Antisemitism, Author, fascism, General, Politics, Racism, Shane Burley, Transcribed, zine

Out-Organizing Antisemitism with Ben Lorber and Shane Burley

book cover of "Safety Through Solidarity" with a star of david made of interlocking hands
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A recent conversation we had with the Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, co-authors of the recently published book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. For the hour we discuss the roots of antisemitism in the West, pushing back on Zionism in the midst of the genocidal war on Palestinians, a rebirth of Bundism and addressing antisemitism in left spaces. I definitely recommend this book to folks and hope you enjoy the chat! And as always, thanks for supporting this project.

If you’re a non-Pacifica station looking for this weeks 58 minute radio show, you can find it here. We’re hoping Archive.Org will be back online and allow us to upload files there soon.

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Transcription

Shane: My name is Shane Burley. I’m a journalist out here in Portland, Oregon. I use he, him, his pronouns.

Ben: My name is Ben Lorber. I use he, him [pronouns]. I’m in Chicago, and I’m a researcher of the far-right.

TFSR: Thanks both of you so much for being on this chat. We’re here to speak about your recent book, Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. I wonder if you would talk a bit about who the intended audience is and what motivated the writing of this book.

Ben: We got the idea to write this book in 2020. Both Shane and I were writing and researching the far-right during the Trump administration, and we both saw the central role that antisemitism played in mobilizing the right. At the same time, we also saw the ways that charges of antisemitism were being cynically used by the right and the center, by politicians and media figures, Christian Zionists, and some Jewish leaders to suppress the movement for Palestine. Very similar, in a lot of ways, to what’s going on today. We knew that we needed a new conversation on antisemitism, a conversation from the left, rooted in liberatory principles. We started to work on this. It took us a few years and it just happened to come out post-October 7th. At a time when these conversations have taken on a new level of intensity and the need to change the narrative on antisemitism and situated within radical politics is bigger than ever.

Shane: I think we also picked up on a wave that had already started because these conversations had been happening for a while. They’ve been happening on the Jewish left for a long time. Antifascists have talked extensively about the role that antisemitism plays in white nationalism and conspiracy theories, even when it shows up on the left. So that’s been a part of it. We wanted to pick up on these different strands, bring them together, and then bring it back to a conversation about how can we take this on as a really intentional work. How would you train folks on this? How would you talk about it? How would you organize around it? How would you differentiate it? Because many times in radical spaces, it’s not so much that we actually talk about it or have much depth in the understanding [of this issue], as we want to bring that conversation back into these radical spaces and back into how we can mobilize on it.

Ben: Just to add real quickly to your question about the audience [of the book]. We talked a lot about it, and obviously, one main audience is the left. Folks who are fighting for Palestine, folks who are fighting for economic justice, for workers’ rights, and across all the issues. But also we hope to speak to broad segments of progressive folks in the US who know that it’s not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel, who don’t trust what the ADL [Anti Defamation League] is saying, or what politicians are saying about this, and who are looking for a new analysis. So we hope to have a broad audience.

TFSR: Ben, you had already mentioned October 7th and the massacres that occurred in terms of the development and framing of the book, but it was interesting for how recently it’s been published, to see that come up in the pages, specifically as a moment that really allows for one to see a lot of these patterns rise and be able to describe them and differentiate them and such. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the timing of the release since you’ve been working on it for a while. How the October 7th, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and then also the genocidal escalation in Gaza, affected the content of the book and how it was received. Did you get much push-back, [along the lines of] this is not the time to talk about antisemitism, and was there space to address that discussion?

Shane: I don’t think we did really get that pushback. Ben and I had talked about this and about what changed after October 7th. We turned in the book [to the publishers] somewhere around October 2nd. And after October 7th we were like: ‘Can we please have the book back?’ You know, things have changed a little bit. Then talking about it didn’t ultimately change how we felt about things, because the reality is that we don’t think anti-Zionism or criticizing Israel, or Palestinian solidarity are antisemitic in any intrinsic way. So it doesn’t actually fundamentally change that. I think we talked about ways that people reacted to it. There were incidents of antisemitism even early on in reaction to October 7th that we talked a bit about. In general, people have been really, really warm to the book and really positive in that they actually do want to talk about this, because this ended up being one of the largest conversations that was happening in US politics. This debate over what counts as antisemitism was sometimes even bigger than the war itself and the genocide in Gaza. People actually were in a position where they were being forced to talk about it, and now they want tools to be able to talk about it. And so people are there for that. I think also it’s part of a longer trend of people wanting to address antisemitism in a forthright way. Because there was a dramatic increase in antisemitism. There’s both the dramatic increase of weaponization of antisemitism claims, and there’s also a very, very real increase in antisemitism. So people wanted tools to go after that. And it’s particularly at a time when mainstream anti-antisemitism organizations like the Anti Defamation League, the ADL, have so thoroughly discredited themselves in the public mind with their behavior, that I think people have experienced a really sharp break. So they open up the space to say, “Okay, there is time for something new”. So we’re seeing a big welcome to that. Some folks disagree with specifics, but generally, people have shown up for this discussion, including Palestine Solidarity groups. So I think people were ready for something like this.

Ben: We did wrestle with that question: “Is now the time?”, and I think it’s hard because in our mainstream discourse, in the mainstream media, in the way that the genocide [of Palestinians in Israel] is talked about beyond the left, there is a way in which conversations on antisemitism end up distracting from the attention that we need, all eyes that we need on the genocide right now. That’s not [happening] in the left, but folks like Jonathan Greenblatt, the mainstream media, politicians, folks on the right, they do use claims of antisemitism, appeals to Jewish trauma, to really recenter the conversation away from the need to stop the genocide. That’s something that we on the left need to combat. But at the same time, we know that if we on the left don’t have a voice on antisemitism, don’t have our analysis on it, and don’t put forward our narrative, our thinking, we cede that terrain entirely to the right. We give it to them. We let them take antisemitism conversations and roll with it and use it to suppress our movements. So I think we did try to strike that balance. But ultimately, we think that especially now, one year since the genocide [started], there is room to talk about antisemitism as leftists, to develop our own analysis. And ultimately we think that benefits the movement for Palestinian Liberation, because we need to know how to talk about this, otherwise the right will take it from us.

TFSR: One thing that I really, really like about the book, and it’s explicit in the title and the thrust, is that it posits that while antisemitism is old and central to Christian white supremacy, it needs to be challenged alongside anti-Blackness, misogyny, homophobia, ableism, and Islamophobia, all these other related, intertwined forms of oppression. I think, timing-wise there is never a wrong time to talk about antisemitism, but as you said Jewish trauma and real existing antisemitism are being weaponized in these ways to literally murder tons of people, including some who are Jewish, who are in the occupied territories. This seems like a beautiful approach, saying that this discussion is not just about us, but it includes us, and it intertwines with all these other things, all these other terrible systems of oppression. Can you talk a bit about the lessons in the book that point to the strength of safety through the solidarity approach?

Ben: Yeah, totally. So often the conversation about antisemitism is silent from every other form of oppression. Those of us who grew up in Jewish communities often hear that antisemitism is eternal. It’s the world’s oldest hatred. It’s unique and incomparable. And if you tune into the mainstream media, or the way the ADL talks about it, or the way most politicians talk about it, they don’t talk about it as deeply connected to the other systems of oppression that plague our world. But I think that’s the only way to understand it. I mean, look at the world today: the Right uses George Soros conspiracy theories to attack Black Lives Matter, attack migration, attack trans rights. That’s one of the central narratives of the Right, that shadowy cabal is working behind the scenes of Cultural Marxism, of globalists, and the shadowy cabal is engineering Black Lives Matter, is engineering immigration, is engineering the LGBTQ visibility in our society. And the Right uses these antisemitic narratives to mobilize their base, to attack our folks, to attack marginalized groups. That’s a really clear way we see in our world how antisemitism is connected to anti-blackness, xenophobia, transphobia. It is all coming together and the right uses antisemitism as a mobilizing tool. Also, if you look back in history, if you look back 120, or 130 years in Europe, where modern race science and modern anti-blackness were developed, where anti-immigrant politics was developed, antisemitism was all in the mix as well. If you look back in the late 1800s even with the rise of European colonialism, and earlier than that, all these systems of oppression are connected. You can go all the way back to the Inquisition in the 1400s and look at the origins of racism and the origins of Islamophobia and antisemitism, and we start to tease apart these histories in the book. It’s too much to get into unless you want to be here for a few hours. But we really need a new narrative and a new analysis that looks at the deep histories of how antisemitism is deeply intertwined, not only with these forms of oppression but with racial capitalism itself. That’s another key thought that we get into in the book, that fighting capitalism and building an economic future is key to ending antisemitism. We can talk more about what that all looks like, but building this analysis is key to fighting antisemitism and ending it. Building these horizontal alliances between Jews and other oppressed groups [is necessary] to win our liberation together. And in the book, we get into some examples of what that looks like.

Shane: To pick up on what Ben is saying, we talk a lot in the book about very specifically how antisemitism might be related to other forms of oppression. So we talk, for example, about several anti-black racist attacks, particularly one that happened in Buffalo at Tops market, where a shooter opened fire on a largely black constituency. But then when you look back at his manifesto, a large portion of it was spent talking about Jews as a centerpiece of what he saw as the race problem. So the theory is that Jews, Ashkenazi in particular, are using non-white populations to attack gentile whites, either through immigration or through socially liberal policy, something along those lines. Reality puts us in a certain shared experience, or at least some kind of comradeship. We actually are being threatened by the same people through the same ideology. So it makes sense to understand those things as interlocking, and I don’t think we’re going to have any real functional strategy for taking the stuff on if we’re doing it alone and not seeing those intersections. The same is true of those all-out assaults on trans folks right now. When you look at a lot of the ideology that underscores those attacks, particularly on youth gender medicine, but also family-friendly queer events, Drag Queen Story Hour, and things like that, you find a deep conspiracy theory that builds itself around in some cases very explicit antisemitism. They blame it on globalists, they blame it on George Soros or other people with Jewish last names as engaged in this anti-Western attack or attack on the foundations of the gender binary. This, again, have a very, very long history in antisemitic conspiracy theories. When you look at different ways these things manifest, either from state actors or from the insurgent right, you end up seeing that they dovetail together. Just to acknowledge that is to put us in concert with others and say: ‘Our fates are bound up in one another’. And I think it’s also to communicate with folks about what investment they have in our fights, and vice versa. If we’re talking about for example confronting the anti-immigrant assaults that are happening, the militarization of the border, we really need to talk about much of the conspiracy theories and even antisemitism that underscores some of that. That way we have a collaboration, and attacking antisemitic conspiracy theories in that way, is a piece of winning battles in those other fights as well because it’s part of what holds the right together. So I think more and more talking about those things as interlocking is really where we need to be.

TFSR: Just to introduce a term that I had only heard recently, but I know it’s been around for a while, from the idea of the great replacement that a lot of these mass shooters are copy-pasting into their manifestos, there is a related idea, the other side of that, the idea of “race suicide.” I think a lot of the right and neo-Traditionalist groups are talking about this concept that conspiratorializes the fact that people are expressing themselves outside of gender binaries, and also that heterosexuality is being somewhat denormalized, while non-heterosexuality is being discussed, being allowable, people are further coming out of the closet. There’s a normalization of discussion around people’s sexuality and gender not just being these [binary] formulas. I just wanted to mention it because there’s always this ‘globalist conspiracy to undermine our children’s reproductive patterns when they become adults to make sure they’re not breeding more little white kids’. ‘Race suicide’ wasn’t a term that I’d heard.

Shane: This again gets to the idea that Jews are engaged in intentional attacks on non-Jewish white people, basically using various covert ideologies. Jews are very smart, and they will confuse you against your better interests and are injecting queerness, or in some cases pornography or socially liberal values as a way of undermining the family, which, of course, is the foundation of the white empire and the furtherance of white civilization. So if you attack those foundations with these ideologies, you’re able to weaken them and therefore control them more. And this is a feature of many, many, many of these sorts of movements, ranging from very explicit claims that the Jews or the Zionist occupation government are actively doing this, all the way to the more covert ones, familiar last names or winking nods towards Jewish figures.

TFSR: A point that you returned to a few times throughout the book, and actually that Ben mentioned is the argument that political Zionism was a project born from the assumption that gentiles will be antisemitic, that antisemitism in the outside world is the norm, and that separation and isolation of Jews in their sovereign state is the only way to keep Jews safe. Can you all talk about this?

Ben: The 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron called this the Lachrymose Theory of Jewish History. This is something that growing up I was taught a little bit in my Jewish communities, and I certainly know people who heard it a lot more consistently than I did. This basic idea, as you’re saying, is that they’re always out to get us. There’s a way that the modern Zionist movement and modern Jewish culture have articulated this, especially since the Holocaust, but there’s also a way in which versions of it go deeper, back into Jewish theology and self-understanding. There is obviously a very real history of antisemitic persecution that took many different forms for many centuries. But I think there’s a tendency today to collapse all the nuance and all the variation in Jewish experience for thousands of years into one sad story of just endless persecution. And this doesn’t tell an accurate story about Jewish history. Whether we’re looking at Europe or the Middle East and North Africa and Asia. Jews had had periods of persecution and periods of great thriving and relative coexistence, living in diaspora in non-Jewish societies. This is a very Eurocentric view, right? It takes a particular story about a Jewish experience in Europe that was only a story of persecution and oppression, a kind of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ for 2000 years, and it projects that into the rest of the world. When actually [if you look at the] Jewish life across the Middle East and North Africa, for example, it wasn’t perfect, there was certainly some inequality and periods of intense persecution, but overall there were also many centuries of thriving and coexistence, especially in the Muslim world. So this is a Eurocentric narrative that, as you said, bolsters Zionism today.

Early Zionist leaders like Theodore Herzl, basically took for granted that antisemitism was a permanent feature of non-Jewish society, and the only solution was to build up walls, cling to nationalism and guns, and ally with the Empire. Christian leaders in Europe were only too happy to work with people like Herzl because they wanted Jews out of Europe. It was this kind of sick alliance in many ways, between Zionist leaders and antisemitic Christian Zionists. People might know about the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which was [issued by] Arthur Balfour, who was high up in the British government, and signed [on behalf of the British government] a proclamation that promised British support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Balfour was a Christian Zionist, who thought that bringing the Jews to colonize Palestine would bring Jesus back to the Earth and force all Jews and all non-Christians to convert or perish. And he also was just a crass antisemite in other ways. He wanted to end Jewish immigration to England because he thought new Jewish immigrants were all Bolsheviks who were going to bring communism from the Soviet Union into England. So he wanted them to go to Palestine instead and become good Jewish nationalists. We see how destructive this ideology has been, and why it’s so important to tell a different story about antisemitism.

Shane: I think it’s important to also acknowledge what the reality is, like Dennis talked about, where that led to. Zionism was a largely marginal movement, and the events of the early 20th century changed a lot of people’s minds about it, as did the first couple of decades of Israel’s life. I think one of the lessons that were learned publicly about this, and Jewish communities aren’t the only place [where people came to this conclusion], is that a lot of leftist ideas about what liberation looks like are purely fantasy and unattainable. There’s a kind of fatal realism that has set in those places, because Jewish communities historically had very, very large movements to confront antisemitism from the left, specifically the Communist Party, anarchist movements, Jewish Labor Bund, and others, who had a vision of Jewish flourishing and safety that didn’t go down this sort of fatalist road and wasn’t based on the idea that antisemitism was inescapable because they were revolutionaries. No kind of oppression was inescapable because we can remake the world. So one thing that has happened and that continues, is that once that [narrative] was established as the center narrative of how antisemitism works, we end up with a theory on antisemitism that sees the answer only in this sort of ethnocratic state-building project. And anything that attacks that must then be an attack on Jewish safety. So we further redefine what antisemitism means, and we hear this term that’s commonly used now, ‘the new antisemitism’, meaning antisemitism allegedly directed through anti-Zionism. That completely reshapes how we understand the idea of Jewish flourishing, the idea of what anti-Jewish prejudice looks like, and ultimately what we can do about it. So we end up with a situation today where very, very large organizations that are dealing with this [topic of antisemitism], center Israel in ways that would never have made sense historically to people experiencing antisemitism and largely are different from an ideologically coherent look at what the term antisemitism means.

When we did this project, we wanted to walk specifically away from that internalist narrative, that Ben talked about, and into one that actually takes lessons both from the Jewish left but also from our larger experience than radical movements. What does it look like to try and do something that people around you believe is impossible? What does it mean to go at the centers of the structures of power? What does it mean to do it with other people? I think those are the kinds of questions we wanted to ask when thinking about this, and refuse to let that kind of fatalist narrative, or these stopgap measures or these police state measures answer the question for the end. Which is exactly what happened when we deferred it to the right or deferred it to mainstream organizations.

TFSR: One of these alternative visions that developed among European Jewry around the turn of the 20th century was that of Bundism or the Labor Bund. It’s a leftist tendency that promotes building safety and solidarity in the diaspora and one that is currently being revived. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the difference between the Bundist approach and the Zionist approach, not that those are the only two, obviously. [What is] Your assessment of it and how this revival is working? Maybe [you could name] some groups or publishing projects or general projects that are forming out of it, to give the audience a little of your awareness of it?

Shane: Bundism emerged as a trend in the larger socialist movement, essentially around Jews who wanted to remain as Jewish people in the socialist project. A lot of the larger organizations in the Communist Party saw nationalities or particularly ethnic consciousness as these antiquated things. This had a mixed reality as the idea of what a proper nation would be evolved in the socialist context. But oftentimes Jews were relegated out of that narrative as a coherent nation. And the Jewish Labor Bund focused really on building up the Jewish identity in the socialist context. But focusing also on active Jewish life, for example, building Yiddish schools. People should keep in mind that Yiddish at the time – late 19th, and early 20th centuries – was becoming a public literary language. And so it was part of reclaiming public Jewish identity, secular identity, and one that was in a relative way new in this public space. So there was a big focus on that. There was a focus on looking at the reality of the Jewish working class and what their experiences were and working in concert with other folks, but also not neglecting that Jewish identity mattered and that they were going to have a continuity with it. This is, in a lot of ways, obviously very different than the Zionist project, even the Zionist left and socialist Zionists, like Poale Zion and others saw Jewish nationalism as really requiring some form of separation and to build a Jewish nation in this other place. But the Bund had an idea of Doikayt, which is hereness: we are a nation, or we are a people, wherever we are, this is our home, and we’ll continue to fight and live and prosper as Jewish people alongside our neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. There are several elements here that I think were – I don’t know if lost is the right word – but they declined as Zionism became an overwhelming force, the State of Israel was formed, and the Bund declined as an organization. But a lot of these ideas continued through generations of the Jewish left.

A lot of what we understand is the secular Jewish left: magazines like Jewish Currents, for example, other folks reviving Yiddish, folks engaged in some projects to literally revive the Bund. There’s a project across the country right now to create a modern Bundist organization. A lot of these projects are picking up on pieces of the Bundist tradition. How do we organize the Jews? How do we maintain a Jewish identity, including secular Jewish identity, not just in schools, but in the cultural context that a lot of these people came from, and how is that going to look like in the 21st century? And I think what’s attractive to people about this, is that it has a coherent Jewish identity, apart from Israel. And as Israel became such a centerpiece of American Jewish identity, if that starts to wobble for you, and it becomes obvious that the Israeli project is not something you feel attached to, then a lot of people feel lost in creating those attachments, particularly in a secular Jewish context. So I think a lot of people are looking to rebuild what’s important to them about Jewish identity and Jewish life. And Bundism has offered a piece of one of those options, an inspiration to look to.

Ben: Thanks, Shane. I think it’s funny that Shane just gave a really good case for people who are reviving secular radicalism. And now I’m going to talk about versions of religious radicalism that are also emerging in the Jewish world. It’s funny, because me and Shane, and not only us, but many Jews right now have these debates about whether Jewish radicalism is religious or more secular. And sometimes I end up taking the secular position and Shane takes the religious one, even though it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. So that’s just a side note. But we also see that the contemporary Jewish left is evolving beyond some of the things that the Bund held dear. One thing that’s different in some Jewish left communities today, is that religion plays a much stronger role. I think it’s because we’re not in the same period of the late 1800s and early 1900s when a lot of these Jewish radicals were in rebellion against the orthodoxy of their parents’ generation, which felt really stifling and oppressive. Today there’s a lot more flexibility and breathing room to pick up aspects of Jewish religiosity and to look at the Torah and Jewish texts and to breathe new radical meaning into them. So we’re seeing a lot of Jewish leftists, who are doing radical Shabbat services, radical Passover Seders at the Gaza solidarity encampments. In April there were a lot of Passover Seders that were held. So these [groups] take on the politics of the Bund, but they also have a lot of religion.

We’re also seeing ideas being developed with diasporaism, this is one idea that you hear a lot [about]. Organizations like Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, JVP, If Not Now, and many, many small Jewish left collectives that are basically articulating new Jewish identities beyond Zionism to really take up this idea of Doikayt Shane was explaining. Saying, ‘We are going to build a Jewish life here, rooted in where we live, in solidarity with our neighbors, and we’re going to fight for liberation, and not through building up a Jewish nation-state thousands of miles away, but through fighting for a just world here where we live’. That’s something that’s part of the legacy of the Bund, and not only the Bund. You know, at the same time, in the early 20th century, there were left traditions and Jewish left movements in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Morocco, all across the Muslim and Arab world, not to mention in the USA that were also along similar lines. There was a rupture of the Jewish left in the 20th century, but there’s also a continuity, and these ideas have always been there, they’re just taking a new form today.

Shane: Just to add one point to this, is that Ben is right. Spiritual traditions play a much bigger role in the Jewish left than they would have in that earlier, more secular-focused Jewish left. I was thinking when reading Joseph Cohen’s ‘The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America’ recently edited by Kenyon Zimmer, where they talk very extensively about how it was the duty of Jewish anarchists to fight religious leaders, literally in the streets to go into combat with rabbis. This kind of way of distinction would never play now, and I think it speaks to a lot of the evolution of how we think about these things. We’ve revived ancestral traditions. We see value in those things. We talk actually about dis-assimilation. We talk about what would it be like to bring other ways of knowing or building community. I think all of that has created an interesting space for the Jewish left to evolve. There is this merging of some of the ideas you found in the Bund or Jewish anarchism with really radical interpretations of Jewish mysticism and tradition. I think we’re at a pretty exciting point for that.

TFSR: I don’t know how much this fits into it, but my friend Cindy will talk about how a lot of Jewish tradition is about wrestling with ideas and wrestling with each other, and not necessarily about the conclusion that you come to, but the wrestling is the important part as a cultural tradition within Judaism from all of its different paths. So hearing you both talk about the place of both of these things, and not necessarily conflict, but negotiation or maybe conflict, is kind of refreshing.

Shane: We talk about this a bit in the book too. This binary between secular and religious, really is a product of Christian supremacy. That is just simply not how Jewish communities think of themselves. So when I go into Torah study the question of whether or not I believe in God often doesn’t come up. That’s maybe not the relevant question here. Instead, that process you’re talking about, are we wrestling, are we asking questions, the process of debating the text itself [is relevant]. Again, with Jewish life, I think part of that dis-assimilation quality is that it challenges the very basic assumptions of what public life, religious life, and political life are, which is something that is not universal. It’s actually imposed by an imperial system, one that has a particular type of Christianity at its roots, and then projects that onto everybody else’s experiences.

TFSR: Pivoting to questions of antisemitic patterns in the left. Shane, when you had come to talk in the past on the show about why we fight, one of the essays in there was specifically about antisemitism, if I recall correctly, this was in 2020. There were some of the things that you both had talked about in your latest book, like, non-Jewish leftists raising the litmus test of Israel to folks that are Jewish, deciding how they’re going to feel about someone based on how they answer a simple question. This is something I have definitely done and only recognized in the last couple of years after having it pointed out by comrades. Knowing that the audience, for the most part, is going to be leftists and anarchists, I wonder If you could talk about some of the ways that antisemitism creeps into or is expressed in left organizing, as was expressed in the book, whether from your own experiences or some of the many voices that you had featured and maybe a little bit about challenging that. That’s a big question to add, that second part, but if you could talk at least about some of the patterns that you notice, that people could maybe become more aware of and learn to call each other on?

Ben: I’ll start, and I’m sure I’ll kick it to Shane because there is a lot to dig into. You named a really common one right off the bat, the tendency to litmus test Jews on their politics, and we really wouldn’t think of doing that to other minority communities. And I think it’s important to have that in mind and to avoid it. Related to that is that you’re good-you’re bad binary, where the small minority of anti-Zionist Jews who totally agree with our politics are the good ones, the only ones who are worthy and deserving of solidarity, and the rest of the Jewish people who aren’t there yet, not so much. We should show up to defend all Jews, to defend any synagogue from attack. We should never ask if a synagogue is attacked by Neo Nazis, ‘Well, what are their politics on Israel?’ While we obviously need to hold firm to anti-Zionism right now, we have to be uncompromising in our opposition to genocide [in Gaza], we also need to try to meet Jews where they’re at, and that means recognizing that many American Jews are on a process of unlearning Zionism, unlearning narratives. They’ve grown up with narratives that for them are deeply tied into inherited trauma and fear. You know, coming only a couple of generations off the genocide of the Jews in fascist Europe. So I think it’s not compromising on our anti-Zionism at all, but also doing the learning and gaining a sensitivity and an awareness of where this is coming from for a lot of Jews, that helps us really ultimately better be allies to Jews and ultimately move folks along, whether that’s folks in our family, if we are Jewish, or whether it’s your Jewish friend who might not be 100% there yet with our politics. I think it’s ultimately a lot more effective to move folks along by understanding what’s informing their views, rather than kind of demonizing them and shoving them out on that basis. And of course, it’s complicated because we would never allow turfs into our spaces, we would never allow folks with reactionary politics into our spaces. So I’m definitely not saying: ‘make an exception here’, but it’s building that understanding. I think that’s where a lot of inter-subjective antisemitism might come into play in left spaces. Also, a conspiracy theory is a part of this. Shane, what do you think?

Shane: Think about how this looks in practice. When I was interviewing folks for the book, some of which are organizers, some of which are scholars, and different backgrounds Jewish folks, when I asked them: ‘Have you experienced antisemitism?’, overwhelmingly they would tell me a story from the left. And these are people from the left. These are anarchists and socialists, a lot of times radicals. And those are the stories they had to share. So people shared stories of being asked to see their passport before they could come to a meeting, coming into a pro-Palestine event, and then immediately everyone assumes they’re a Zionist because they’re wearing a kippah and try and block them or start questioning them the very detailed questions about Israel and their relationship to Israel, immediate requests of them to denounce their families, and things like that. A lot of Jewish families, particularly if they come from more traditional families, probably have family in Israel, or their parents are probably Zionist. These are really, really big expectations on people entering into this.

And then lots of conspiracy theories about it, lots of weird standards about people attending synagogues, or what kind of relationships they have. I think that version of it is in a way, more ubiquitous than some of the other more egregious versions, like the conspiracy theories mentioned, which do play a role in some Palestine spaces, though they’re much more marginal than I think people often suggest. I think when we’re considering this, we should consider what people are bringing into these sorts of political spaces. People have these backgrounds. They have reactionary traditions in their family. They have a lot of, like Ben mentioned, historical trauma that plays into that, and people are in that process of it. I don’t think how we approach people changes the underlying political ideas here, coming in with anti-Zionist ideas, those ideas remain. I think it’s about how we talk to people who are moving through this process. And it’s worthwhile to remember that when we come in with anti-Zionist analysis, that’s a radical analysis, we should actually expect, and this is factually true, that most people aren’t on board yet with that. So we’re walking in and approaching it that way. I think being cognizant of that allows us to do that process of meeting people where they’re at. I still think there’s boundaries, you know? I think if you’re doing Palestine Solidarity organizing, having a bunch of people of liberal Zionist [coming to events], is not a great idea. And holding some pretty firm standards, I think is actually a good thing. But this assumption that extra scrutiny should go on the Jewish person participating, and this is an assumption that plays out very frequently, I think that gets to the underlying problem here.

Ben: The other big way that antisemitism can show up, which we both touched on, just to expand a little more, is in conspiracy theories. In the book, we talk about how conspiracy theories are really at the root of antisemitism. This could show up around outdated ideas of global Zionist power. It can show up in the way we talk about Wall Street, and then the 1%. It can show up in the way we talk about landlords. Basically, in any movement, there’s a tendency sometimes for some folks to bring in conspiracy theories as a way to talk about power, as a way to conceptualize how power operates, and this is how antisemitism has come in. And it’s really dangerous, not only because it puts Jews in danger, but also it leads to bad politics on the left. We need a sharp, rigorous analysis of the forces that we’re up against, of the systems and structures of power that we need to transform. And if you think that our main enemy is a shadowy cabal up there, then we’re not going to win, because we’re boxing with shadows instead of doing the real work of understanding and untangling oppression. Learning about conspiracy theories and where they show up, and understanding this is a way that right-wing ideas get smuggled into left-wing spaces, and sometimes even this is a way that right-wing actors could show up in left-wing spaces. That’s another part of fighting antisemitism on the left and also just having a strong and sharp left that knows how to win.

TFSR: That’s a really good point about the kind of critiques that we’re bringing, or the easy answers that some people will accept about why the world is the way it is. There’s a lot of feeders for conspiracy theories just into the general public, but also when people are asking radical questions about what’s at the root of this problem. There’s so much antisemitic base to a lot of the stories that we’re asked to accept. And you saw lots of examples since October 7th of 2023 where actively far-right actors, not just people that had reactionary antisemitic views, but people that were specifically organizing and trying to target pro-Palestine spaces were coming in under the guise of pro-Palestinian perspectives when they were just throwing out the same antisemitic BS and didn’t really give a care about the people in Palestine. Like the National Justice Party, had some examples of trying to go in NJP or Defense League, or other groups were trying to infiltrate pro-Palestine rallies on the East Coast, and antifascists or students or whoever was able to point them out and root them out collectively in a lot of instances. I’m sure it didn’t happen in every case, sadly.

Shane: Patrick Casey, formerly of the American Identity Movement and Identity Evropa, went into the George Washington University encampment with the idea of finding some allies. He didn’t find any because a very quick conversation between those people usually defers them from the idea that they have shared politics. But there was an intentional effort. Ben and I both wrote stories on this. You hear that a lot of the far-right used very opportunistic language over the last year that basically points they see that Jewish cabal is controlling things. If you go to places like David Duke’s website or TRS and the former alt-right, they’ve based a huge portion of the analysis of global affairs on this. You’ll even see things like them using Palestinian flags on social media profiles. They really go to great lengths to say: ‘This is us’. This is where we can have a crossover bridge to weak points in the movement. And they’ve done this with other issues at other times. When you have a sharper analysis of how this works and what the underlying values are that lead you in solidarity with Palestinians, that, in a lot of ways, is the most effective cutoff. Because it becomes very clear, when looking at how they discuss this, that universal liberation, or even care for Palestinians, isn’t at the heart of it.

TFSR: One point you all make about antisemitism on the left is that it’s not a baked-in central ideological core as it is too much the worldview of the right and that the urge towards egalitarianism can give the initiative on the left to help actually dig out antisemitism and similar forms of oppression. Could you talk about what can help us to avoid antisemitism in our movement as you said: sharper critiques, seeing if what you’re saying or the way that you’re approaching someone would feel okay if you were doing it to another marginalized identity, such as the litmus test thing. I wonder if there are other steps, lessons, or cues that you would want to suggest for calling this out when we see it and organizing past it.

Ben: One thing that we think about a lot is that sometimes people get really scared thinking about the presence of antisemitism on the left, it’s almost like a fight or flight response kicks in. I think it’s important to normalize it, that of course, we’re going to find antisemitism in left spaces sometimes because we’re going to find anti-Blackness in left spaces. We’re going to find misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and every other bigoted ideology because these are part of our world. These are things that we all learn simply by living in the oppressive society that we live in, and the work is to unlearn them. The work is to try to build awareness and gain consciousness. This is how these patterns and tropes might show up, and then you do the work of interrupting them and unlearning them. Like you said, the left is the space where we do that. It’s where we reach for each other. It’s where we do education, where we build our analysis, where we question the views that we have been brought up with, and we learn how to think and act differently. And so I think the same applies to antisemitism. I think the number one way to fight it is to learn about it and to talk about it, and to keep reaching for each other and be willing to have honest and open-hearted conversations when something comes up. Not to run away from each other, not to cancel each other, not to shut down, but to really just be able to call each other in, as the saying goes with a lot of compassion and to try to keep prioritizing a relationship. Relationships across communities and relationships between comrades are really how we get stronger on this. Just willing to learn about it, and to always be educating ourselves, just like we do for any other kind of oppression.

Shane: Picking up on what Ben just said, I think one of the strongest things any movement can have is to actually spend real time invested in understanding what we’re doing and why. When it comes to Palestine organizing, having a really clear idea of the role of Israel and the global empire, the Western Empire, the United States in particular, I think really is like the antidote to conspiratorial thinking. And that’s actually true, no matter where we’re coming from. I think sometimes in an effort to build a mass movement, we oftentimes cut corners on expectations and what we ask of folks, and what kind of ideas we’re willing to accept in there, and we actually should work to build those things up over time. I think that’s a good method of long-term inoculation. Like Ben said, the willingness to talk about this, I think, is going to be important. I think also the willingness to plan for this in advance. The idea of making antisemitism education in movement spaces more available is a good one. Let’s be able to bring this back, have this conversation, and talk more focused. I think that’s actually happened a lot in the last five or six years. I think there’s been some movement on that. And it’s harder in a time like now where people are in very understandably heightened emotions. Figuring out the way to have this an everyday part of the discourse about doing education and confronting it and talking about it. One of the ways that antisemitism is often treated differently is that when someone sees antisemitism, they assume it’s the tip of the iceberg because they assume it has a profound amount of ideological sophistication behind it. Sometimes, when you hear it on the right, for example, it often is a sign that someone’s tipped over from the mainstream right into the far-right or fascist movements, white nationalism, that kind of thing. In the left that’s not always the same thing. And there are a lot of casually antisemitic ideas that sometimes get filtered that actually don’t have a deep ideological anchor. I think the assumption that this person said this thing, and therefore they’re now verboten isn’t always the case. That said we should have some clear lines about what’s acceptable and what’s not, and what it looks like to do that. I think more than anything, it’s about bringing consciousness about this in there, which is something that we generally avoid now.

TFSR: Anecdotally, we had a situation over the summer of 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina, during the Anarchist Book Fair, where three known local Zionists came to a discussion that the Book Fair was hosting at a public library on Palestinian resistance to genocide. The three individuals are far-right political organizers. One is a gentile MAGA activist. The other two are Jewish and show up in public forums frequently, shouting about leftist conspiracies, claiming that Antifa is pro-Hamas and conspiring in the shadows, bullying people at pro-Palestine demonstrations, and trying to egg people into fights. One of the activists has spent time protesting Drag Story Hours and was present alongside Nazis attacking the UCLA encampments in the prior semester. There’s a good article in the Asheville Blade, talking about the three characters that I’ll link in the show notes. So the three began live streaming the presentation that was going on at the Book Fair, actively filming the audience. And they were asked to stop or to leave. They refused. And then some sort of conflagration started, where one person claimed that she had her phone taken. We just know that it dropped from her hand. None of the three people had serious injuries, but they were ejected from the space and have been actively harassing people on social media and pressing local police to pursue charges against anyone that they can while the local right-wing media has been publishing the personal information of anyone they can identify who challenged the narrative of events or their political perspectives. This includes actively conflating the critique of Israel with antisemitism. I wonder if you all could talk a bit about good approaches to challenging this sort of opportunistic and bad-faith lobbying of accusations of antisemitism. It seems that this sort of thing really muddies the water, and could diminish the effectiveness of actual charges of antisemitism as they come up.

Shane: You’re exactly right. The muddy model charges make it harder to take it seriously, and a certain layer of cynicism has developed over parts of the left about claims of antisemitism, particularly related to Israel-Palestine. That doesn’t help anybody. Certainly doesn’t keep Jews safe. I think it’s really troubling in that case, with the folks you’re describing, I mean, they collaborate with antisemites. I think in a way outlining their actual history and how that work is really important. We talk about this in the book. There are huge portions of people who claim to be supporters of Israel that do so either for antisemitic reasons or also hold antisemitic ideas. A number of the people leading the charge and attacking campus protesters over the last year themselves have either shown support for QAnon or various kinds of Rothschild conspiracy theories, George Soros conspiracy theories, and so on. So are they friends of Jews? Are they speaking out of allyship with Jews? I don’t think so. I think pointing to the reality of that is going to be important. It’s hard when they’re picking up on a narrative that has become mainstream, that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when it hits a certain level of intensity, that’s actually what dictates it, and that’s simply not true. You could have opinions about Israel-Palestine that are really radical, maybe even problematic, and they don’t necessarily have to be antisemitic, right? Those things are not necessarily congruent with one another, and that’s actually a hard and more nuanced position to take. What these far-right attitudes are doing is essentially merging their narrative with one that’s become the common narrative in media circles. I think that’s really tough. Obviously having other Jewish folks speak up about it, talking about how antisemitism actually works is useful.

And I think providing a long-term counter-narrative for how antisemitism actually works is always going to be useful in this case. Severing the relationship as quickly as possible. You know, someone’s showing up and filming crowds in the space – they need to be ejected. I don’t think it’s debatable. And I think that was handled appropriately. I think the problem ends up being that entering into the discourse with them and responding to their charges is designed to sort of put us at a disadvantage. Avoiding that kind of direct interaction, direct response sometimes, instead having a more positive, forward-thinking approach [might lead to better results]. They’re throwing around accusations of antisemitism. We’re just going to develop our own antisemitism event, and maybe we’ll talk about it this way, and we’ll create relationships with Jewish communities through X, Y, and Z methods. I think that ends up having more benefits. And then, Ben, you’ve had a lot of experience with this sort of thing in your organizing work. What do you think?

Ben: I think you’re right on. In this case, these are right-wing trolls, and it’s just appropriate to make sure we have good security and de-escalation at our events, and make sure that organizers know who these people are and develop plans to try to deescalate and to remove them and to keep our spaces safe. I agree with what you said about not letting them distract. These trolls shouting into the wind and a few far-right outlets and trying to amplify their narrative, I don’t think you need to get distracted into a big public conversation on what antisemitism is necessarily. I think they’re feeling desperate and threatened by our work, and I think it’s important to just keep doing what we’re doing. Keep drawing attention to the genocide [in Gaza], and keep fighting for a free Palestine. It’s also good to do the long-term work of building an antisemitism analysis in our organizing. If this right-wing activism starts to seem like it’s changing public opinion, seems like it’s peeling off elements of the Jewish community, and it seems like it’s gaining ground, then it might be worth thinking about ways to counter it in the ways that Shane described, having our own events, or doing our own political education, and working to try to build partnerships with local Jewish community, even if they don’t agree about Palestinian liberation, the way we’d like them to, at this moment. Seeing what bridges can be built, humanizing what we’re doing. But I think ultimately these are trolls, and it’s good to deal with them in that way.

TFSR: Ben and Shane, thank you so much for having this conversation. I know I was all over the place. It’s an amazing book. It’s so full of good stories, good arguments, good discussions, lots of history. And I really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing it, and thanks for taking the time to talk to me about it.

Shane: Thanks so much for having us on the show. I’m always happy to come.

Ben: Yeah. This was a really great conversation. Thanks for having us.

TFSR: It’s my pleasure.