Fighting antisemitism

Keith Kahn Harris’s book sets out to be a short analysis on what drives a lot of conspiracy theories: denial. People deny climate change, the effectiveness of vaccines, or the Holocaust. Kahn Harris explains succinctly where some of these conspiracies are driven from — helplessness in a world that leads the less informed to believing the conspiracy of someone with an alternative agenda. But the book is short in length and short on answers. Kahn Harris makes a distinction. “Denial” is the act of denying something, for example, claiming that you can smoke just one more cigarette and quit easily...

According to an Institute for Jewish Policy Research (IJPR) report on “Antisemitism in Contemporary Great Britain” levels of antisemitism in Britain are “amongst the lowest in the world”. According to a Community Security Trust (CST) report on “Antisemitic Incidents – 2018”, the number of antisemitic incidents in 2018 was “the highest total that CST has ever recorded in a single year, an increase of 16% on 2017, which was itself a record annual total.” According to a report entitled “Institutionally Antisemitic – Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party”...

While workers were angry and willing to fight, too often their anger was aimed at fellow workers of a different colour rather than at the employers and authorities responsible for their exploitation and poverty. Sometimes this occurred in the absence of socialist political leadership, but on occasion, labour movement misleadership played a poisonous role. On 23 January, four days before the Glasgow general strike, trade union leader Emmanuel Shinwell told a 600-strong seafarers’ union meeting that the unemployment they faced was caused by Chinese sailors joining British ships. White sailors...

Above: Gregson with Rabbi Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group which is vehemently anti-Israel and argues that Jews "deserved" the Holocaust Shop steward Peter Gregson’s appeal against expulsion from the GMB trade union was rejected last Wednesday (6 March). Last year a GMB disciplinary hearing had concluded that Gregson had: • Written and promoted antisemitic materials which were racist in nature, including claims that Israel “exaggerated” the Holocaust. • Made “utterly unacceptable and frankly sinister attacks” on GMB organiser Rhea Wolfson, describing her as “a...

In an article published online in December 2018, Joni Alizah Cohen seeks to find a link between the global rise in antisemitism and the rise in transmisogyny. By “transmisogyny” she means the joint experience of transphobia (hostility to transgender people) and misogyny (hatred of women). The article, “The Eradication of ‘Talmudic Abstractions’: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project”, situates the contemporary rise in the far¬right as stemming from National Socialist ideals and seeks to gain an understanding of the current situation through an analysis of those...

Minnie Lansbury was one of the rebel Labour councillors of Poplar (East London) who in 1921 forced the Tory-Liberal coalition government to start central government payments to equalise resources between councils in poor and in well¬off areas. Janine Booth’s biography of Lansbury is rich in detail about her life; working¬class conditions at the time; and much more. It is a solid achievement given the scarcity of material available on Lansbury to work on. Lansbury’s parents were impoverished Jews from Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and had fled to the East End of London to escape...

I used to think that conspiracy theorists were just silly. I must have made countless jokes about people who think the moon landings were faked, that Prince Philip ordered Diana’s death or that, despite NASA’s protestations, the Earth is in fact flat. But it’s become clear for some time now that conspiracy theories have reached a whole new level of influence. 9/11 was an inside job, Mossad created ISIS, George Soros is controlling the news — this kind of stuff is getting more and more mainstream. Just recently right-wing conspiracists sent bombs to George Soros and anti-Trump Democrats, and...

The following article is based on a Twitter thread, here . The author plans to expand it into a longer piece. Momentum has produced a video on antisemitism . I think this is a step in the right direction, and it’s good to see Momentum putting out content that directly challenges the idea that there’s no antisemitism on the left. But there’s quite a bit in this I’d query... It seems to present antisemitism on the left mainly as an incursion from wider society, and figures antisemitism as essentially a right-wing phenomenon that seeps into the left. But there are specific, discrete forms of...

Soon after the murderous antisemitic attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue on 27 October, at least two Constituency Labour Parties voted down or gutted motions condemning antisemitism. The people in those CLPs will of course have been as horrified by the synagogue attack as we are. But enough of them had ideas similar to those expressed by Jewish Voice for Labour secretary Glyn Secker in a recent "Labour Against Racism and Fascism" meeting: that antisemitism is not an issue in Britain . The conclusion drawn is that any complaint about antisemitism, or affirmation against it, should be dismissed as...

For part one click here In the last part of this article I looked at how Bibó analysed the historical background of antisemitism in Hungary. But on a more general level what makes an anti-semite “tick”? Bibó begins by considering the personal experiences of anti-semites, “[…] anyone who knows anti-semites even a little, knows that they base their claims about Jews on very personal experiences, presented in honest and passionate form. It would be incorrect to claim that they invent their experiences because of their shared prejudices, interests and ideologies; there are indications that the...