Professor Alan Johnson conceived and founded Fathom in 2012 to make a balanced and expert case for rejecting the demonising frameworks and sensibilities about Israel that were becoming increasingly prevalent in the intellectual culture, in civil society, and on the left. For 12 years, Alan expertly edited the journal before retiring at the end of 2024. To mark this, several of those who worked closely with Alan over the years – Michael Walzer, Einat Wilf, Dave Rich, Eve Garrard, and Cary Nelson – reflect on his achievements.
Michael Walzer
Professor Michael Walzer is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, a prominent American philosopher and public intellectual and editor of Dissent magazine.
I first knew Alan as editor of Democratiya, an online magazine (was there ever a print edition?) that represented the best of Britain’s left – the genuinely democratic left, the men and women who signed the Euston Manifesto. It reminded me of the early Dissent, and when Alan put its archive on our website, it was a permanent reminder of the democratic left’s necessary battles. Alan understood from early on which battles those were – and are.
Alan’s move to BICOM was a surprise, at least to people like me who knew him from a distance. But it was exactly right because many of the last decades’ necessary battles have focused on Israel and its enemies. Fathom, which I think of as Alan’s magazine (which is wrong: he has always been a man with comrades) has been the place to read about and to join those battles. But the passive verbs are wrong. Alan and his friends made it the place, starting small, working hard, creating a magazine where I go, where you can go, as the OED says, “to get to the bottom” of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its repercussions in the UK and everywhere else.
There is nothing like Fathom (and nothing like Democratiya) in the US today, and so a large number of American liberals and leftists, old Dissent-niks, embattled professors fighting the boycott movement on our campuses, Jews and non-Jews for whom 7 October was a wake-up call – we are Fathomists. Alan and his friends give us space to write and, again and again, important articles and interviews to read.
It is hard to believe that Alan is retiring from Fathom. A young man. I will continue to look to him, in these bad times, for political wisdom – and for a model of political commitment.
Einat Wilf
Dr. Einat Wilf is a former Member of Knesset and Author of “We Should All be Zionists”
It is a rare thing to have both a piercing mind and an open heart. Alan has both. It is this combination that has enabled Alan, with quiet determination – year after year, essay after essay, exacting argument after exacting argument – to withstand the constant barrage of lies, libels and sophisticated erasure, so as to see the devastating manner in which the ancient impulse against the collective Jew has emerged dressed in the new garb of the “New Left”, “Social Justice” and other beautiful words.
Having emerged from these circles, Alan was able to marshal superb arguments, broad knowledge, historical background, to shine an early light on the emerging danger. He carefully gathered around him thinkers and writers, providing them, as he did for me, with the aptly named platform of Fathom, allowing us all to participate paragraph by paragraph in the construction of a sturdy building of words and thoughts, that began to serve as a mote against the newly disguised onslaught on the Jewish people. To this day, the essays published in Fathom over the years – by Alan and his curated roster of writers – remain some of my most cherished, and those to which I refer once and again.
The Jews are a small people, and though we do our best to punch, or at least argue, above our weight, we cannot thrive in this world without friends. Alan has been such one. And like many righteous allies before him, Alan came to it from the simplest of motivations – a love of truth, a sense of justice and a very British annoyance with hypocrisy. In moments of doubt, when the onslaught seemed particularly intense, one could always turn to Alan to find one’s bearings in the storm.
As Alan retires to a life of peace and quiet, if he can truly keep himself away from writing another excellent take-down of a pseudo-sophisticated essay, he should know that he does so after having built something of worth that continues to live in our minds and hearts
Dave Rich
Dave Rich is Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust.
I first met Alan Johnson around twenty years ago, during the Second Intifada, when he was part of the group behind the Euston Manifesto, and then set up Democratiya, a journal that I was honoured to write for. More important than his practical contributions, though, was what Alan – along with others – represented at that time: a left wing tradition that rejected the unthinking anti-Zionism and anti-Western reaction that characterised much of the British left during that period.
This was the period of Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem cafés and Tel Aviv nightclubs; of the Iraq War; of Osama Bin Laden having an op-ed column in the Guardian: and of a surge in anti-Jewish hatred across the West. It was a period when much of the left failed to understand, never mind oppose: the Islamist extremism that would lead to British suicide bombers, or the hatred of Israel and Jews that fuelled the campaign to dismantle the world’s only Jewish state.
Alan could never be accused of shirking those challenges. Whether in writing or in person, he has always articulated an open, optimistic and thoughtful politics that rejects antisemitism and sectarianism; that understands identity but is not bound by its binaries; and that seeks to both learn and inform. His legacy is found in the pages of Fathom, which has become essential reading precisely because of the diversity of the views to which it gives space.
Alan personally made a significant contribution to understanding and explaining the antisemitism that infused the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and the wider left before and since. He has put this commitment into practice, too, in debates with some of this country’s most ardent anti-Zionist (and at times, antisemitic) polemicists. It is often said that the Jewish community lacks allies in the fight against anti-Jewish hatred: Alan Johnson’s record demonstrates that while those allies may be thin on the ground, they can be the most effective and uncompromising advocates in that particular struggle.
In a way, the defining thread that runs through all of this is Alan’s ability to adhere to his own principles, while never mistaking those principles for the political purity tests that have crippled so much of the left. He campaigned against the 2003 Iraq War, but wrote the Euston Manifesto alongside colleagues who had supported Britain’s involvement in that war. Through Fathom he has done more than most to promote understanding of the challenges confronting Israel, but was always ready to publish criticisms of how different Israeli governments addressed those challenges. His own views were passionately held, but never to the exclusion of others. This even extended to football: a Newcastle United fan by birth and a Liverpool fan by marriage, he nevertheless cannot hide his admiration for Manchester United’s midfield genius, Paul Scholes.
On a personal level, I benefited greatly from Alan’s readiness to help promote my work when I published my books on antisemitism. My only regret is that I did not have the time to write for Fathom as often as he offered space to do so, but I knew that whenever I did, it was worth it. Alan built Fathom into a unique and indispensable platform, and as they go their separate ways, I wish both him, and Fathom, all the best in the future.
Eve Garrard
Eve Garrard is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester.
Alan Johnson is a truly remarkable person. I know him both as a writer and as an editor, and under both headings he is quite exceptional. He’s a man of the Left, who is able to analyse and forcefully criticise the failings, both moral and political, of the Left in this country and elsewhere. (See e.g ‘Little Short of Lunatics’)
One of the failings of the Left on which he focuses, with outstanding insight and cogency, is the ferocious anti-Zionism, a stance which is increasingly widespread on the left at the moment (as it is elsewhere). His analyses of these issues has been unfailingly articulate, precise, and illuminating. Whenever there is some new outbreak of that toxic phenomenon then Alan’s response to it is one of the first places I consult when looking for an insightful and rigorous treatment of the matter.
Along with many others, I’ve benefited from having Alan as an editor – he’s always managed to combine critical rigour with really helpful support. But the overall achievement of Alan’s work at Fathom has been far wider than that: he’s made it into an indispensable and very widely used source of incisive commentary about Israel and the attitudes of people both in the West and in the Middle East to events in that troubled region, and their reverberations closer to home.
Others will be able to say more than I can about the widespread influence of Fathom. I’d like to mention another aspect of Alan’s critical yet supportive treatment of Jews and Israel: Alan isn’t Jewish. He, and others like him (not an outstandingly large group of people) give hope to Jews that they’re not alone in what are increasingly dark times.
Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & The Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State (Indiana 2019).
I am not fond of change when things are working well, and things have certainly worked well at Fathom under Alan’s stewardship. Writing as a long time, repeat contributor, I look back over scores of Alan’s editorial suggestions and questions with awareness that he has always been on point. Every editorial suggestion has improved my submissions. Indeed, I have too many times relied on knowing that, though things were not quite right, Alan or others on staff would fix them. He has led a team exquisitely well for more than a decade – issue after issue, one relentless deadline after another.
Fathom has evolved under Alan’s leadership into the worldwide leader in publishing real time substantive analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the escalating spread of antisemitism. There are print journals making important contributions, but Fathom has for years been just about the only venue for essays issued while they could have an impact on developing events. Over the last couple of years several additional online publications have been created, so that Fathom has not had to answer this huge need entirely on its own, but Fathom long functioned in an antisemitic online wilderness.
Fathom’s contributors all along could know as well that they were negotiating not only with a superb editor but also with a key intellectual with a major role in defining the character of contemporary antizionism. This was powerfully in evidence for me as coeditor of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. The book is now a decade old, so it is past time to make a confession. Alan’s immensely influential contribution, “Intellectual Incitement: The Anti-Zionist Ideology and the Anti-Zionist Subject,” is the book’s theoretical centrepiece. There are many other valuable essays there, but it is Alan’s essay alone that advances a theory of antizionism. The essay is thus the book’s main claim to making a theoretical, not just a political, intervention. It’s the book’s one indispensable essay.
Of course for the rest of the world, Alan’s magisterial, comprehensive indictment of the Corbyn controlled phase of the British Labour party, “Institutionally Antisemitic,” is the publication that matters. It stands as the single most politically effective intervention into the left having crossed the line into antisemitism. It helped keep Corbyn out of No. 10 Downing Street. Alan credits himself with a “small role” in that matter, but most of us know that rather understates matters. His detailed analysis was the prosecution’s brief, once again the theoretical centerpiece and underpinning of the whole movement to issue a wakeup call to the British left and force its reform. When the history of the postwar British left is written, Alan will have a significant place in it. It remains unthinkable how close an aggressive antisemite was to heading Britain’s government. But Alan stood in the way, enabling others to join him.
I haven’t asked Alan what his writing plans are for the future. But he will have more time. That, at least, is a good thing for all of us, even if it hurts not to have his email address on call for submissions.
