Response to noah feldman

AAJS, 2023

Based on a recent PhD at the University of Melbourne, this book by young progressive researcher Max Kaiser sets itself the ambitious agenda of reclaiming what he terms the 'lost' story of the 1940s and early 1950s Australian Jewish anti-fascist Left. Kaiser's history is informed by a number of vantage points. Firstly, he writes from an openly partisan perspective. He is supportive of the left-wing Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JCCFAS), and critical of its ideological opponents. Secondly, he is influenced by the political activism of his grandfather, multicultural and welfare advocate Walter Lippmann, who was a prominent actor in the early years of the JCCFAS, but ceased involvement in 1953 due to disagreement with the Council's pro-Soviet alignments and their specific refusal to recognize and condemn the appalling manifestations of Stalinist anti-Semitism. Thirdly, he is keen to use the learnings from the past to inform current Jewish and broader anti-fascist advocacy activities including particularly the struggle to achieve self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Finally, he is motivated by a rejection of what he labels 'right-wing Zionism' (p.254), but does not seem able to reconcile that agenda with the inconvenient fact that the JCCFAS was strongly supportive of Israel's creation in 1948, and objectively pro-Zionist.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

This impressive book, offering essays by 19 authors on the topic of the recent upsurge in virulent anti-Jewish hostility, is daunting, not by sheer size, which is considerable, but by the very fact of its existence, the very fact of what must be its focus the worldwide rise of a pernicious, persistent anti-Semitism. The topic of course must be explored, and is explored with painstaking scholarship, intensive scrutiny of the subject itself, commitment, eloquence, and passion. The book is the outgrowth of a four-day conference involving 45 scholars from 10 countries at Indiana University's Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) in April 2014. The 19 authors represented in the book live in, and/or are affiliated with colleges and universities in Austria, England, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, and the United States. It is important, and impressive, that the contributors to the book are international, because anti-Semitism is a burgeoning international problem. The book is organized into four parts, (I) Defining and Assessing Antisemitism, (II) Intellectual and Ideological Contexts, (III) Holocaust Denial, Evasion, Minimization, and (IV) Regional Manifestations. The second chapter, ''The Ideology of the New Antisemitism,'' by Kenneth Marcus, is useful in identifying some key psychoanalytic issues. He sets the stage by underscoring that antisemitism is an ideology, quoting Sartre, who described antisemitism as a ''conception of the world'' (p. 21), giving us a broad, inclusive perspective to consider. He identifies the irrationality of otherwise educated, knowledgeable people who accept an ideology that includes the infamous blood libel, that Jews murder Christian babies to use their blood in making Passover matzoh. He continues by citing Holocaust-denial statements that Jews invented stories about a Holocaust that never happened, and by citing the belief that the antisemitic forgery, ''The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' is true. He anchors his discourse in an acknowledgment of Freudian thought, that ''the ideology of hatred is a symptom of repressed desire'' (p. 25). Marcus discusses trauma as underlying antisemitic ideology, citing projection and displacement as essential to further understanding how people deal with the conflicts generated by repressed desire, in an attempt to rid themselves of forbidden desires. He delineates various ways in which Jews are blamed for everything, quoting a 19th century CE (Common Era) tract that traces everything evil to Jews, and contemporary Islamic thought that attributes every ''catastrophe'' to Jews (p. 37).

Medaon, 2018

Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism, 2024

This article problematizes the question of antisemitism that is raised, seemingly inevitably, whenever the question of Palestine is presented in Europe and its historic settler colonies, including not least the United States. In the face of the impending U.S. legislative adoption, and presidential endorsement, of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which falsely equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with Jew-hatred and thus effectively criminalizes it, such problematization is urgently necessary for enabling us to argue clearly and unabashedly that the IHRA definition is not only aligned with Zionist political aims-that is, that its aim is to stifle sustained critical analysis of the anti-Palestinian structures and relational practices of the Israeli entity (an easy enough conclusion to draw, even as it may be contested by IHRA proponents)-but that the definition is patently incorrect, based as it is on historical mystification. Perhaps recognizing this fact, in March 2004 the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) (now European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA]) rejected a similar definition of antisemitism in its Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003, and in November 2023, the FRA highlighted the Council of the European Union's qualification of the IHRA definition, which it nonetheless endorsed, "that the working definition must not be used to 'stifle, or stigmatise as antisemitic, legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies…in the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.'" I believe furthermore that without a correct historical narrativization and in turn re-understanding of antisemitism, the necessary theorization and

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1991

2019

T here was a time at the end of the twentieth century when antisemitism was relegated to the margins of public discourse. In the general atmosphere of increasing tolerance and fight against all kinds of prejudices and increased protection of minorities, Jews lived in security and even started to take that state of affairs for granted. Following the Holocaust, no one who wanted to be taken seriously in the Western world would accept the epithet antisemite. Prejudice and hatred against Jews, based either on ancient Christian anti-Jewish teachings or nineteenth-century racist theories about the inferiority of Jewish blood, disappeared together with their most vociferous propagators in the Third Reich. Anyone still clinging to the beliefs that the Jews controlled the world via a stranglehold on the media, the financial markets, and politiciansbe it on Capitol Hill, in Whitehall, or in the Kremlin-had to either hide those beliefs or express them only behind closed doors to avoid running the risk of social ostracism. The populist lies blaming the Jews for all the ills of the world lost much of their mass appeal when Allied soldiers threw open the gates of German concentration camps and revealed the unspeakable atrocities that were the outcome of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. 1

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Dynamics of Delegitimization, , 2019

1999

Critical Theories of Antisemitism Distinguishing between different ways of thinking about antisemitism, this study concentrates on those theories that understand antisernitism as a uniquely modern phenomenon. Covering the period from the mid-19th century to the present day, it first examines the work of Marx and Nietzsche and then moves on to those theorists who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust and concludes with the postmodern writings of Bauman and Lyotard. It argues that these critical theories of antisemitism all relate the emergence of antisemitism to modern forms of political emancipation and questions the impact of the holocaust upon this body of thought. The study argues that the fluidity and open-endedness by which the early writers characterise modernitymost notably the ambivalence within modernity itself between the possibility of full emancipation and barbaritycomes to be replaced by an increasing pessimism that sees antisernitism as modernity's only possible outcome. It argues that this change is accompanied first by increasing the centrality of antisemitism to modernity, and also by defining more rigidly the concepts by which antisemitism is explained, most noticeably, the concept of "the Jews". This study argues that as a result of these interrelated developments, critical theories replicate many of the assumptions of the antisemitic worldview identified in the early works. By calling for a cautious and critical return to these earlier ways of explaining antisemitism, the study concludes by pointing to an approach that remains within the tradition of critical theory, but which re-establishes the critical distance between ways of accounting for antisemitism and the phenomenon itselfone in which the "Jewish question" is de-centred, the explanatory concepts reopened to question and the promise of emancipation reinvigorated.