Pankaj Mishra’s (2024) essay in the London Review of Books, “The Shoah after Gaza”, is essentially a call for ‘ordinary Jews’ to become ‘exceptional Jews’: to learn the correct lesson from the Holocaust, which is to become extraordinary human beings. The problem, for Mishra, is that most Jews, inside Israel and beyond, are ‘ordinary Jews’ […]
The transcendence of the principle of “everything is permitted” into the realm where “everything is possible” is the hallmark of totalitarianism – so understood Hannah Arendt (1962) in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Indeed, until that moment in human history, there were no parallels between life in the German and Russian concentration camps of totalitarian power. […]
TV fictions and AWL reality (Sean Matgamna): “AWL’s adverse reputation in the ostensible left arises from the fact that we try to be consistent democrats and socialists on questions such as Israel-Palestine; from the politically decomposed state the left is in; from the prevalent unreason and displaced emotion on the left on such questions; and […]
This is a recording of the presentation which I gave to the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (BISA) on 12th December 2023.
Reference: Camila Bassi (2023) Geography, antisemitism and Zionism, Geography, 108:3, 130-133, DOI: 10.1080/00167487.2023.2260220
This is a recording of the talk given to the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) on 13th September 2023.
My wholehearted gratitude to the judges and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism for this recognition and book award. Amid a despairing time, which has fully exposed what Robert Fine and Philip Spencer (2017) refer to as the Left’s “inequitable economy of compassion”, the work of the Centre and all the research […]
The below exchange took place on Crit-Geog-Forum: “a forum for the discussion of critical and radical perspectives in geography”. It followed my original post advertising the online launch of my book Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination. Ashok writes: “It’s stomach-churning to define Zionism as a desire for a Jewish homeland without […]
I teach a final year module on Globalisation. This past year, in the last session of this module, one of my most engaged students challenged my dismissal of conspiracy theories. He drew a similarity between the academic critique of power, hegemony, capitalism, and globalisation and the purpose of conspiracy theories to not accept reality but […]
