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Review of Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt (Schocken, 2019).

Finding Antisemitism on the Left Only Emerging shortly after the Tree of Life massacre this past fall, Lipstadt’s book seems to be everywhere. It has been praised by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post; she has given extended interviews on NPR and the CBC since its release; the book is being used in high school classrooms in Michigan as part of its curriculum on race and racism. Since the rise of the far right, such a book would seem welcome: there are many liberals and leftists who desperately need a readable, scholarly work to help make sense of resurgent antisemitism. And yet, despite the Nazi on the book’s cover, it does little to explain the resurgence of the far right and its connections to antisemitic thought. If the book is useful, it is only as a guidepost for the contemporary collapse of liberal Jewish thought on Israel and the rise of white nationalism. Given the fascist imagery on the book’s jacket, one might expect Anti-Semitism to delve into the paranoid intellectual bunkers of neofascism. Yet while the book gives quick lip service to the rise of the Right, less than a fifth of the way in, it gets down to its real work: equating the Left with the rise of fascism. Focusing her first case study on the figures of Trump and British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Lipstadt equates the two by saying they “both have facilitated the spread of antisemitism.” Corbyn, “like Trump,” Lipstadt argues, has “emboldened antisemites.” To anyone even casually following the news across the pond, the idea that Corbyn is an antisemite has been accepted as truth only among the chattering classes; the claim’s circumstantial evidence is incredibly weak. To give credence to the idea that Corbyn is a facilitator of antisemitism, one would have to equate occasional antisemitic statements by anti-Zionist activists in England with the far-right’s clear antisemitic doctrine. According to an extensive inquiry by OpenDemocracy and statements by Jewish Voice for Labour, the Labour Party can only be considered to be “institutionally” antisemitic if one considers anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism, or one finds any expression of solidarity with Hamas or Hezbollah prima facie expressions of deep-seated bias against Jews (which if one accepts, one would then have to say every expression of support for Israel is fundamentally anti-Arab — or, more saliently, ignore that Palestine is under military occupation). Lipstadt instructs the reader to divorce Corbyn and Trump from whatever personal feelings the two may have about Jews, going so far as to say we cannot know how Trump “intended” his comments on white nationalists or his antisemitic campaign ads. And while depersonalizing racism can be helpful to illuminate larger structures, in this instance, it seems strangely perverse: Corbyn, who has never uttered an antisemitic comment, can then be rationally compared to Donald Trump, who told a crowd of Jewish Republicans he “doesn’t want their money,” retweets neo-Nazis, and so on. This is why personal statements by Trump matter: he says and tweets antisemitic images and phrases because he is broadly aligned with an ideology for which antisemitism is a core part of its structure. As a reactionary ideology, political antisemitism is not merely or even necessarily an aversion toward Jews; it is a theory of power. Capitalism’s workings can often seem dictated by shadowy, alien forces that are in charge of the political economy, even daily life. Borrowing on medieval Christian tropes of Jewish “devilry,” right-wing nationalists repurposed this figure to explain what may appear as an obscure globalized bourgeoisie and modern, bureaucratic state power. As the late Marxist theorist Moishe Postone wrote in his essay on antisemitism and Nazism, antisemitism functioned for the Third Reich as a “foreshortened anticapitalism” that offered a bracing critique of the liberal economic system, explaining how this mysterious system worked and for whom. When Trump critiques Hillary Clinton for serving “global special interests” over an image of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein, or features Clinton superimposed on piles of cash under a Star of David, he signifies on centuries of reactionary antisemitic ideas of Jewish economic power. To argue that the conflation of Trump and Corbyn is absurd is not to say Corbyn is perfect: he, like many leftists I’ve encountered, does not incorporate antisemitism into their analysis of oppression. As some British Jewish leftists have articulated, Corbyn should have been faster to condemn an antisemitic mural, or to understand how his introduction of John Hobson’s Imperialism could have better contextualized Hobson’s own personal antisemitic worldview. Yet the British press in this case acts as if Corbyn wrote the introduction for Mein Kampf. Hobson’s book remains a groundbreaking study of the financialization of Western imperialism, a book that generations of Marxist writers have built on in foundational ways. No one calls Vladimir Lenin an antisemite for citing Hobson; it would be like denouncing the National Endowment of the Arts for introducing The Great Gatsby without first reminding us that F. Scott Fitzgerald was also a garden-variety antisemite. But this is different both in quality and kind to the antisemitic project of the far right. When Trump blames Jewish financier George Soros for funding a migrant “invasion,” it is not a sin of omission: he signifies on entire body of reactionary thought that equates Jews with the subversion of the West. It is coherent and consistent. To compare Corbyn’s silence to an active project to dehumanize and occasionally assault and even kill Jewish people is like the difference between a colorblind liberal and an actual white supremacist: The former can be “called in” as part of a progressive political project; the other needs to be obliterated for a progressive society to exist. To equate them is to erase the violence of white supremacy.