David Hirsh and I have been reading, researching, writing and politically organising to counter left antisemitism for around half a century. We have each created an intellectual institution to embed that work in the culture by educating the new generations and by pulsing out a rigorous critique of antisemitic antizionism – respectively, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the online journal Fathom (2012-). We both played a part, no more but no less, in preventing left antisemitism taking over the Labour Party. And we both spent a large chunk of 2022-23 buried in the unforgiving grind of editing big books – respectively, David’s The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century and my Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays (both Routledge Press) – so that some of the best thinking about contemporary antisemitism is now permanently available at the click of a mouse to university students and others all around the world, competing there for attention and influence with the deluge of antizionist academic publishing. More can always be done, but that’s not a bad record
This week the Jewish Chronicle dismissed our two books in eight words – ‘These books about hate are already out of date’ – in a review written by their ‘chief fiction reviewer’ David Herman.
The books, wrote Herman, ‘don’t address the particular features of the current crisis facing Jews today’ and ‘smack of the seminar room’. Several of the essays are trashed as ‘wilfully irrelevant’ and of ‘no interest’ to the reader.
Of course, he could be right. I want to suggest here that he isn’t. More: that the JC has spectacularly missed the point of the books and misled its readers as to their value as a resource in the fight against antisemitism today. More still: that the JCs handling of the two books is a representative example of a long-standing failure within the UK Jewish community to understand the battle of ideas: how and where to engage in it, what kind of institutions and resources that battle needs. In particular, there is a failure to understand the role played by the academy over the last half century, in our era of genuinely mass higher education, in the more or less comprehensive defeat of the case for Zionism and Israel in the West. The flood of books, journals, conferences, conceptual innovations, fresh (and false) historical narratives, curricula revolution, and poisoned pedagogy may have started in the academy but it has long since ventured out to shape the wider society.
A story: I was once in Israel presenting a paper to a think tank seminar (apologies to David Herman) about antizionism in the UK. I was talking about the influence of the academic antizionism of Ilan Pappe and my recent experiences of debating him and writing about his work. A number of those around the table could not see the point of engaging a mere academic, of bothering to take a fine analytical tooth comb to his claims. I tried to explain why it was necessary work by reference to Frederick Engels’ decision to write Anti- Dühring in 1877-78. Engels did so, I explained, because he knew Eugene Dühring was miseducating whole layers of the German Social Democratic Party (including about the Jews) and that was a very bad thing. One person broke out into a smile and caught my eye: the great Robert Wistrich. We talked afterwards: some never get it, he told me. They think talking points and polemics, appearing on TV and having the ear of this or that newspaper editor is all that is needed. They don’t understand how the battle of ideas works or its timescales. I think we may have talked of Keynes’ famous observation about how intellectual influence works: ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt … are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back’.
To be fair, the JC review of Mapping begins with some compliments for which I am grateful. Fathom is ‘one of the most interesting journals addressing antisemitism today’, the book has an ‘impressive list of contributors’ and ‘the range of essays is impressive: from the number addressing the nature of left antisemitism today, the Soviet roots of contemporary left antisemitism, and the left antisemitism in academia, in Europe and the US and the IHRA.’ My own introduction is said to be ‘particularly stimulating’.
After that though, a series of criticisms. I’ll take them one at a time.
First, the reviewer claims that because the 30 articles and interviews were published in Fathom between 2013-21, ‘the essays too often feel out of date and don’t address the particular features of the current crisis facing Jews today.’ (Bizarrely, he also complains that two books published before 7 October 2023 do not ‘properly engage with the Gaza conflict today’.)
Other reviewers, each heavily invested in the ‘crisis facing Jews today’, have been kinder. For David Nirenberg, not a chief fiction reviewer for the JC but author of the seminal Anti-Judaism, ‘it is difficult to imagine a better stimulus to reflection than the essays gathered in this informative, wide-ranging and important volume’. In a similar register Anthony Julius said the book was ‘indispensable’ and Gunther Jikeli called it ‘essential’.
Herman’s claim that because the essays were published between 2013 and 2021 they are therefore ‘out of date’ is, with all due respect, absurd. Today’s crisis, to steal a phrase, has not happened in a vacuum. It has roots. That’s why several of the essays in Mapping address episodes of left antisemitism from the past, making clear that left antisemitism has deep historical roots, that threads of influence can be traced from past to present, and that left antisemitism was not some tricksy Zionist invention to ‘stop Jeremy’, only dreamed up by tricksy Zionists in 2015. That is why, for example, I included chapters on Soviet anti-Zionism, the anti-Zionist campaign in Communist Poland in 1968, and the post-war West and East German Left. It’s why my own essay on ‘The Jews and the Left Time for a Rethink’, and my long conversation with intellectual historian Philip Spencer, that ends the book, ranges over the entire history of left antisemitism. And as William Faulkner put it, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past. If events since 7 October have taught us anything surely it is that the present-day impact of past waves of antisemitism, left and right, religious and secular, is huge.
Herman’s claim that the book ‘does not address the particular features of the current crisis facing Jews today’ is also absurd. Mapping has chapter after chapter on several of those features: from my essay on the antisemitism denialism of Norman Finkelstein to Lesley Klaff’s on Holocaust inversion; from Paul Bogdanor’s comprehensive dismantling of the ‘Nazi-Zionist’ collaboration myths to Norman Geras’s meticulous critique of the use of anti-Israelism as an alibi for antisemitism; from Susie Linfield’s explanation of ‘reactionary anti-imperialism’ and why the left, by its lights, often gives a free pass to Arab or Muslim antisemitism to Eve Garrard’s examination of the emotional and psychic ‘pleasures of antisemitism’ to the anti-Semites, so obvious since 7 October; from Dave Rich, Bernard Harrison and Lesley Klaff’s collective defence of the IHRA from misrepresentations and calumnies to Karin Stogner’s explanation of why the influential theory of ‘intersectionality’, in its dominant forms, excludes and demonises Jews and has contributed massively to the monstering of almost all Jewish students on campus as ‘white supremacists’ and ‘oppressors’.
Our books ‘smack of the seminar room’ Herman reveals. Well, as they say, no shit, Sherlock! The essays are written by academics, mostly, in critical response, often, to the claims anti-Zionist academics have made, and both books are published in the same academic book series, with an academic press. The point of the series is to generate rigorous and authoritative academic texts that are accessible to students in two senses. The essays are edited so they can be understood by students and so that they can get into university libraries around the world, and so are able to appear on student reading lists and – forgive us please – be allocated to students as seminar readings. Are we really still unaware, in 2024, of the importance of reaching the universities? Can we still not see, as we watch the universities become hubs of antisemitic forms of ‘antizionism’, the absolutely imperative need to engage with anti-Zionism at this level, with our own intellectual heft and our own texts, journals and research centres?
Remarkably, and in a frankly philistine vein, Herman claims the reader ‘won’t care about’ Marlene Gallner’s essay ‘Jean Amery’s Critique of Anti-Zionism’. I felt like banging my head against a wall when I read that. Amery is, like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, a figure of fundamental importance in making sense of the Holocaust. His book At The Mind’s Limit is still in print and is a staple of Holocaust module reading lists. And here was Gallner showing that a writer of such huge authority, not least on the left, was also writing powerfully and urgently about the blight of left antisemitism in the German left of the 1960s, and making many of the points we would make ourselves half a century later about Corbynism. Are we really still stuck in a place where we can’t see the importance of putting that kind of writing in front of students who are being given a diet of Ilan Pappe and Asa Winstanley?
The reviewer also dismisses Russell Berman’s critique of Judith Butler’s reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as of ‘no interest’. Again: head, wall. The reviewer seems not to understand the gargantuan influence of Butler on at last two generations of students. A case could be made that she is the most influential global academic writing today. And she is not only a cultural theorist. She is one of the most important anti-Zionist academics too, precisely because she bridges ‘Critical Theory’ – now dominant in all academic social sciences and humanities – and ‘anti-Zionism’. To be able to put before students a front rank academic, and theorist, such as Russell Berman, engaged in a meticulous critique of Butler’s anti-Zionism is pretty much the opposite of being ‘of no interest’.
Herman claims Mapping has no engagement with ‘the crisis of immigration or multiculturalism across Europe or a generation of angry young Muslims from the East End to Paris and Brussels?’ I can only presume he did not read Ken Waltzer’s long essay ‘Reflections on Contemporary Antisemitism in Europe’ or Dave Rich’s essay ‘The Unwelcome Arrival of the Quenelle’ with its critique of France’s Dieudonne M’bala. (Herman also complains there is nothing on Iran in a book which maps left antisemitism.)
Herman then makes this astonishing claim: ‘the three essays on “Left Antisemitism and Academia”, on David Miller at Bristol, academic publishing in Israel and Oren Ben-Dor and academic antisemitism, seem almost wilfully irrelevant.’
Let’s take each in turn.
So, in the week that the Employment Tribunal delivered its verdict on Miller. and debate has been raging about the relation between his antizionism and antisemitism, Herman thinks it is ‘wilfully irrelevant’ and ‘out of date’ for Mapping to carry a long chapter by David Hirsh, ‘The Meaning of David Miller’, that explains that relationship in detail for readers by a close reading of Miller’s writing, as well as explaining the key historical context for understanding the warm reception left academia has given to Miller’s antizionism, i.e. recent developments within the academic union, the UCU.
On to Cary Nelson’s ‘wilfully irrelevant’ chapter. Despite what Herman writes, the book contains no chapter on ‘academic publishing in Israel’ (my emphasis). If Herman had read the chapter he would know that Cary Nelson – a former President of the American Association of University Professors and a regular contributor to Fathom for a decade – contributed a chapter on academic publishing about Israel. The difference rather matters to any judgement of the chapter’s ‘relevance’. Nelson showed how left anti-Zionist commissioning, refereeing, publishing, curricula development and teaching is now radically biased against Israel and is indoctrinating western students, including UK students, today. How can all that be ‘wilfully irrelevant’ to ‘the current crisis facing Jews today’? All that is at the heart of the crisis! Nelson also proposes some practical reforms of academic publishing on Israel. ‘Wilfully irrelevant’ too?
The relevance of Sarah Brown’s critique of Oren Ben Dor, also dismissed by Herman, should be obvious. Ben-Dor was the subject of a raging national controversy in the mainstream press concerning an anti-Zionist conference he tried and failed to organise at the University of Southampton. At stake, in part, was whether his antizionism crossed over into antisemitism. Brown’s close reading of Ben-Dor’s work, of his awful attack on ‘Jewish being and thinking’, no less, may not be accessible to the average reader – Heidegger’s thinking on Being generally isn’t – but you don’t bring an intellectual knife to a intellectual gun-fight.
To finish, perhaps a clue as to the source of the animus against my book is found in Herman’s complaint that neither it nor David’s book are a ‘powerful polemic’. But not everything should be a polemic, powerful or otherwise. We need more clubs in the bag than that. It is also important – I think all-determining, in the long run – to also work upstream of the talking points, sound bites, spats and late night paper reviews, in the heights of the intellectual culture – a key site of which is, yes, the seminar room – amongst and against the (anti-Zionist) historians and philosophers and social scientists, against the miseducators of the next generation of students and, in time, of professionals and opinion formers. Fail to do that and we will continue to lose the battle of ideas. It really isn’t enough to say to a student faced with an anti-Zionist Professor, an anti-Zionist reading list, who has an essay with a biased title to hand in, ‘Just read this polemic, you’ll be fine’.
On the back of Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays are the words ‘In 10 years Fathom has already published a half a century’s worth of critically important essays and reviews’. Michael Walzer gets it, even if the Jewish Chronicle does not.
