are evoked. While this performance is integral to the right and mainstream of politics, it also exists on the left. The British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, which was embroiled in what was widely referred to as an ‘antisemitism scandal’ under his leadership, was defended by its supporters as the ‘antiracist party’, implying that antisemitism is no more than a right-wing smear (Goodfellow 2019).
The political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them. The severing of race, as a technology of rule, from ‘frozen’ accounts of racism has precipitated a public illiteracy about how race works that presents a serious challenge for antiracism. Race, understood throughout this book as a key technology of power, has largely been evacuated from mainstream discussions of migration, citizenship, class, and identity, not to mention policing, health, or education. In this chapter, I argue that a proxification of antiracism that can be observed in the current performative preoccupation with antisemitism obscures the workings of race further still. Therefore, to shed light on what is deliberately obfuscated, the question of antisemitism and its intense politicization must be explored to further answer the question why race still matters.
What is antisemitism and who is antisemitic, and why and to what ends antisemitism is named, are questions that have come to dominate political discussions on both sides of the Atlantic against a backdrop of white supremacist violence and accompanying apologetics. To be against antisemitism today is variably to uphold racial rule and to undermine it. These are not logically consistent positions and they necessitate disentanglement. Sorting out these strands can shed light on how antisemitism coheres with other forms of racism, particularly Islamophobia; how white supremacism and colonialism may be served by forms of anti-antisemitism; and how, in contrast, its denial and minimization from other quarters detract from the broad fight against racism. Whether antisemitism is tangible or a fictive weapon is a question and a fault line that slices in several non-linear directions, thwarting obvious answers. Antisemitism is both straightforwardly manifest in racist violence, both physical and discursive, and perceptible through the chimera of a shattered mirror (Langmuir 1993). It sounds warnings about the snares of complicity. Its usages and meanings reveal important lessons about the dangers of ordering racisms hierarchically against a backdrop of white supremacy.
Zoning in on antisemitism draws together the various components of this book: the resurgent fusion of race and genetics; the redrawing of the definitional boundaries of racism; and the dismissal of the ‘merely cultural’ as ‘factionalizing, identitarian and particularistic’ (Butler 1998: 33). It opens questions that are imbricated in the racial; questions of nation, belonging, and loyalty, of the inextricability of race from the colonial, of what constitutes whiteness and white supremacy, and of solidarity and its absence. It is not coincidental that at this time of heightened white crisis, a time during which it seems we are teetering on the brink of fascism, antisemitism becomes a point of intense debate. If, as we have seen, the attempted genocide of the Jews of Europe is held up as the height of racism in practice, it is unsurprising that the extent of the crisis is discursively circumvented via a deflection that centres on whether antisemitism is present or absent in a range of contexts. Against both the weaponization of antisemitism in the service of the racial-colonial and its dismissal as a strawman hoisted by the right to stave off challenge from the opposing end of the political spectrum, as could be seen in the Rees-Mogg vs Lammy example, I conclude by arguing that a challenge to antisemitism that is attentive to the role it plays in racial rule points towards productive ways to decolonize and politicize antiracism in these critical times.
The political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them.
For a widening circle on the right and for many centrists today, the defence of Jews relies on the classification of Muslims and Islam as the world’s greatest threat, and of Islamophobia as a bogus and illegitimate concept. The pitting of Jews against Muslims and of the racisms we each experience plays a central role in how antisemitism is presented as a problem on the rise today. To cite the aforementioned Bernard-Henri Lévy, ‘the principal fuel of the new anti-Semitism, a fuel capable of stirring people up and rekindling the pogromist urge, is anti-Zionism’ among Muslims. What he calls ‘today’s new alliance of Christians and Jews’ has formed owing to the ‘common and violent enemy’ of Islam (Lévy 2017). But the vigour with which opposition to Islam and Muslims is legitimated depends on neglecting the fact that where there is antisemitism, there is very often Islamophobia also. Far from Jews and Christians being in natural alliance, in reality both Jews and Muslims are racialized as the intrinsic Other within; as inimical to the West and to Christian culture (Anidjar 2003). As we shall see, this is despite the fact that contemporary antisemitism often takes a ‘philosemitic’ tone that, while pitting ‘good’ Jews against ‘bad’ Muslims, can only do so while racializing and essentializing Jewish people (Bouteldja 2015).
The history of antisemitism, and the Holocaust primarily, is mobilized both in denial of ‘real racism’ and to shift blame for its perpetuation onto the proponents of what another French writer, Pierre-André Taguieff, referred to already in 2002 as ‘the new Judeophobia’, in his book of the same title (Taguieff 2002). Taguieff proposes that this form of Jew-hatred is dominant in the twenty-first century. In a similar vein to Lévy, he sees today’s antisemitism as coming not from whites or from elites, but from Muslims and anti-Zionists. While Taguieff’s position may have been novel in 2002, it has since become hegemonic. In his book, he couches it in a classist and racialized demonization of young people of North African origin in France. This has been a major theme since at least the 2002 French presidential elections, which saw the first near-win of the far-right Front national party. Subsequently, rising to a crescendo with the deepening of the War on Terror, the cementing of Islamophobia in mainstream policy, popular discourse, and political culture is shielded from the charge of racism by making it about defending Jews from antisemitism. Presenting Muslims and anti-Zionists as the real antisemites allows the history of the Holocaust to be cynically manipulated in order to police Muslims and quell pro-Palestinian activism. This is far from being unique to France.
Antisemitism is often dismissed or excused by those who find common ground in Islamophobia. For example, right-wing British philosopher Roger Scruton was sacked from his role as housing adviser to the British government in April 2019 after he supported the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Jewish philanthropist George Soros wields an ‘empire in Hungary’ during an interview for the New Statesman magazine (Weaver and Walker 2019). Scruton was a long-standing friend of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orbán, who accuses Soros and his Open Society Foundation of attempting to undermine the Hungarian nation-state. Hungary’s anti-Soros hate campaign heralded an atmosphere of increasingly brazen antisemitism. In October 2019, a fifty-strong mob attacked a Jewish community centre in Budapest, attempted to torch it, and covered the building with neo-fascist slogans (Hume 2019). Rising antisemitism in Hungary accompanies the virulent and violent anti-refugee racism which saw the borders being closed to those seeking asylum from the war in Syria in 2015. Government-funded billboards with a ‘sneering’ picture of George Soros were accompanied by the words, ‘Let’s not let Soros have the last laugh’ and ‘99 percent reject illegal migration’. In this way, Jewish ‘meddling’ was presented as having been instrumental in bringing ‘Muslim invaders’ to Hungary, as Orbán described refugees in 2018 (Leifer 2018).
The campaign against Soros, which his son described as ‘dripping with anti-Semitism’, reaches far beyond Hungary. Although it begins on the extreme white supremacist ‘anti-globalist’ fringes, it extends into the political mainstream, where Soros is attacked for orchestrating attacks on the right, including false accusations of fomenting antifascist violence, via his support for progressive causes (Wilson 2018). In October 2019, Jacob Rees-Mogg described Soros as ‘Remoaner funder-in-chief’, making reference to his financial support for ‘Best for Britain’, an organization fighting to keep the UK open to EU membership. Despite the fact that the remark has clear antisemitic undertones, Lord Alfred Dubs, who had come to Britain on the Kinder Transport, apologized to Rees-Mogg for accusing him of taking a line ‘straight from the far-right’s antisemitic playbook’ (Buchan 2019). This is revealing in a context in which Soros has repeatedly been the target of virulent antisemitism from the White House to the Hungarian streets, with Donald Trump, for example, claiming that Soros is ‘paying refugees to illegally enter the country’ (Levin 2018). While accusing Muslims and the left of antisemitism is par for the course, the right seems to play by different rules when it comes to its own antisemitism.
In Roger Scruton’s case, he defended his allegiance with Orbán from any potential charge of antisemitism by relying squarely on Islamophobia. Hungarians, he claimed, ‘were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East’ (Eaton 2019). Supporting Scruton, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, accused New Statesman journalist George Eaton of ‘grotesquely distorting’ his comments, while hypocritically retweeting the ‘antisemitic meme’ that ‘Isis learned a lot from Israel on how to build an expansionist state’.4 Perhaps Pollard overlooks Orbán’s antisemitism because Orbán himself swings between manipulating antisemitic tropes such as ‘Hungary’s enemies “do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs”’ and accepting the World Jewish Congress’s invitation to speak at its 2013 convention in Budapest (Zion 2018). During his speech there, ‘Orbán not only denounced antisemitism, he also recognized the Jews as allies in his fight for international acceptance for his controversial policies’ (Wertheim 2017: 277). Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also emerged as a key Orbán supporter, welcoming him as an ally in the fight against antisemitism and against the ‘threat of radical Islam’ which ‘could endanger the world’ (Zion 2018). This unveils the Israeli government’s solidifying alliance with the European far-right under Netanyahu.
Stephen Pollard enthusiastically shared articles defending Scruton by Spectator magazine editor Douglas Murray and prominent ex-Muslim Maajid Nawaz for his column in the Jewish News. Pollard, editor of one of the world’s oldest Jewish newspapers, appeared able to overlook Scruton’s opposition to Soros despite its inherent antisemitism. He publishes articles by the journalist Melanie Phillips, one of the key intellectual proponents of the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ thesis, whose writings in the ‘fear of Eurabia’ genre were collected in white supremacist Anders Breivik’s ‘compendium’ on which he drew to justify the Utøya massacre of 2011. In a 2019 Jewish Chronicle column, Phillips downplayed white supremacism, arguing that, today, ‘some Jews are now even joining the manipulative campaign to camouflage Muslim antisemitism and extremism by claiming the biggest threat to the world is coming from the far right’ (Phillips 2019).
Douglas Murray and Maajid Nawaz, for their part, are on the frontline of the intellectual rationale for state-sponsored and popular anti-Muslim racism. In a stunning reversal of the actual experience of Muslims worldwide, Murray’s 2013 book Islamophilia contends that ‘metropolitans’ are dangerously in thrall to an Islam that can do no wrong. His 2017 follow-up, The Strange Death of Europe, zones in on Muslim ‘migrants raping and murdering and terrorizing’, killing off an undefined European culture (Hinsliff 2017). The Quilliam Foundation, established by Maajid Nawaz on an Islamophobic agenda that demonizes Muslims, was essentially created to assist the UK government’s countering violent extremism programme, Prevent, which it was paid a million pounds to promote (Kundnani 2015). Nawaz has been personally associated with Tommy Robinson/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of Islamophobic street gang the English Defence League, who was jailed for nine months in 2019 ‘for seriously interfering with the administration of justice’ (Busby 2019). In 2018, Nawaz and Quilliam were exposed by child sexual exploitation expert Ella Cockbain for cementing the narrative that Muslim ‘grooming gangs’ were disproportionately responsible for incidences of child sex abuse in cities in the North of England based on ‘a case study in bad science’ (Malik 2018).
What shielded Scruton from accusations of antisemitism in the eyes of Pollard, Murray, and Nawaz was shared opposition to Islam and Muslims. Contrast their dismissal of Scruton’s effective support for Orbán’s antisemitic attack on Soros in the service of their shared Islamophobia with their opposition to US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Omar, the first Somali-born Muslim woman to be elected to office in the United States, is a religious Muslim who wears a hijab and whose outspoken remarks on Palestine, US imperialism, and the nefarious impact of the pro-Israel lobby on US politics became a flashpoint for discussions of what constitutes antisemitism today. Omar came under widespread condemnation for a tweet – ‘It’s all about the Benjamins baby’ – which was interpreted as mobilizing the antisemitic trope associating Jews with money. When pressed for clarification, she claimed she was referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which brands itself as ‘America’s Pro-Israel lobby’. She later contextualized her remark by reaffirming the ‘problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA or the fossil fuel industry’.5
In March 2019, Omar gave a speech to the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) in which she said that Muslims have been discriminated against in the US because of 9/11 when ‘some people did something’, thus tarring all Muslims with the brush of terrorism. Her remarks went unnoticed at the time, despite being broadcast live, but resulted in a video being released by President Donald Trump in April in which images of the Twin Towers falling were superimposed with the words ‘some people did something’, to imply Omar endorses the 2001 attacks. The key figure in the trajectory of Omar’s speech from the CAIR event to the President’s thumbs was an Australian ‘fake imam’, Mohammad Tawhidi, who claimed that she used 9/11 to justify ‘the establishment of a terrorist organization (CAIR) on US soil’ (Friedersdorf 2019). Death threats against Omar following the release of the video multiplied (Terkel 2019). Despite the fact that the majority of US Democrats failed to speak in support of Omar, right-wing Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro wrote that ‘the Democratic Party proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is willing to not only countenance but embrace anti-Semitism’ (Shapiro 2019). Shapiro’s discomfort with antisemitism is selective, it appears, given that he tweeted that, although fellow right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s antisemitic remarks are ‘awful, nonsensical’, she ‘is also super pro-Israel, and has always been so, so I won’t lose sleep’.6
Antisemitism today, as these vignettes suggest, is not independently identifiable, but relies on an attendant Islamophobia and pro-Zionism that mysteriously slip out of view when it appears on the right and in pro-Israel circles. As the cases of both Orbán and Coulter attest, antisemitism is excused if opposition to Muslims and support for Israel are present. Pro-Zionist politics are not consistent with a rejection of antisemitism, even if the defence of Israel generally presupposes unequivocal support for the Jewish people. Benjamin Netanyahu’s self-declaration that, as Prime Minister of Israel, he was the leader of world Jewry cements the inexorable unicity of Jews and Israel such that opposition to left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews is bracketed from ‘real antisemitism’, which is made synonymous with criticism of Israel. Therefore, Douglas Murray condemns Omar and her supporters for deflecting from her antisemitism by making ‘an equivalence between anti-Semitism and the crock term “Islamophobia”’ (Murray 2019a). Recalling the definitions of ‘real racism’ as distinguished from ‘not racism’ discussed in Chapter 2, Murray describes antisemitism as ‘an irrational prejudice built on centuries of stereotypes and hatreds which culminated in the worst crime in human history, on our continent, in the last century’. He contrasts this to Islamophobia, ‘a term which can claim almost anything that the wielder claims it to mean’ (Murray 2019a), thus endorsing Scruton, who called it ‘a propaganda word “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”’ (Eaton 2019).
The detachment of the definition of antisemitism from that of Islamophobia is bound up with our impoverished public understanding of race. To fully understand the contemporary form taken by race and racial logics requires getting to grips with how, more than any other, debates around the meaning of Islamophobia, and even whether it exists, have been used to discredit the argument that race matters. The proposition that ‘Islam is not a race’ and that therefore anti-Muslim racism is a misnomer is a core dimension of contemporary Islamophobia. This often relies on a comparison with what is suggested to be the ‘real racism’ of antisemitism. For example, British journalist David Aaronovitch considers ‘that for many perfectly reasonable people a read-across from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia has to be argued, not axiomatically stated. Why? I’ve explained already. Because Jews are a race/people and Muslims are a faith.’7 This is a case study in how race attaches itself to and detaches itself from categories and contexts for reasons of political expedience. The multi-ethnic and multinational character of Islam’s adherents is considered to disqualify Muslims from being considered ‘a race’, hence delegitimating the charge that they face racism. In addition to the fact that such a reading erases the existence of Black Jews and Jews of colour, the distinction relies on a purely biologistic account of race that paradoxically reifies it, thus upholding the racialization of the Jews which underpinned the explosion of nineteenth-century political antisemitism. Aaronovitch and others use the argument that Jews are ‘a race’ while Muslims are ‘only’ a religion because they seek to negate and downplay Muslim people’s experiences of Islamophobia. But this is not as recent a phenomenon as it may seem. Prominent Zionists such as Max Nordau and Arthur Rippin promoted ideas of ‘Jewish supremacy’, explicitly conceptualized Jews as a race, and presented ‘Zionism as a eugenic project’ (R. Lentin 2018: 84).
Today’s (re-)racialization of Jews flies in the face of Jewish attempts to de-racialize themselves following the Holocaust and to assert themselves instead as a religious minority. Gil Anidjar remarks that Jews in the US refer to themselves as ‘American Jews’ rather than the reverse in order to press home that ‘they would just be a religious minority’, rather than an ethnic group for whom being American may be construed as secondary (Shaikh and Anidjar n.d.). The effort to de-racialize oneself is an understandable response to the old European antisemitism that cast Jews as ‘a race that was present within all races’ (Foucault 2003: 89), a trope that is resurgent on both right and left today, evident in memes that cast Jews as globalist anti-nationalists with dual loyalty to a foreign power. However, the argument is, as Anidjar himself admits, replete with contradictions given that ‘Israel both ethnicizes – indeed, racializes – the Jew, and erases the religious difference that is nonetheless critical to its myths and policies’ (Shaikh and Anidjar n.d.). This fact was compounded by the 2019 passage of the ‘nation state law’, which instates ‘a racial divide between Jews and Palestinians, and enshrines Jewish supremacy as a core legal principle’ (Tatour 2019). It also obscures the fact that in order to become white (Brodkin 1999), non-European Jews had to be re-racialized, thus igniting intra-communal tensions among Jews originating from different parts of the world, with white Jews asserting dominance within the racial landscape of America and Israel predominantly (Slabodsky 2015).
Furthermore, casting doubt on Islamophobia necessitates the mobilization of a ‘radical atheist’ argument of the sort promoted by Richard Dawkins, in which Muslims lose legitimacy on the basis of their religiosity. They are cast as de facto irrational and opposed to European values, which now incorporate the formerly excluded Jews. In construing Jews as a race in the service of delegitimizing claims of Islamophobia, it is the religion of Islam that is racialized while the religious element of Jewish existence conveniently fades into the background as Judaism is tacitly included within a Eurocentric secularism which also encompasses Christianity. This is clearly evident in the resurfacing of the myth of conjoined ‘Judeo-Christianity’, which posits, as Ben Shapiro did after the fire that engulfed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in April 2019, that western civilization was ‘built on the Judeo-Christian heritage’.8 Gene Zubovich locates the origins of ‘Judeo-Christianity’ in Roosevelt’s opposition to rising European antisemitism in the 1930s (Zubovich 2016). However, in its contemporary usage by the right, it is ‘an ideological construction’ (Burrows 2015) that obscures Christianity’s antisemitism and rewrites the history of Europe to exclude Islam and Muslims (Anidjar 2003).
Efforts to counter the Islamophobic manipulation of antisemitism often have recourse to the argument that ‘Muslims are the Jews of today’. Discussions about the historical or contemporary possibility of seeing antisemitism and Islamophobia as analogous raise important questions about the specific evolution and purpose of each form of racism (Bunzl 2007). Brian Klug concludes, contra Bunzl’s contention that Islamophobia supersedes antisemitism today, that there are sufficient similarities between the two to render the analogy useful (Klug 2014). Arguing about whether antisemitism or Islamophobia is more significant is a pointless exercise given that widely available statistics on the degree of racialized policing, incarceration, everyday discrimination, and violent attacks against Muslims in the West far exceed the number of reported cases of either verbal or physical attacks on Jews. Houria Bouteldja suggests that the attempt to equate Islamophobia and antisemitism is imbricated in a moralist approach to antiracism which, while wishing to recognize the significance of anti-Muslim racism, cannot dispense with the signifier of ‘the Jews’, ‘a community upon which the left progressively re-established its humanist conscience’ (Bouteldja 2015). In order to square the circle, progressive leftists create a simple equivalence between anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racism and elide the fact that institutional and state racism targets Muslims in France but not Jews, although this is not true for all states, Hungary being a case in point. Bouteldja does not deny that antisemitism exists. Rather, her argument is that today, above all, antisemitism describes how ‘the Jews’, not as people, but as a cipher, serves a purpose for the ‘imperialist nation-state’ (Bouteldja 2015). As we have seen, this is exacerbated by the readiness of some Jews to excuse antisemitism when doing so serves a larger agenda that includes attacking Muslims, asylum seekers, or, in the US particularly, Black people. Rather than analogous, then, antisemitism and Islamophobia should be thought of as entangled, both historically, in the conjoined purpose of what Anidjar names ‘the Jew, the Arab’, for defining the external contours of Europe, and contemporarily, as two forms of racism that mutually reinforce each other (Anidjar 2003; Joskowicz 2014; Katz 2018).
Indeed, today, it is no longer useful to theorize antisemitism independently of Islamophobia, although, given that Islamophobia works institutionally as well as chimerically, the inverse is not true. To say that a complete theory of antisemitism requires it to be juxtaposed with the ways in which it is manipulated in the service of anti-Muslim racism is neither to analogize the two nor to dismiss antisemitism as insignificant in its own right. It is to deepen our understanding of why hyper-attention is currently paid to antisemitism. Netanyahu’s ahistorical assertion in 2015 that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Europe, not Hitler, surely alerts us to the complicity of many Jews with this entangled antisemitism/Islamophobia, sounding warnings about another entanglement, that of Zionism and right-wing Jews with white supremacism (Haaretz 2015). The very fact that Islamophobia is so often mobilized in order to draw attention to antisemitism and to contend that Arabs and Muslims should bear the brunt of responsibility for antisemitism should alert us to the role played by racial rule in perpetuating both forms of racism. In other words, while some Jews, as we have seen, are complicit, and antisemitism certainly exists among Muslims, sometimes resulting in violence, neither Jews nor Muslims benefit from the manipulation of antisemitism or the negation of Islamophobia. And antisemitism, while it has been used with great effect over centuries to incite hatred among poorer people in Europe and elsewhere, has always been an elite project, and so it remains.
A spectre haunts the West, apparently; the spectre of ‘Cultural Marxism’. My own entry on the antisemitic Judas Watch website reads, ‘Alana Lentin is a Cultural Marxist Jewish Associate Professor’.9 Those who promote the idea of a ‘Cultural Marxist’ conspiracy – a linchpin of current right-wing and conservative thought – spread the idea that the mainly Jewish members of the Frankfurt School of social theory and critical philosophy were responsible for using ‘psychological manipulation to upend the west’. Cultural Marxism was made into an antisemitic meme by misappropriating the idea of the Frankfurt School thinkers that cultural change is needed to bring about an end to capitalism. Jewish intellectuals who were forced to flee to the US after the rise of Nazism, such as Herbert Marcuse, were targeted for contributing ‘to the decline of Western Judeo-Christian civilization’ (Garratt 2019). It is not immaterial that Marcuse had taught Black feminist scholar and former political prisoner Angela Davis. Today ‘Cultural Marxism’ is used to describe ‘anti-White traitors, subversives and … Jewish influence’, as the tagline of the Judas Watch website states. It is used to attack ‘leftist values’ of multiculturalism, ‘political correctness’, and pro-immigrationism. The story is, as antifascist journalist Jason Wilson puts it, ‘transparently barmy’ (Wilson 2015). Nonetheless, it has been wildly popular on the right for decades and is rapidly spreading from the fringes of the American conservative movement to the mainstream, as we shall now see.
In a 2019 speech, British Conservative MP Suella Braverman said that she was ‘very worried about this ongoing creep of Cultural Marxism which has come from Jeremy Corbyn’, a movement she attached to ‘politically correct’ attacks on free speech at British universities. Cultural Marxism is vague enough a term to see it being co-opted by mainstream politicians, such as Braverman, as a synonym for socialism or poorly defined political correctness. However, this leads to ‘its existence in a context of rampant online antisemitism, anti-Muslim sentiment and fervent nationalist populism’ being dismissed as inconsequential (Kesvani 2019). The Board of Deputies of British Jews initially rebuked Braverman for using an antisemitic trope. However, after a meeting, they rescinded, stating that ‘she is clearly a good friend of the Jewish community’, and apologized for any ‘distress’ caused.10 Ironically, Braverman found support among opponents of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had been accused of fostering a culture of antisemitism within the Party. In denial of the fact that the ‘Cultural Marxism’ trope is used by right-wing actors from Jordan Peterson to Stefan Molyneux in the service of anti-feminism and ‘race realism’, Braverman’s supporters claim that there is nothing antisemitic about the term, given its origins among the Jewish members of the Frankfurt School (Chrenoff 2019). And despite the considerable time spent excoriating those on the left who mobilize ‘identity politics’, the defence of Braverman centred on her identity as the daughter of Goan immigrants who is married to a Jewish man (Murray 2019b).
The protracted political row over antisemitism in the British Labour Party exemplified the racial logic implicit in thinking about antisemitism as a weapon, rather than as a dimension of racial rule. Defenders of Jeremy Corbyn and other figures in the British Labour movement responded to these claims by stating that, far from being antisemitic, it was their opposition to Israel that their attackers were concerned by. While there is truth in this, the problem with this line of defence is that it denies the possibility of treating antisemitism as separate from debates over Zionism. We must be able to observe antisemitism, even on the left, without always attaching it to a discussion of Israel. In addition, it is a fact that the majority of the world’s Jews support the existence of the state of Israel. Yet they do not live there, and many object to the association made on both left and right that, as Donald Trump put it in a Hanukkah address at the White House, Israel is ‘their country’ (Weisman 2019). Former British Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger reported receiving hate mail which ‘accused me of having two masters. … They have called me Judas, a Zionazi, and an absolute parasite, and they have told me to get out of this country and go back to Israel’ (Burack 2018). The fact that Berger is ‘an active supporter of Israel who has visited the country over twenty times’ (B. White 2013) is seen as delegitimizing the claim that she faces antisemitism rather than mere objection to her defence of Zionist racism. However, the racism faced by Jewish public figures such as Berger has to be disentangled from her political beliefs, colonialist as they surely are, if antiracism is not to be made contingent on political alignments.
There is a struggle internal to Jewish communities to recognize the pernicious effects of supporting racial-colonial rule through adherence to Israel, abetting antisemitism via shared opposition to Islam and Muslims, and giving succour to white supremacism through support for racist leaders such as Donald Trump and by internally discriminating against Jews of colour (Pierce 2019). The white supremacist attack on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in which eleven Jews were murdered in October 2018 shone light on the problematic nature of equating antisemitism exclusively with attacks on white Jews, who, in the post-war era, have been folded into a vision of European identity that excludes people of colour. Addressing a vigil after the mass murder, Black female rabbinical student Tamar Manasseh drew attention to the invisibilization of Black and Brown Jews that occurs as a result of this enfolding, obscuring the fact that Jews were once majority Black and Brown (Gordon 2016; Oxman 2018).
However, the dialogues provoked by these truths are ignored by a culture that has accepted the unilinear story of Jews as white, a reading which serves to render us intelligible to the dominant society (Butler 2006). This need to flatten Jewish experience and complexity, invisibilizing the myriad identity positions and political standpoints within Judaism, participates in the equation of Jews with ‘lobbies’ or ‘forces’, as the spread of the ‘Cultural Marxist’ take-over thesis attests. This is not to say that there are no questions to answer with regard to the impact of Jewish organizations on state policies across the world. However, conflating Jews tout court with these processes is, whatever side of the political spectrum one is aligned with, a signal of race at work in terms of the particularity of antisemitism both as a form of racism, and as a mode through which the operations of race are deliberately obscured. Put simply, understanding the complexity of Israeli racial-colonialism, the function of Euro-American Jews vis-à-vis white structures of power, and the impact of the legacy of the Holocaust on the conceptualization of racism will not be served by reducing us to ‘the Jews’ as a homogeneous identity. What is necessary, rather, is a race-critical reading of what function the equation of all Jews as white and, variably, of all Jews as Zionist has on the operations of racial rule in the current conjuncture. At a fundamental level, the equation of all Jews with Zionism, whether this comes from the pro-Zionist establishment or from those opposed to Israel, is itself a form of antisemitism that refuses the possibility of Jewish divergence from pre-scripted alignments.
The propagation of the idea that the ‘Cultural Marxist’ agenda is responsible for altering the bases of western civilization is one expression of the widespread idea that the West is subject to manipulation from foreign forces within. There is a point at which legitimate criticism of Israel and of Jewish support for Zionism becomes available to more nefarious pseudo-conspiratorial ideas about the causes of perceived societal dissolution, particularly the perception that a ‘traditional working class’ and ‘dishonoured’ white men are losing out at the hands of minorities and migrants, and that there is a politically correct plot in place to bring this about. This can be seen, for example, in the spread of Rothschild memes online claiming that the historical Jewish banking family, as one put it, ‘owns every bank in the world … owns your news, the media, your oil, and your government’ (Evon 2016). As a teacher, the ubiquity of these conspiracies was driven home to me when a student used one to make a point about neoliberalism and austerity in a class I teach on ‘politics, power and resistance’.
Antisemitism persists memetically despite the successful entry into whiteness of Euro-American Jewish people. This is due to the continued availability of ‘the Jews’ as a symbol of foreign manipulation, a notion that is core to racist nationalism and was central to the development of intra-European racism in the nineteenth century (Balibar 1991). As Lewis Gordon reminds us, ‘Antisemitism is saturated with bad faith [because] most people who hate Jews do not think about their religion. They see the Jews, even if they are white, as never white enough’ (Gordon 2018b: 103). Never being white enough is what undergirds perceived Jewish rootlessness, such that, notwithstanding the dual efforts of Israel and the diaspora Jewish establishment to associate themselves wth hyper-nationalism, ‘the Jews’ – rather than individual Jewish people – acts as a signifier for an internal threat. This could be seen in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, which was replete with the manipulation of antisemitic symbols to foment fear about an immigrant take-over that could only be halted by a vote to leave the European Union. A cartoon published on the Leave.eu website used repurposed antisemitic tropes to argue that ‘swarthy bearded figures’ (now marauding Muslims), carrying bags of money and pushing ‘waves of immigration’ on a public cowed by the shark of ‘political correctness’, would be the death knell for ‘British culture’. In the popular imagination so successfully captured by this trope, the suffering of the English ‘working class’, made more acute under austerity, is portrayed as caused by global elites determined to further dispossess them with unwanted migration.
The focus on whether the British Labour Party was held hostage by Zionist forces weaponizing antisemitism to delegitimate the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has distracted from a more prevalent reality. Some figures within the British labour movement trade on the idea that a far-left, multiculturalist agenda impoverishes and undermines the working class through unfettered support for open borders. The spread in acceptability of this idea unites the anti-immigration right with a nativist left and key figures within the intelligentsia such as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who wrote that opening Europe’s doors to refugees would ‘trigger an instant populist revolt’ and result in the triumph of anti-immigrant parties (Žižek 2017).
Katy Brown and her co-authors note that ‘populism’ has become the go-to word to define ‘our current political age’, but caution that ‘can be a weasel word for “racist”’. They cite the Guardian’s observation that whereas about 300 of its articles mentioned populism in 1998, by 2016 2,000 did (K. Brown et al. 2019). The way in which populism is mainly used in these articles and beyond wilfully negates its relation to race and whiteness. Rather, it is construed as prioritizing the ‘culture and interests of the nation’ and the promise ‘to give voice to a people who feel that they have been neglected, even held in contempt, by distant and sometimes corrupt or self-serving elites’ (Goodwin 2018). Professor of Politics Matthew Goodwin is one of the key defenders of the thesis that populists are ‘not racist’. We met him in Chapter 1 as a Quillette magazine contributor and one of the signatories of the letter defending eugenics researcher Noah Carl after his dismissal from Cambridge University. Goodwin claims that the left deliberately misinterprets the positive offer populists make to the electorate, in which curbing immigration is part and parcel of a ‘more equal economic settlement’ (Goodwin 2018). There is a tacit acceptance in this position that the interests of a cosmopolitan elite are not those of the nation.
In a world in which, the globalization of finance notwithstanding, politics continue to be conducted within nationally bounded territories, the implication that rootless elites foist unwanted migration and multiculturalism onto a disregarded ‘indigenous’ population only functions if elites themselves are counterfactually portrayed as having extra-national allegiances. Whether or not Jews are named, formulations such as that put forward by Paul Embery (see Introduction) that the divide in society is encapsulated by ‘a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle-class … and a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class’11 function chimerically to evoke the spectre of a core European Manicheanism. As political sociologist David Smith puts it, ‘These ghostly, walking tropes are not Jews. They are representations of people, not people per se’ (D. Smith 1996: 221). Hence, they represent a grab bag into which can be thrown everything that challenges what is presented as the originary legitimate right of white people to the fruits of the nation. The point is not whether individual Jews are responsible for particular acts. Smith agrees that ‘antisemites take the actual Jews of history as their premise’ (D. Smith 1996: 221). However, he resists the implication of Hannah Arendt’s thesis that some Jewish financiers were responsible for detrimentally affecting society, despite becoming ‘the victim of the world’s injustice and cruelty’ (Arendt 1951: 8). Jewish actions may ‘inspire chimerical fantasy’, but Jews cannot be held co-responsible for antisemitism (D. Smith 1996: 221). To take Arendt’s side would be to agree that the fact that some migrants are criminals or that some Muslims have perpetrated acts of terrorism means that, qua migrants or Muslims, they can be held responsible for racism. It is far from new to argue that stopping immigration is a panacea for racism, as witnessed in the refusal of both Australia and Ireland to allow Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism entry into their countries in the 1930s. Both countries argued that allowing Jews in would lead to an increase in racism. Indeed, a core rationale of popular anti-immigrationism is that it is reasonable to demand that immigrants integrate into ‘our way of life’ or face sanction, and that the failure to do so – not a discriminatory and carceral migration regime – is what conjures an otherwise dormant racism.
Separating Jewish actions from antisemitic interpretations, far from absolving individual Jews, the representatives of certain Jewish institutions, or Zionist colonial ideology of responsibility for damaging actions, frees us to identify them without attaching them racistly to an underlying, homogenizing ‘genetic code’ (S. Hall 2017). Seen in this way, it was not antisemitic for Ilhan Omar to accuse Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s migration policies, which include the travel ban on people from Muslim countries and the policy of separating children from their families at the Southern border, of being a white nationalist. Miller has said he ‘would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil’ (Levitz 2019), encouraging his uncle to evoke the family history of escape from Nazi Europe and ask his nephew in an open letter ‘if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him’ (Glosser 2018). However, this should not be taken to mean that antisemitism is wholly fictitious, a reading that would lend itself to the adjudication of all racisms on a case-by-case basis that disables the analysis on which this book is based: that race is above all a matter of rule. What the simplification of debates over antisemitism neglect in their pitting of weaponization against ubiquitous Jew hatred is an interpretation of the place accorded to the ‘frozen racism’ of modern antisemitism in the overall architecture of race.
On 16 February 2019, French ‘new philosopher’ and public provocateur Alain Finkielkraut was verbally abused by protesters aligned with the Gilets jaunes grassroots movement for economic justice that had exploded onto the scene late the previous year. They called him a ‘dirty Zionist’ and told him to ‘go back to Tel Aviv’. The protesters were identified as pro-Palestinian, or, to use the expression of the Islamophobic Riposte laïque website, ‘pro-Palestinian, lefties, fascists and Muslims’ (Moisan 2019). This was hegemonically interpreted as an antisemitic attack. In its aftermath, President Emmanuel Macron called anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism such as not seen ‘since the Second World War’ (Bouteldja and Lentin 2019).12
Finkielkraut is a central figure in French Islamophobia and an outspoken defender of Zionism. Riposte laïque came to his defence notwithstanding their rejection of his anti-Trump standpoints or of his opposition to the antisemitism of the comedian Dieudonné. For these ‘right and left wing patriots’ and defenders of the Republic who refuse to ‘accept the Islamization of their country’,13 those who attacked Finkielkraut were ‘degenerate, hateful’ imposters who do not have the ‘Gilets jaunes culture’ within them (Moisan 2019). Yet Finkielkraut himself maintained, in November 2018, that the yellow-vested protesters, as the ‘left behind of happy globalization’, have every right to voice their opposition to ‘progressivist thinking … characterized by the refusal to take into account the economic and cultural insecurity of the middle and working classes’, hence mobilizing an anti-globalist argument of the kind that pits the ‘rootless’ against the ‘rooted’ (Feertchak 2018). It is interesting that Finkielkraut chose to reference globalization in this way, given the antisemitic undertones of the terms ‘globalism’ or ‘globalist’ (Barenblat 2018). Trump has called himself a ‘nationalist’ in comparison to a ‘globalist’, who is ‘a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much’ (Boyer 2018). The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has spoken about a ‘negative globalism’ run by an ‘unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy’ (Karp 2019). Be that as it may, as soon as Finkielkraut became the object of ‘pro-Palestinian’ abuse, his position on the Gilets jaunes changed from one which saw them as the patriotic little people forgotten by globalist elites to one which regarded them as the embodiment of antisemitism. He expresses the commonly held view in France that antiracism has become the object of a ‘terrible corruption’ by Islamic-leftists and communitarians (Nadau 2019). This view plays a not insignificant role in the rise of violent Islamophobia and antiblackness in France today.
A few days after the attack on Finkielkraut, a rally against antisemitism was held in the centre of Paris, attended by the French government, all the major political parties, the official representatives of the French Jewish communities, and major antiracism organizations. This curious gathering, which recalled the march attended by world leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu, after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, signified a state-endorsed, top-down antiracism which is at odds with the grassroots mobilization of racialized people, including many Jews.
There is no reason to assume that the Gilets jaunes would be any less infused with antisemitic symbols than any other political movement at a time when memetic antisemitism has, as I have noted, become widely available across the political spectrum (Assoun 2019). The existence of antisemitic tropes within the Gilets jaunes movement notwithstanding, including the circulation of memes attaching President Emmanuel Macron to the ‘Rothschilds’ (Hirsch 2019), it is vital to set the labelling of the movement as uniquely antisemitic in the context of a French state, and, more generally, of a West, coming face-to-face with the ramifications of a ‘dying colonialism’ (Fanon 2007 [1965]). Post-Holocaust European states in their declaration that ‘never again’ would genocide take place on European soil operated with a cognitively dissonant denial of the fact that colonization had not stopped. Europe was still exploiting and racially dominating its colonized and formerly colonized ‘others’ both in the majority world and within the frontiers of the rapidly diversifying metropoles of the post-war years.
In effect, then, concern for antisemitism, which is morally defined as aberrant and ignorant, is transposed onto racism in general. This produces a vague humanist and universalizing form of antiracism which enjoys state support and that, because of this, downplays institutionalized or state racism (Bouteldja 2015). To situate racism in the instruments of state rule, rather than in the bad faith of individuals or in particular, uniquely antisemitic communities – primarily Muslims – would mean admitting that the rejection of race that united the European states after the Holocaust had a specific purpose: to cleanse Europe of its Judeophobia without dislodging racial-colonial governance abroad or the exploitation of non-European migrants at home.
Not only is antisemitism a chimera, then, but the fight against it increasingly takes on a chimeric form. As David Smith puts it, ‘Chimerical antisemitism often rises to obsessional as well as delusional heights’ (D. Smith 1996: 222). So, too, official, top-down antiracism relies on a mirror of this delusion and sets antisemitism up as the threat to end all threats. This does not, as we have seen, result in an end to antisemitism. Rather, antisemitism is left intact while all other racisms within the racial state are denied. A two-sided vision has solidified in which either antisemitism is the fruit of an uncritical left-wing Islamophilia that creates what in France has become known as ‘Islamogauchisme’ (Islamic leftism), or it is purely a tool to undermine the pro-Palestine movement. Complexifying this polarity are the voices of race-critical, anticolonial Jews and our allies. However, the activism and scholarship that produce a decolonial reading of antisemitism, drawing out its imbrication in other forms of racial rule and its availability as a narrative to racial states, are either ignored or savagely misrepresented in the public arena, as the attacks on anti-Zionist Jews attest.
Official, top-down antiracism sets antisemitism up as the threat to end all threats with the purpose not of ending antisemitism, but of denying all other racisms within the racial state.
To fully understand the political utility of antisemitism and the possibility, as I have shown, for particular antisemitic tropes, such as globalism, rootlessness, and ‘Cultural Marxism’, to coexist with a performative defence of Jews and Israel against an antisemitism made synonymous with anti-Zionism, we need to take a close look at the role played by ‘state philosemitism’ (Bouteldja 2015). Exposing the role played by philosemitic alignments today is key to the process of decolonizing antisemitism and revealing how race plays a crucial role in building hierarchies of victimhood with pernicious effects. The false love for Jews relies on the separation of ‘good’ from ‘bad’ Jews, as I later elaborate (see also Topolski 2018). Only the good Jews are its beneficiaries. To receive philosemitic love, Jews in France must uphold the dominant French narrative of Islamophobia which the sociologist Ugo Palheta, author of The Possibility of Fascism, has called a ‘new nationalist and racist doxa’. Being a ‘bad Jew’ means to align with Muslims, ‘the enemy within’ (Palheta 2019) – a role once ascribed to the Jews.
State philosemitism does not denote actual love of Jews or concern with antisemitism against all Jews. If that were the case, the antisemitism waged against anti-Zionist Jews, Black Jews, Jews of colour, and all those who do not fit into a template of what the modern Jewish subject of the post-Holocaust looks like would be equally protected from charges of traitorship and ‘self-hatred’. The philosemitic defence of Jews and Israel relies on the tacit acceptance of the idea of Jews as perennial foreigners. Houria Bouteldja states that even while Jews are being defended, French citizens and Jews are always talked about as separate in official French discourse. This reveals how ‘“Jews” as a category are still not a fully legitimate part of the nation and its identity’ (Bouteldja 2015). This was evident in President Raymond Barre’s condemnation of the 1980 attack on a synagogue which ‘intended to strike Israelites who were going to the synagogue and which struck innocent French people who were crossing the rue Copernic’ (Assoun 2019). Similarly, in 2004, Jacques Chirac noted the rise in racist attacks against ‘our Jewish or Muslim compatriots, or sometimes quite simply against the French’ (Bouteldja 2015).
State philosemitism emerges as a function of Europe’s realization that it had applied colonialist procedures on its own soil against white people and, as Aimé Césaire put it, no longer ‘merely’ against ‘the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, or the “niggers” of Africa’ (Césaire 2000 [1955]: 36). Rudolf Bkouche notes that it was the Holocaust that made white people out of Jews, reminding us of Catholic monarchist Georges Bernanos’s ‘terrible words’ that ‘after the massacre it was no longer possible to be antisemitic’, as though, if it were not for the Holocaust, antisemitism could have continued as usual (Bkouche 2015).
State philosemitism, thus, takes independent agency away from Jews and ‘unilaterally squeezes us between the forces of power and the popular masses’ (Assoun 2019). This positioning is what permits Jews in France to become what Bouteldja has referred to as the ‘dhimmis of the Republic’, the dhimmis being those Jews and Christians who were accorded protected status under Arab rule in the past (Bouteldja 2016: 51). Positioned such, Jews become aligned with the needs of the state and whiteness. For this polemic and others, Bouteldja has been accused of antisemitism. Her 2016 book Whites, Jews and Us was widely attacked in France, with the attacks often based on wilful misreadings. For example, in the chapter addressed to Jews, Bouteldja mentions that a cousin from back home in Algeria does not know who Hitler is. She shocked readers by writing that this cousin’s words are precious. But they are precious because they remind us that at its core ‘antisemitism is European’. It does not derive from Muslims or the Arab world. If it exists there today, it has been bequeathed by colonialism (Bouteldja 2016: 55). Nonetheless, attacks on Bouteldja multiply even as her book gains readers and scholarly support across the world (Fernando and Lloyd 2018). One of her detractors, the political scientist Thomas Guénolé, is a member of the main left party of opposition in France, La France insoumise. He accuses her of racism and antisemitism (A. Lentin and signatories 2017). In so doing, Guénolé ignores the subheading of the book, ‘a politics of revolutionary love’, for Whites, Jews and Us is a lament for the lost past in common of Jews and Muslims in the Arab world.
Simon Assoun, an anti-Zionist member of the French Union of Jews for Peace and a Gilet jaune, agrees with Bouteldja that there is a pernicious state philosemitism in France. Being made the ‘dhimmis of the Republic’ has no benefit for Jewish people. On the contrary, it equates ‘the Jews’ with power, leaving them open to antisemitic attack (Assoun 2019). Assoun contends that when the French government and ‘its dhimmis’ held the aforementioned protest against antisemitism that followed the attack by some Gilets jaunes on Alain Finkielkraut, it served to take the spotlight off rising popular protest. These protests against the Macron government’s neoliberal policies were discredited by associating participants with antisemitism. Far from being effective to combat real antisemitism, which Assoun does not deny exists on both the right and the left, this only served to demonize Jewish people. Furthermore, by constructing a figure of the ‘innocent Jew’ (Assoun 2019), the complexity of Jewish existence is flattened. It renders invisible the history of Jewish trade unionism and anticolonialism, the role of South African Jews in the anti-Apartheid movement and the Israeli Black Panther movement, the movement of Black Jews against racism and the Israeli movement against anti-immigrant racism, as well as Jewish involvement in the struggle for a free Palestine invisible.
In The Crises of Multiculturalism, Gavan Titley and I argued that the state mobilizes two visions of diversity – good and bad. Good diversity foregrounds the ‘neoliberal formation of the autonomous, self-sufficient subject’: the model migrant, for example (A. Lentin and Titley 2011: 6). She is pitted against the subject of ‘bad diversity’, who embodies an excess of culture of the wrong kind and places strain on resources nationalistically construed as finite. In today’s Islamophobic times, the subjects of ‘bad diversity’ are most often religious and politically engaged Muslims. Analogously, philosemitism constructs good and bad Jews. This Manichean view hides the fact that support for Jews is always conditional on performing the role expected from us by the state and public sphere eager to distance themselves from the racism of today. ‘Real racism’ must remain firmly in the past. In this scenario there are also ‘good’ Muslims and ‘bad’ Muslims, reminding us why both Jews and Muslims are served by solidarity not enmity. ‘Good Muslims’ cooperate with the state in the war on terror; ‘bad Muslims’ resist it (Morsi 2017). Not only are there two types of Jews and two types of Muslims, but there are two types of antisemitism. Bad antisemitism is ‘real’; it exists among the far-right, the far-left, and Muslims. In contrast, ‘good antisemitism’, which treats Jews as a racialized subaltern group in service to the state, is left intact.
Bad Jews are those who refuse to allow antisemitism to be instrumentalized in the service of racial rule. They are anti-Zionist and struggle against racism in all its forms (Bouteldja and Lentin 2019). The bad Jew who refuses to sit in her accorded place is the thorn in the side of the racial state. The argument I have made here, that antisemitism cannot be disentangled from other forms of racism – most prominently Islamophobia, but also antiblackness, anti-Roma racism, and anti-migrant racism which builds on earlier forms that explicitly targeted Jews as unwanted aliens – should not be taken to mean that antisemitism no longer exists. Rather, a decolonial and race-critical reading of antisemitism requires it to be considered against the question of where anti-Jewish racism sits in the archipelago of racial rule. Nevertheless, I wish to note the specific forms taken by antisemitism – its cipherization, its availability to racial rule and the proxification of antiracism, and the attendant construction of good and bad Jews – in order to better act against it.
After the Holocaust, making race into a taboo did nothing to assist a deeper understanding of the history and political sociology of modern racial rule or help counter racism (A. Lentin 2008). Similarly today, considering a unidimensional account of ‘bad antisemitism’ as the prototype for all racisms rather than setting it in the context of colonial modernity and its continued imprint will do little for the fight against antisemitism. From my perspective as a Jew, I agree with Santiago Slabodsky that this approach also pushes Jews further adrift from what he calls our barbarian history, the history which ties us to the other subjects of racial rule (Slabodsky 2015). Slabodsky, contra the hegemonic Zionist preference for a Jew to ‘be a Maccabee – not a Hellenized dweeb’,14 wishes for us to dwell in the realm of Jewish suffering. This is not in order to elevate our persecution above that of others, as hegemonic readings of the Holocaust would have it, but in order to draw a line from our experience to that of others, drawing attention to commonalities in the ways we have suffered. To recall the discussion of victimhood and trauma in Chapter 3, taking this approach does not require that we reassert victimhood perennially, but that we draw on our past, not only to build solidarity decolonially, but also to unveil the ways in which racial rule necessarily shapeshifts, never remaining the same.
However, as Slabodsky concludes, there are no guarantees as to the outcome of this sitting with suffering. Suffering, as we have seen, is available politically both to hegemonic projects and to subversive ones. Today, it is no longer possible to simply repeat Fanon’s reminder that ‘an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro’ (Fanon 1986 [1967]: 122), or that of bell hooks that ‘white supremacy relies on the maintenance of anti-black racism and antisemitism’ (hooks 1995: 213). Just as it is insufficient to remark that race is a social construct, we need to work hard to unveil how this is so; how antisemitism, antiblackness, Islamophobia, coloniality, and white supremacy work co-constitutively. This is, as Stuart Hall put it, a ‘politics without guarantees’, as I shall now propose in conclusion.