Book Review: Contemporary Left Antisemitism

People didn’t know how bad the Holocaust was at the time. Not even the Germans. Sure, they saw the closing and looting of Jewish businesses, they heard the genocidal rhetoric coming from the offices of government, the steps of universities, and the tables of beerhalls. They saw neighbors and friends disappear, whole families taken in the night, their homes turned out and scavenged because no one expected their return.

They saw enough to know better. But they didn’t know precisely what it meant. They could not know because they could not imagine what was taking place as no such thing had ever been done before. There was no precedent by which to consider the possibility of such mass industrial evil, so they held no version of it in their minds.

It was only after the war, when the Allies began to uncover the camps after liberating cities, that the truth began to out, and the horror began to reveal itself. But even then, people did not fully understand because many of the pictures were held back from the broader public. One reason, particularly in France, was to respect the family members of the victims. Another reason was simply that in the 1940s, people were not as accustomed to such imagery as we are today.

When the Civil War broke out, sons of the North and sons of the South proudly signed up for a chance to fight for glory and win honor. Those who were turned away for whatever reason did not feel lucky, but were bitter about it, even ashamed. Families went to the battlefields and picnicked in the grass, little girls with their petticoats spread on the blanket, mothers holding the umbrella and pointing to the men. That one’s a second lieutenant. And there’s a brigadier general, girls. Until mother took a cannonball to the face and the girls were left covered in blood and pieces of skull.

Even as late as World War I and World War II, young men found ingenious ways to get into the service if they were rejected for failing to meet the physical or mental requirements. Public perception of war did not change until the 1960s. Journalists who had run stories based off military press conferences began to conduct their own interviews and analysis.

This was the network era when ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated television in the United States. The television had become what the piano once was, the rocking chair before that, the fire once upon a time—the center of family entertainment. Parents seated on the sofa, children cross-legged on the floor, American households saw the images of war in flesh-and-blood color for the first time. It disgusted them.

By February 1968, only 32% of Americans approved of the war. And while communist Viet Cong massacred 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế that same month, communist and Black Power students protested U.S. involvement—for which Vietnamese to this day will warmly thank Americans, something I experienced every time I have visited the country.

Since then, we have learned much more about war. In 1981, Sony developed an integrated circuit containing an array of linked capacitors known as a charge-coupled device, and digital photography was born, which would teach us much about war that could never be expressed in any human language. The structural rules of grammar cannot capture the look in a suddenly motherless child’s eyes, covered in powdered concrete and fresh blood.

We saw images from the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, Darfur. We saw the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, the War in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, the war against ISIS. Not to mention the cloying impact Hollywood and video games have had on our threshold for tolerating gory imagery. But we were not so used to it in the 1940s, and so pictures were withheld—initially.

The first camp to be liberated was Majdanek (pronounced my-dahn-ik) in eastern Poland in July 1944 by the Soviets. In April 1945, the Allies came upon an annex of the Buchenwald camp in Germany known as Ohrdruf, which held, as Dwight Eisenhower said after visiting the camp that month, “conditions of indescribable horror.”

This was a turning point for us all, for all humankind, because the Allies decided the only thing to do with such evil was to expose it. They lifted media restrictions, pulled the curtain all the way back, and showed the world who the Nazis were and what genocide looks like up close. They taught us what genocide truly means.

In addition to this shock was the revelation that so many of their fellow citizens had been complicit in doing this to Jewish families.

Our numbness through exposure has made it harder for terrorists to shock us, but Hamas has succeeded by showing us greater depths of human depravity than we imagined possible. We did not have to wait until after this war for the images. When Hamas carried out the October 7 pogrom, they uploaded the images themselves. They danced and sang. They contacted their own parents to brag, Dad! I killed 10 Jews with own hands! And what is worse, the father replied, Oh my son, God bless you!

And, as with World War II, we again face the revelation that so many among us support this evil. Jewish children in America are in peril as animals chase them, attack them, and hold parades to celebrate Hamas, festivals of death.

Many of us had fallen into the naive belief that violent antisemitism was the domain of far-right groups such as the KKK or various neo-Nazi militias. That this was a problem of the right, not the left.

After all, the left is home to Black Lives Matter, antiracism, and the LGBTQ community. Lefists fight racism and oppression of minority groups. But it turns out, violent antisemitism exists on the left as well, and in fact, left antisemitism has direct ties to Nazism through the Palestinian movement (see my post “The Problem of Palestinian Culture” for more).

The rot of left antisemitism is as vile and harmful as it was in Nazi Germany, and it has come as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or wolf turned shepherd, lecturing us on how to tend the flock, excoriating us for stepping out of line, which is cancel culture, and smuggling intolerance and racism into our institutions under the guise of tolerance and antiracism, feeding off the better angels of our nature like parasites.

There can be no more essential reading now than the 2018 book Contemporary Left Antisemitism by the British sociologist David Hirsh, whose brings to the subject the level of academic rigor required to truly unpack and understand the issue. It is astonishing to see how perfectly Hirsh outlined everything we see before us now.

In the introduction, Hirsh notes two kinds of antisemitism, citing the writer Ben Cohen, who in his 2012 essay “The Big Lie Returns,” conceptualized these types as bierkeller and bistro antisemitism:

Bierkeller anti-Semitism—named for the beer halls frequented by the German Nazis—employs such means as violence, verbal abuse, commercial harassment, and advocacy of anti-Jewish legal measures … Since the Second World War, though, this mode of anti-Semitism has waned sharply, along with the tendency to use the word anti-Semite as a positive means of political identification.

Bistro anti-Semitism, on the other hand, sits in a higher and outwardly more civilized realm, providing what left-wing activists would call a “safe space” to critically assess the global impact of Jewish cabals … the depiction of Palestinians as the victims of a second Holocaust, the breaking of the silence supposedly imposed upon honest discussions of Jewish political and economic power …

Cohen’s article was later published in the 2014 collection Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism, and in his review of the book, Dave Rich, a friend of Cohen’s and the policy director at the Community Security Trust, a British charity that provides security to the nation’s Jewish community, wrote that Cohen’s formulation makes his article the “central article … of the entire book,” adding that Jews now face danger “as much from human rights advocates of the left as they are from the xenophobic right.”

Rich closed by saying that in addition to the first two categories, we should add a third, banlieue antisemitism, after the poor French suburbs where many Muslims live and jihadist antisemitism now thrives.

Many of us have been so unforgivably naive, like some Southern belle sitting on a lawn with her daughters eating sandwiches as we clap and watch the cannonballs fly. We believed bierkeller antisemitism was a thing of the past. Even neo-Nazis accepted this. There is a term, ghost skin, which is short for ghost skinhead, referring to the skinheads or neo-Nazis who walk among us like ghosts, present but invisible, because they do not express their true opinions on matters. They know better than to do that. Instead, they remain silent or speak in the dog whistles of bistro antisemitism.

But left antisemitism doesn’t bother to hide. Hamas uploads videos of hell on earth and Western leftists cheer. There is no deception here. There are people explicitly saying that they consider the atrocities a good thing. One student activist called the massacre “beautiful.” A professor at Cornell said it was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” They have no need to walk around as ghost skins because the cloak of woke protects them.

There are two kinds of antisemitism. But I would quibble with Cohen’s wording. We do not have Nazi beerhall antisemitism and coffee shop antisemitism. We have Auschwitz antisemitism and Stanford antisemitism. We have SS antisemitism and collaborator antisemitism. We have Hamas antisemitism and BLM Chicago antisemitism.

In the 2015 essay “Anti-Judaism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism,” Eve Garrard wrote:

Antisemitism morphs through the centuries, taking on the colour of the local culture in which it exists. In Medieval times, religion, specifically Christianity, was culturally pre-eminent in the West, and antisemitism took the form of declaring Jews to be God-killers and hostile to divine revelation. As time went by, and the rationalist wave of the Enlightenment poured over Europe, the charge against Jewishness changed from its being hostile to revelation (and hence being the enemy of Christ) to its being impervious to reason (and hence the enemy of rationality). With the rise in power and prestige of science in the 19th and 20th centuries, the pseudo-biological discipline of ‘race science’ declared Jews to be an inferior, perhaps sub-human, race, which tainted and infected the supposedly more advanced and progressive races such as the Aryans. The defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War, and the revelations about what their version of antisemitism led them to do, gave race science, and for a time antisemitism itself, a very bad name, and not too much of it was heard in Western countries in the aftermath of the war, although in the Soviet Union antisemitism continued to flourish very successfully under the fig-leaf of anti-Zionism.  But in due course, with the increasing emphasis on human rights in liberal-left circles, we find the growth of an obsessional interest in every violation of human rights that Israel could be thought to have committed (and indeed some that she clearly didn’t, such as the alleged massacre at Jenin). In this latest development, we see a shift from what has been aptly called the bierkeller antisemitism of the right to the bistro antisemitism of the liberal left.

In other words, left antisemitism is a sophisticated repackaging of right antisemitism. The people who support Hamas violence hate Jews just as much as the people who support Nazi violence. Another way of thinking about these two types is as violent antisemitism and political antisemitism, which is why Israel is often a convenient way of venting one’s Jew hatred without coming across like a Nazi.

Another very useful conceptualization that Hirsh offers in his book is what he calls the Livingstone Formulation, named after the socialist former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who was suspended from the Labor Party in 2016 and later resigned because he made comments about how Zionism is tied to Adolf Hitler. When people accused him of antisemitism, he accused them of playing the race card. The Livingstone Formulation is the claim that those who accuse people of antisemitism are just trying to delegitimize them and their views on Israel.

But as the human rights advocate Natan Sharansky has noted, it’s not that difficult to parse criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitism. The three Ds of antisemitism, or 3D test, is Sharansky’s tool for doing this. The three Ds are delegitimization, or saying Israel does not have a right to exist, demonization, or talking about Israel as if it is an evil or satanic entity, and double standards, or holding Israel to a standard that one does not hold other liberal democracies, such as expecting it to kill practically no civilians during a brutal urban war campaign, or calling it genocide when they kill 0.2% of the population, which is exactly what we have now seen.

Hirsh’s concept of the community of the good is particularly insightful. People want to belong to the community of the good, and even when they are doing evil, they will convince themselves they are the good guys. This is the argument I made about Hitler. This is why you see Western leftist feminists and LGBT activists cheering for Hamas rapists who would saw a child’s head off if they thought she was gay or trans. It seems incomprehensible, but they do this because they have convinced themselves this is the community of the good. Gazans are oppressed, Israel is a colonizer, and that’s the extent of the moral math.

According to Hirsh, antisemitism is a “key marker” of the community of the good. Sure, racism is still ostensibly considered bad. But your view on Israel is the clearest way to discern your footing among leftists, and as with many of the unrelated issues bundled with this one, there is no tolerance for good faith discussion. He writes:

On the contemporary left, people and ideas are more and more being bundled over the boundaries of legitimate discourse by discursive force rather than rational debate and persuasion.

Hirsh then explains how anti-imperialism and a tolerance of antisemitism became defining characteristics of the community of the good, writing that while Jews in the Holocaust were seen as the ultimate symbol of powerlessness, those who survived the Holocaust and found safety in their ancestral homeland were made to be the ultimate symbol of corrupt power—world-dominating power, you might even say.

If a Jew dies in the holocaust, this is very sad and we have all learned something from it. But if a Jew survives and thrives in their homeland, this is the worst kind of evil. It seems then, in the left’s imagination, that the purpose of Jewish life is not to find meaning in one’s relationship with god or in helping others or loving family but to be sacrificed like an animal so that we can realize genocide is wrong and become more woke. Their lives only have value when they are losing them so that we can use their dead children as metaphors in our virtue signaling on social media.

This is the influence of Marxist analysis, which prizes power critiques. Jews dying in the Holocaust do not have power, but Jews in Israel do. I am sorry to tell you, but the logic really is just that simple. It does not matter that Hamas is ideologically worse than the Nazis. They are without power, Israel has power over them, so when they rape children this is actually a good thing. Their position in the power dynamic matters to the exclusion of their actual beliefs and actions. Or as Hirsh puts it, this is a worldview that “raises anti-imperialism to an absolute and which places great emphasis on position rather than agency.”

Hirsh notes that this approach is called ‘campism,’ an example of which would be supporting North Korea not because you actually want to live in a society like that but merely because North Korea is a U.S. rival. It is support by default, and it leads many young leftists to trip backwards into supporting fascism and becoming the worst kind of moral monsters.

Hirsh notes the rot of this phenomenon in post-colonial studies, Middle East studies, English, sociology, anthropology, and so on. If you want to read about the rot and its roots in decolonial studies, see my post “What Decolonization Really Means.” By way of example, Hirsh quotes the gender studies scholar Judith Butler:

Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of of a global left, is extremely important.

Yes Judith, I agree it is extremely important to understand this. Hirsh further quotes John Molyneux, a leading intellectual of the Socialist Workers Party, which was, when he said this, the most influential Marxist organization in the UK:

an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant who supports Hamas is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism.

I could not agree more, and I am glad to see progressives defining their own movement in such breathtakingly clear terms.

Hirsh goes on to discuss the problems of defining the term “antisemitism,” the academic boycott of Israel, the origins and sociological components of anti-Zionism, and much more. For anyone paying attention to the protests in the West and pro-Hamas rhetoric on the left, this is an absolute must-read. And stay tuned as I plan to publish a two-hour podcast interview with the author in the next day or two.