Published: 4 February 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
PHILIP MENDES: Confronting Antisemitism on the Left outlines a compelling case for the British Left about the necessity of combatting antisemitism
REVIEWED BY PHILIP MENDES
The relationship between the political Left and the Jews, including particularly the degree of anti-Semitism prevalent within progressive circles, has long been a subject of contention.
Two recent books by self-declared British socialists have forensically examined what has been called British Labour’s antisemitism crisis. Both are well worth a read. The first text by lawyer David Renton I have mostly positively reviewed elsewhere.
Confronting Antisemitism on the Left: Arguments for Socialists, by railway worker and trade union representative Daniel Randall complements Renton’s work, and addresses a core limitation of that book, which was its failure to provide an historical analysis of left-wing antisemitism to contextualise the contemporary debate.
Randall is a self-described secular Jewish Socialist active in the radical Left British Trotskyist group, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL). In contrast to most of the far Left, AWL has supported Israel’s right to exist for more than three decades, and accurately characterised the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash between two legitimate nationalisms which requires a compromise solution that is fair to both sides.
Indeed, the principled writings of leading AWL figures such as Sean Matgamna and Stan Crooke have provided a source of inspiration and hope to many progressive Jews who reject the simplistic construction by others on the ideological Left of Jewish-Israeli nationalism as inherently oppressive and conversely, Arab-Palestinian nationalism as inherently pure.
The AWL’s balanced “two states for two nations” approach informs Randall’s text, as does the earlier writings of the famous UK Jewish socialist Steve Cohen. Cohen’s classic 1984 text That’s Funny You don’t look Antisemitic, which I first read way back in 1989, taught many progressives that antisemitism on the Left was not just some minor aberration limited to a small number of cranks and xenophobes on the extreme fringes.
