Published: 6 August 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
CONTENT WARNING: Hate speech
In 1973, Israel’s left-wing foreign minister Abba Eban said: “Let there be no mistake: the New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism.”
While public awareness of anti-Semitism on the Left has grown in recent years, the question of how and why it exists remains overlooked. Even among Jews, we may know the problem exists but pay little attention to its origins.
How does a group devoted to social justice come to embrace racist conspiracy theories and stereotypes?
I am a Jew who grew up in the Left. My adolescence was spent moving between queer, environmentalist, and workers’ rights advocacy circles. I stuck around long enough to encounter the peculiar malady that is leftist anti-Semitism.
During Chanukah last year, a popular left-wing Facebook page I follow posted an image of Nazi Berlin beside an image of Berlin today, in which a Menorah stands before the Brandenburg Gate.
The image, no-doubt, was intended to show the progress Germany has made. The page was flooded with comments including, “I like it better in the first picture” and “Incompetent Hitler couldn’t even do his job right.” There were photographs of the Star of David being used as toilet paper and an animation of a button labelled “gas” being pressed.
Left-wing anti-Semitism may seem an offshoot of the more traditional kind, but the reasoning behind it couldn’t be more different. The Left is collectivist, anti-nationalist, political and disinterested in the past. Traditional anti-Semitism is individualist, nationalist, cultural, and committed to historical revisionism.
In the past, anti-Semitism sought Judenrein, a world free of Jews; anti-Semitism today desires Judennstraaterein, a world free of a Jewish state and Jewish influence. It focuses not on painting individual Jews as sub-human, but as a powerful collective with disproportionate power.
Right-wing extremists hate Jews because they are nationalists and see Jews as a fifth column and a threat to national purity; the extremists of the Left hate Jews because, to them, it is the Jews who are the nationalists: they are the architects of the State of Israel, an embodiment of all that they find repellent about the nation-state.
Leftist anti-Semitism exists in the political realm. It references an all-powerful “Jewish lobby” with tentacles penetrating every facet of lawmaking. By contrast, vintage anti-Semitism is reinforced by faith and culture. Politics is only the outlet, not the nexus of this bigotry. Traditional anti-Semites babble about the Jews murdering Jesus and recite medieval fairy tales of Jewish infanticide and other god-offending rituals. They attempt to deny the Holocaust.
Anti-Semites on the Left, even the most radical, do not outwardly bother with Holocaust denial. German historian Dr Susanne Urban, from the International School for Holocaust Studies in Jerusalem, has noted a curious paradox among certain Leftists who carry “compassion for the murdered Jews” of the past while harbouring “strong reservations towards Jews today”.
It is remarkable how two groups with entirely different premises can reach the same age-old conclusion.
This, of course, is not a recent observation. In 1974, the Anti-Defamation League argued that new anti-Semitism was “anti-globalist and neo-Marxist far more than it is Christian and conservative”.
Susanne Urban elaborated on this, diagnosing a new strain of anti-Semitism in Germany of “anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation and anti-Zionist attitudes all reinforcing the new German claim of having been victims in World War II”.
She notes that by the turn of the 21st century, a fifth of Germans believed Jews were responsible for “most major conflicts in the world” and a quarter felt Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was equal to the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews.
Here we reach the elephant in the room: Zionism. One cannot overstate the role of Zionism, or more appropriately, ideas about Zionism, on the formation of anti-Semitism in left-wing spaces. In what some term “the Nazification of Israel,” legitimate public grievances towards Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has devolved, in some circles, to “excessive criticism” that the ADL cautioned in 2013 can result in people feeling “more comfortable attacking Jews and Jewish institutions”.
However, I am reluctant to use the term “left-wing anti-Semitism”. It seems to me an oxymoron. What kind of progressive goes after one of the most ostracised groups in history? Surely one loses the right to call themselves left-wing once they indulge in this absurd hatred.
On the other hand, I wonder if my reluctance to describe this new anti-Semitism as left-wing is perhaps just rooted in a denial that “my side” can perpetuate such ideas.
I believe Leftists do not pose a systemic threat to Jewish people around the world. The anti-Semitism I have faced in my life has been decidedly of the right-wing flavour. It wasn’t a leftie that drew a swastika on my schoolbooks.
It is important not to lose sight of who truly poses the greatest risk. In May, following the release of Germany’s annual crime report, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said right-wing extremists were to blame for a large rise in anti-Semitic crimes in the country last year. The French government cited the “resurgence of the far-right” as the leading cause of the country’s increase in anti-Semitic incidents. It was not Leftists who marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Nonetheless, anti-Semitism on the Left exists and its existence is conditional on its toleration by other Leftists. If Leftists are true to their principles, and truly believe what they say, they must exile those in their ranks spreading this disease. Anything less is not good enough.
A warning issued almost 20 years ago by Dr Robert Wistrich, a leading scholar of anti-Semitism, still holds true: “In the first half of the 20th century, many good-hearted rational people refused to accept that such highly irrational beliefs could be taken seriously by many people. They were wrong. This is an error well worth avoiding in the first half of the 21st century.”
Photo: Former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
