The Socialism of Fools
Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity
Repeater, 256pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781912248438
reviewed by William Eichler
On a train last summer, I made the mistake of putting David Hirsh’s Contemporary Left Antisemitism (2018) on the shared table. The elderly, white lady sat opposite, glanced at it. It’s all a ‘smear’, she said. I asked what she meant and, identifying herself as a Labour member, she delivered a medley of the greatest hits: we’re-an-anti-racist-party; I’ve never witnessed antisemitism; and anyway what about Palestine. She then shared her own version of an old classic. Growing up under apartheid South Africa, she explained, had taught her what happens when a group of people think of themselves as ‘chosen’.
Antisemitism is ‘a very light sleeper’, the writer Conor Cruise O’Brien once observed. It also dozes, he might have added, at both ends of the political spectrum. The new book by the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity, attempts to shed light on anti-Jewish prejudice in the 21st century. While he looks at antisemitism on both the left and the right, the bulk of the book focuses on left-wing bigotry, presumably because Kahn-Harris is on the left and has been a prominent voice in the Labour antisemitism debate. As a non-Jewish member of the Labour Party who writes on Israel/Palestine, this was also the part of the analysis that I found most interesting – and most challenging.
The charge of left-wing antisemitism relates largely to the place of Israel within the political imagination of progressives today. The left, so the argument goes, singles the Jewish state out for opprobrium, a curious tendency given that Israel shares its neighbourhood with dictators and theocrats. The criticism is also often vitriolic and sometimes includes antisemitic tropes about Jewish power. According to theorists of the ‘new antisemitism’, moreover, the triumph of anti-Zionism within left-wing circles is a sign of Jew-hatred and calls for the creation of one state ‘between the river and the sea’ is said to be tantamount to advocating genocide.
But Israel is not the only issue. Left-wing populism, it is argued, with its talk of ‘morally bankrupt’ elites and ‘rigged systems’, has created fertile terrain for anti-Jewish prejudice to flourish. The broad-strokes analysis of social problems offered by figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders can lead some to believe a particular group – rather than the flaws of the socio-economic system we live under – is responsible for the immiseration of vast swathes of society. It provides what the Marxist academics Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts call a ‘template for antisemitism’, and it is a short step from here to the racist notion that Jews are all-powerful financiers exploiting the working classes.
The argument that the left might have an antisemitism problem – revolving as it does around Israel and what the German socialist August Bebel called the ‘socialism of fools’ – is compelling. Israel’s crimes leave left-wing activists enraged, even while many appear untouched by Bashar al-Assad’s bombing campaigns. It has also been surprising to see, amid the rancorous conflict over Labour’s abysmal handling of antisemitism complaints, how racist tropes about powerful Jews have risen to the surface. Critiquing ‘rigged systems’ is the job of any radical political movement and it is unrealistic to expect Corbyn or Sanders to recite passages from Das Kapital rather than talk in terms people understand (‘the people’, ‘the 99%’ etc). But ten minutes on social media should be enough to demonstrate that the phenomenon Bebel identified is certainly alive and tweeting.
Kahn-Harris locates the origins of modern left-wing antisemitism in a post-Second World War rupture between the left and the mainstream Jewish community. After the Holocaust, the majority of Jews in the diaspora flourished in the liberal democracies of the West joining the middle classes and – after the Six Day War in 1967 – embracing Zionism. Others emigrated to the newly established State of Israel, a country that would evolve into a prosperous, nuclear-armed nation-state. Due to this ‘unprecedented upward mobility’, Jews acquired some security and with it some power. Today, writes Kahn-Harris, they can ‘exert their agency in the world in a way scarcely imaginable just a few decades ago.’
The left too went through a change in the post-war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, progressives shifted their attention from class war in the West towards anti-colonial struggles in the South. Empire and race became the focus of the ‘new left’. As positive as this was in many ways, Kahn-Harris argues this marked a shift that gave birth in some quarters to a rigid worldview that sees white Europeans at the top of an oppressive world order with everyone else relegated to the lower strata. The Jewish community, due to its upward mobility and embrace of Israel, is often bundled together at the apex of this hierarchy with white Europeans, making it, as Kahn-Harris writes, hard for many leftists ‘to see Jews as victims’.
The analysis of the ‘overly simplistic’ understanding of power held by some on the left is the strongest part of Strange Hate. By casting Jews simply as possessors of ‘white privilege’, some progressives have blinded themselves to antisemitism and, in turn, allowed anti-Jewish bigotry to creep in. This reductive ideology is arguably the reason Corbyn can look at a mural with antisemitic themes and see only white oppressors enslaving black victims or bankers exploiting the poor. Like many people, he can only recognise antisemitism when it comes with a swastika attached. It is also the reason that the woman on the train could repeat an explicitly racist slur; in her mind, as is always the case with antisemitism, she was punching-up.
The ‘smear’ accusation is not entirely unfounded, however, and Strange Hate would have benefitted from a closer analysis of the politicisation of antisemitism. The authors of a new study of Labour’s antisemitism crisis, Bad News for Labour, commissioned the polling organisation Survation to gauge public perceptions of the levels of anti-Jewish bigotry in the party. The pollsters asked 1,009 people how many Labour members faced antisemitism complaints. The average answer of the group was 34%, which is over three hundred times the actual figure of 0.1% (673 people). This is not the full story. This poll finding ignores the wider lack of seriousness on the left when it comes to antisemitism. It reveals, however, the extent that the genuine concerns of the Jewish community have been exaggerated and weaponised by the Tories, the Labour right, much of the media, including The Jewish Chronicle, and others hostile to the reemergence of the left.
Caution is, however, required on this point. It is right to push back against the irresponsible and absurd claim that Labour poses an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews, and right to question some of the spurious accusations of antisemitism. But talk of ‘smears’ can easily morph into conspiratorial tropes about Jewish cabals, particularly when it comes to discussing Jewish communal organisations. This is often missed on the left. Too many progressives are unable to see beyond ‘white privilege’. The Jewish community is safe and secure, they think, so the usual rules that apply to minorities (listening to communal organisations, not dividing the community along politically convenient lines, etc.) don’t apply. But they do. British Jews may well be predominantly middle class but they remain a minority and, as such, are vulnerable to the capricious whims of the majority.
Does this mean criticising the State of Israel or advocating the single-state solution is out of the question? Zionism, Kahn-Harris argues, has become an essential component of modern Jewish identity, so opposition to the ethno-nationalist ideology underpinning Israel is experienced by many Jews as antisemitic. This means that the left should tread lightly in its pro-Palestinian activism. Such a cautious approach to supporting Palestinian rights should not ‘imperil’ resistance to injustice, Kahn-Harris insists. But it does mean that ‘special rules’ are required when it comes to debating an issue held by a minority to be an essential part of their identity. ‘In a diverse society,’ he writes, ‘the default position towards ethno-religious minorities should be to work harder on civility towards them than one would normally do.’
In the first few versions of this review I criticised Kahn-Harris for ceding too much ground to identity politics and for accepting the politicised expansion of what constitutes antisemitism, one that conflates supporting justice for Palestinians with opposing the right of Israeli Jews to live in peace. Why should Palestinians temper their struggle for basic rights to avoid offending the Jewish community? The former, after all, are facing armed soldiers, fanatical settlers and arbitrary punishment for just existing, whereas the latter are experiencing the more abstract fear of offence caused by keyboard creeps and concern over what would happen if the hegemony of Israeli Jews in Israel/Palestine were lost.
A closer reading of Kahn-Harris’ argument, however, reveals something more subtle. He does not believe that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or that talk of anti-Jewish bigotry is not sometimes deployed as a political weapon. He argues instead that the anti-Zionism embraced by many western leftists sometimes drifts into the territory of antisemitism and that this needs checking if anti-racists are to keep describing themselves as such. Challenging Jewish communal politics is legitimate, he says, but when leftists ignore Jewish history and concerns, invoke the Holocaust as a rhetorical ploy against ‘Zionists’, praise Hamas and Hezbollah, share images of bloodsucking monsters bearing the Star of David attacking the Statue of Liberty, talk about Israel as an ‘entity’ to be destroyed, embrace the identity politics of every minority except Jews – then the Jewish community unsurprisingly becomes unnerved.
Civility, apart from being a good in itself, will help repair the rupture between the left and the Jewish community. Kahn-Harris argues that if the left begins to take antisemitism more seriously then this might open the way to discussions about ‘alternate politics’ — that is, the single-state solution. He may well be right. But there’s more at stake. The current febrile political climate has unleashed violent tendencies across society. Jews, like other minorities, are not just concerned about being offended. They fear football fans giving Nazi salutes in Glasgow. They fear talk of ‘Zionist money’ and the obsession with George Soros. They fear the rise of white supremacists and the violence of jihadists. What they should not have to fear is the left. The fact that many do is a tragedy.
Antisemitism is ‘a very light sleeper’, the writer Conor Cruise O’Brien once observed. It also dozes, he might have added, at both ends of the political spectrum. The new book by the sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris, Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism, and the Limits of Diversity, attempts to shed light on anti-Jewish prejudice in the 21st century. While he looks at antisemitism on both the left and the right, the bulk of the book focuses on left-wing bigotry, presumably because Kahn-Harris is on the left and has been a prominent voice in the Labour antisemitism debate. As a non-Jewish member of the Labour Party who writes on Israel/Palestine, this was also the part of the analysis that I found most interesting – and most challenging.
The charge of left-wing antisemitism relates largely to the place of Israel within the political imagination of progressives today. The left, so the argument goes, singles the Jewish state out for opprobrium, a curious tendency given that Israel shares its neighbourhood with dictators and theocrats. The criticism is also often vitriolic and sometimes includes antisemitic tropes about Jewish power. According to theorists of the ‘new antisemitism’, moreover, the triumph of anti-Zionism within left-wing circles is a sign of Jew-hatred and calls for the creation of one state ‘between the river and the sea’ is said to be tantamount to advocating genocide.
But Israel is not the only issue. Left-wing populism, it is argued, with its talk of ‘morally bankrupt’ elites and ‘rigged systems’, has created fertile terrain for anti-Jewish prejudice to flourish. The broad-strokes analysis of social problems offered by figures like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders can lead some to believe a particular group – rather than the flaws of the socio-economic system we live under – is responsible for the immiseration of vast swathes of society. It provides what the Marxist academics Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts call a ‘template for antisemitism’, and it is a short step from here to the racist notion that Jews are all-powerful financiers exploiting the working classes.
The argument that the left might have an antisemitism problem – revolving as it does around Israel and what the German socialist August Bebel called the ‘socialism of fools’ – is compelling. Israel’s crimes leave left-wing activists enraged, even while many appear untouched by Bashar al-Assad’s bombing campaigns. It has also been surprising to see, amid the rancorous conflict over Labour’s abysmal handling of antisemitism complaints, how racist tropes about powerful Jews have risen to the surface. Critiquing ‘rigged systems’ is the job of any radical political movement and it is unrealistic to expect Corbyn or Sanders to recite passages from Das Kapital rather than talk in terms people understand (‘the people’, ‘the 99%’ etc). But ten minutes on social media should be enough to demonstrate that the phenomenon Bebel identified is certainly alive and tweeting.
Kahn-Harris locates the origins of modern left-wing antisemitism in a post-Second World War rupture between the left and the mainstream Jewish community. After the Holocaust, the majority of Jews in the diaspora flourished in the liberal democracies of the West joining the middle classes and – after the Six Day War in 1967 – embracing Zionism. Others emigrated to the newly established State of Israel, a country that would evolve into a prosperous, nuclear-armed nation-state. Due to this ‘unprecedented upward mobility’, Jews acquired some security and with it some power. Today, writes Kahn-Harris, they can ‘exert their agency in the world in a way scarcely imaginable just a few decades ago.’
The left too went through a change in the post-war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, progressives shifted their attention from class war in the West towards anti-colonial struggles in the South. Empire and race became the focus of the ‘new left’. As positive as this was in many ways, Kahn-Harris argues this marked a shift that gave birth in some quarters to a rigid worldview that sees white Europeans at the top of an oppressive world order with everyone else relegated to the lower strata. The Jewish community, due to its upward mobility and embrace of Israel, is often bundled together at the apex of this hierarchy with white Europeans, making it, as Kahn-Harris writes, hard for many leftists ‘to see Jews as victims’.
The analysis of the ‘overly simplistic’ understanding of power held by some on the left is the strongest part of Strange Hate. By casting Jews simply as possessors of ‘white privilege’, some progressives have blinded themselves to antisemitism and, in turn, allowed anti-Jewish bigotry to creep in. This reductive ideology is arguably the reason Corbyn can look at a mural with antisemitic themes and see only white oppressors enslaving black victims or bankers exploiting the poor. Like many people, he can only recognise antisemitism when it comes with a swastika attached. It is also the reason that the woman on the train could repeat an explicitly racist slur; in her mind, as is always the case with antisemitism, she was punching-up.
The ‘smear’ accusation is not entirely unfounded, however, and Strange Hate would have benefitted from a closer analysis of the politicisation of antisemitism. The authors of a new study of Labour’s antisemitism crisis, Bad News for Labour, commissioned the polling organisation Survation to gauge public perceptions of the levels of anti-Jewish bigotry in the party. The pollsters asked 1,009 people how many Labour members faced antisemitism complaints. The average answer of the group was 34%, which is over three hundred times the actual figure of 0.1% (673 people). This is not the full story. This poll finding ignores the wider lack of seriousness on the left when it comes to antisemitism. It reveals, however, the extent that the genuine concerns of the Jewish community have been exaggerated and weaponised by the Tories, the Labour right, much of the media, including The Jewish Chronicle, and others hostile to the reemergence of the left.
Caution is, however, required on this point. It is right to push back against the irresponsible and absurd claim that Labour poses an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews, and right to question some of the spurious accusations of antisemitism. But talk of ‘smears’ can easily morph into conspiratorial tropes about Jewish cabals, particularly when it comes to discussing Jewish communal organisations. This is often missed on the left. Too many progressives are unable to see beyond ‘white privilege’. The Jewish community is safe and secure, they think, so the usual rules that apply to minorities (listening to communal organisations, not dividing the community along politically convenient lines, etc.) don’t apply. But they do. British Jews may well be predominantly middle class but they remain a minority and, as such, are vulnerable to the capricious whims of the majority.
Does this mean criticising the State of Israel or advocating the single-state solution is out of the question? Zionism, Kahn-Harris argues, has become an essential component of modern Jewish identity, so opposition to the ethno-nationalist ideology underpinning Israel is experienced by many Jews as antisemitic. This means that the left should tread lightly in its pro-Palestinian activism. Such a cautious approach to supporting Palestinian rights should not ‘imperil’ resistance to injustice, Kahn-Harris insists. But it does mean that ‘special rules’ are required when it comes to debating an issue held by a minority to be an essential part of their identity. ‘In a diverse society,’ he writes, ‘the default position towards ethno-religious minorities should be to work harder on civility towards them than one would normally do.’
In the first few versions of this review I criticised Kahn-Harris for ceding too much ground to identity politics and for accepting the politicised expansion of what constitutes antisemitism, one that conflates supporting justice for Palestinians with opposing the right of Israeli Jews to live in peace. Why should Palestinians temper their struggle for basic rights to avoid offending the Jewish community? The former, after all, are facing armed soldiers, fanatical settlers and arbitrary punishment for just existing, whereas the latter are experiencing the more abstract fear of offence caused by keyboard creeps and concern over what would happen if the hegemony of Israeli Jews in Israel/Palestine were lost.
A closer reading of Kahn-Harris’ argument, however, reveals something more subtle. He does not believe that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic or that talk of anti-Jewish bigotry is not sometimes deployed as a political weapon. He argues instead that the anti-Zionism embraced by many western leftists sometimes drifts into the territory of antisemitism and that this needs checking if anti-racists are to keep describing themselves as such. Challenging Jewish communal politics is legitimate, he says, but when leftists ignore Jewish history and concerns, invoke the Holocaust as a rhetorical ploy against ‘Zionists’, praise Hamas and Hezbollah, share images of bloodsucking monsters bearing the Star of David attacking the Statue of Liberty, talk about Israel as an ‘entity’ to be destroyed, embrace the identity politics of every minority except Jews – then the Jewish community unsurprisingly becomes unnerved.
Civility, apart from being a good in itself, will help repair the rupture between the left and the Jewish community. Kahn-Harris argues that if the left begins to take antisemitism more seriously then this might open the way to discussions about ‘alternate politics’ — that is, the single-state solution. He may well be right. But there’s more at stake. The current febrile political climate has unleashed violent tendencies across society. Jews, like other minorities, are not just concerned about being offended. They fear football fans giving Nazi salutes in Glasgow. They fear talk of ‘Zionist money’ and the obsession with George Soros. They fear the rise of white supremacists and the violence of jihadists. What they should not have to fear is the left. The fact that many do is a tragedy.