In Daniel Randall’s review of my book for our shared organisation Workers’ Liberty, he raises the following critique:

“One cannot hold water in one’s hands; a too fluid conception of the construction and reconstruction of “race” risk depriving it of any explanatory value whatsoever. In my own book, Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, I questioned whether antisemitism as it is most often encountered on the left can meaningfully be understood as a form of “racism”. Leftists whose politics, by a series of logical steps, arrive at antisemitic implications because of conclusions they draw from historical narratives applied to Israel/Palestine do not, I argue, see Jews as a racialised Other. Indeed, they are often sincere opponents of that form of antisemitism. Their antisemitism is an ideological implication — more of a danger, as I have sometimes provocatively argued, to the left, in terms of the risk of political miseducation, than to Jews as such. Bassi’s contention (and, again, to oversimplify) is that the “othering” left antisemitism applies to Jews is so intense, and maps so clearly onto historic forms of racialisation, that is has a racist effect, regardless of whether or not its adherents conceive of it in consciously “racial” terms. I remain unconvinced on this point; to me, the confrontation with contemporary left antisemitism is still primarily a matter of unpicking historiographies and analyses of imperialism derived from Stalinist campism more than it is a matter of exposing sublimated anti-Jewish racial biases.”

Both a conceptual deflation and a conceptual inflation of racism is a problem. We should be precise in what we mean by racism. In Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination, following the work of the Marxist sociologist Robert Miles, I define racism as an ideology that is the outcome of a process of racialisation – a process that produces, reproduces and assigns ‘racial’ meaning to designated groups of people and creates the idea of ‘race’. In the history of ‘racial’ science, groups of people were racialised on the grounds of phenotypical and/or social and cultural characteristics. In the history of anti-Jewish racism, supposed visible bodily features and the invisibility of ‘the Jews’ have been racialised. Since the demise and delegitimisation of ‘racial’ science, and even without explicit reference to ‘race’, racism as an ideology – as a way of making sense of the world – continues.

I develop the concept of racism as an ideology through the work of Antonio Gramsci on ‘contradictory consciousness’: that people can hold both reactionary and dogmatic ‘common-sense’ ideas and progressive ‘good-sense’ ideas about the world; that people can have racist ideas that co-exist with ideas for a more equal society, for example. Our task as socialists is to help develop people’s good-sense while challenging their common-sense. We do not damn people as racists, rather, we argue against common-sense racist ideas.

Following the academics Robert Fine and Philip Spencer (2017) in their book, Antisemitism and the left: On the return of the Jewish question, I understand the idea of ‘race’ in anti-Jewish racism on the Left as represented through ‘the Jewish question’: “the classic term for the representation of Jews as harmful to humanity as a whole”. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the prism through which the contemporary Left’s ‘Jewish question’ ideologically manifests. From the “Enlightenment credo that ‘we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals’”, we have a contemporary leftist ideology that values Jews as individuals and devalues Jews as a nation (Fine and Spencer, 2017).

Zionism is central here. The absolute anti-Zionism of much of the Left – which demands that people who identify as Jewish cease their emotional affiliation to Israel and call for Israel (from the river to the sea) to be destroyed – collapses ‘Zionism’ into the idea that Zionism is both the racist outlier of a decolonising world and the racist forerunner in a globalising laboratory of ills to humanity. Absolute anti-Zionism sees Zionism as not simply racism, but as an exceptionally deplorable and uniquely problematic racism: a racism that channels the twentieth century Holocaust of the Jews into a twenty-first century Holocaust by the Jews. Zionist Jews are not only racialised as ‘white’, but as so glaringly ‘white’ that they are often not visible to the naked eye. The historical context and development of Zionism vis-à-vis antisemitism, nationalism and colonialism is dismissed through an elevation of Zionism as the world’s out-of-date and frontrunner settler-colonial racism.

Those who believe there is a ‘Jewish question’ won’t see its racialised Othering of the Jews, because they don’t see that there isn’t a Jewish question: that there is no question of what is to be done with the Jews who are harmful to humanity. Instead, much of the Left see ‘ordinary Jews’ while demanding ‘exceptional Jews’: they see Jews who must enlighten and educate themselves into becoming not just exceptional to ordinary Jews, but “exceptional specimens of humanity” (Arendt, 1976). This Left, through its ‘Jewish question’, writes-off a potentially progressive political role for the Israeli Jewish and diaspora Jewish working class, such is the exceptionally high bar set for the Jews (and the Jews alone) into admission into the Left’s humanity.

Daniel says one cannot hold water in one’s hands. All too often definitions of antisemitism form part of a highly contested debate and wave of accusations from the Left on the weaponization of antisemitism. Take, notably, the opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. What I do in Outcast is follow the ideological thread in the pre-history and history of racist thought and ideology to its manifestation in the Left’s ‘Jewish question’. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) spells it out when he states, “in the contemporary world the multi-faceted imagery of Jewry, once drawing inspiration from multiple dimensions of ‘Jewish incongruity’, tends to be tapered down to just one fairly straightforward attribute: that of a supra-national elite, of invisible power behind all visible powers, of a hidden manager of allegedly spontaneous and uncontrollable, but usually unfortunate and baffling turns of fate.” Beware the Zionist lobby, we are told: they are everywhere, even while we cannot see them, and They are out to harm Us.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons: Melbourne Gaza protest, 4th January 2009)