To understand what could now be called the “daily folklore” of antisemitism, there is an anecdote from the 1930s attributed to German satirist Kurt Tucholsky:
“The Jews are to blame for everything”, someone said. “And the cyclists”, I said. “Why the cyclists?” he replied, puzzled. “Why the Jews?” I asked back.
After the Hamas genocidal attack in which 1200 Israeli men, women, children, and babies were barbarically executed on October 7, 2023, hundreds abducted, and Israeli women brutalized and raped, the Jews were to blame “for everything” again, including their own extermination. That it became more plausible to believe that Israeli Jews were allowed to be murdered by their own nationalist government, or Washington, or both, than that a complex technological system could fail, is telling. The eternal cunning Jew knows how to trick the world into believing that he is a victim when he is the “oppressor”.
For the antisemite, the eternal cunning Jew knows how to trick the world into believing that he is a victim when he is really the “oppressor”.
With this stereotype welded into the social imaginary, antisemitism has finally conquered the mainstream. The Reichspropagandaminister would have prided himself on such an achievement over 70 years after the founding of the Jewish Israeli state.
Good ol’ leftwing Jew haters
It was not even a day after the Hamas pogrom that a professor of the University of Bern in Switzerland expressed his happiness about the attack as his “best early birthday present”, and thousands of other tenured radicals’ pro-Palestine Twitter accounts praised it as an act of quasi-resistance. Only a week after the attack, the left-leaning London Review of Books published what can only be called a depraved “open letter” accusing Israel of “a textbook case of genocide” in Gaza and not breathing a single word about the Hamas pogrom. The left particularly either went out of its way not to mention the victims of the Southern kibbutzim and the fate of the hostages at all, or violated their memory in literal terms by tearing down posters picturing the abducted from walls or lamp posts, or wrung out half-baked and not even half-hearted obligatory statements. Nor was it only in the LRB’s letter that the IDF’s response and shelling of military infrastructure in Gaza decoupled from the previous attack by the heavily funded terrorist organization and its ISIS-style barbarism. Big leftist Twitter accounts engaged in an orgy of Israel hatred with Israel-Nazi comparisons, Holocaust relativization, and victim blaming, according to which the dismembering of toddlers in front of their parents on 07/10 was an act of “self-defense”, never mind Judith Butler’s unsurprising reaction to Hamas’s genocidal attack as an act of “armed resistance”. Nothing seems to have preceded the current war in Gaza except a 70-year-old history turned on its head, in which Israel has always been the “settler-colonial” apartheid state, while the Palestinian Arabs have always been the victims, revealing the ignorance of Israel’s difficult history. But it would be incorrect to say that one would do Israel a favor by calling it the actual victim – although against the background of a coalition of aggression against it, now led by Iran, and the terrorist groups Iran funds, which openly declare the extermination of Jews and the annihilation of Israel as their goal, it objectively is. But Israel fights back. And that is its real moral death sentence: for the left victimhood cult, nothing matches the horror of a strong Israel determined to bring its enemies to the knees.
For the left victimhood cult, nothing matches the horror of a strong Israel determined to bring its enemies to the knees.
While antisemitism in the early 20th century made its career in the fascist right – even if there are good reasons to view Hitler as a man of the left -, antisemitism is more firmly anchored in the left’s political history. Whether as the “socialism of fools” that August Bebel detected among his contemporaries in the 19th century, or in the works of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or in its later anarchist and party-communist proponents such as Bakunin and Stalin, antisemitic sentiments on the left have always been commonplace. Beginning with the Soviet Union’s late 1940s official anti-Zionist party line, antisemitism is deeply tied into the “liberation movements” and the left’s “anti-imperialist”, communist, and International Red Army Fraction and Red Brigades terrorist group history from the 1960s-1990s. In the German student movement of the late 1960s, Germany’s recent history was already forgotten, to return in a repressed form in the pro-Palestinian cause: “Make the Near East red, smash the Zionists dead” chanted many an upright German communist during the student protests. In the mainstream, however, antisemitism remained fringe, especially with the rise of liberal democracies in the West. In literature, TV series, movies, art, even songs, the memory of the Holocaust was kept alive as an imagination-shaping template for absolute evil and unspeakable suffering, so much so that whole novels could be written about Auschwitz without even mentioning its name.
“Make the Near East red, smash the Zionists dead” chanted many an upright German communist during the student protests, only two decades after the horrors of Auschwitz.
But one cannot understand the current trajectory towards the mainstream accommodation to antisemitism without examining the proceedings in the Western liberal university system. For a couple of decades now, Humanities faculties in the West have increasingly adopted previously fringe leftist ideologies, such as the 1970s black lesbian women’s Combahee River Collective’s idea of “interlocking systems of oppression” – now known as “Intersectionality” and the DEI paradigm – or a Nation of Islam-version of “anti-racism”, now known as the New York Times 1619 project (never mind the NOI’s blatant antisemitism that activists of the US left seamlessly adopt). In the last decades, universities have served as accelerators for the outlandish theories and abstruse theses of “anti-imperialist” sit-ins and made them increasingly acceptable in the political mainstream. The same goes for antisemitism. It used to be a minority view by Holocaust deniers of the David Irving kind, or grifters like Norman Finkelstein, whose attempt to demystify what he called a “Holocaust industry” ended in romanticizing Gaza terrorists as “martyrs”. It was mostly regarded with suspicion – except in the Corbyn left, Trotskyist sects like the Socialist Workers Party, or British Marxist book publishers. Of course, in the SWP and Anglo left more generally, antisemitism would be called its more socially accepted, palatable, and “geopolitical” name, anti-Zionism. And as “anti-Zionism”, antisemitism is no longer a minority view, especially among the young.
Universities have served as accelerators for the outlandish theories and abstruse theses of “anti-imperialist” sit-ins and made them increasingly acceptable in the political mainstream. The same goes for antisemitism.
By contrast to decades in which antisemitism was socially ostracized, in a 2023 US Congress hearing, an assembly of university presidents was unable to assert whether the call for genocide against Jews violated their schools’ rule of conduct. This indicates a shift. While fantastic fabrications like “fat-shaming” and “misgendering” constitute clear violations of Harvard’s Code of Conduct, the threat of the extermination of Jews fails to provoke the same outrage. This has less to do with real antisemitic sentiment on the side of the university administration, than with consideration for the potentially anti-Zionist views of their clientele: students. For the views of radical left campus groups who view Hamas as “liberators” are no longer fringe in the overall student body. They have entered the mainstream. And as many have pointed out on Twitter, including many African Americans, had the call for genocide of black people been in question, the meltdown would have been unprecedented and complete.
And yet, most people I talk to – educated people with a developed understanding of social critique – often do not understand the difference between racism and antisemitism. And hence they do not understand why the left sees racism everywhere while turning a blind eye to antisemitism: a particular constellation which simultaneously harbors the explanation for the left’s own antisemitic worldview.
Antisemitism and racism ideal types
Both antisemitism and racism have been subject to a gigantic academic research apparatus for decades. My aim naturally cannot be to reproduce its scholarly findings. I only wish to highlight what I believe has been almost entirely ignored in the public discourse on the relation between the two. A conflation of antisemitism with racism, or the reduction of antisemitism to a kind of racism, tends to deemphasize antisemitism’s specificity, and therefore continues to leave us in the dark as to why the left’s worldview is fundamentally antisemitic. For the deeper function of antisemitism in the left is a reductionist, vulgar, and fetishized form of anti-capitalism. This may help to grasp the broader context of antisemitism’s success against the background of rising acceptance of an anti-capitalist worldview in the political mainstream.
The deeper function of antisemitism in the left is a reductionist, vulgar, and fetishized form of anti-capitalism.
What seems undeniable at first sight is that antisemitism and racism share the common feature of dehumanization. The genocide against the Armenians, for example, was prepared by propaganda against non-Turkish “exploiters” and “bloodsuckers”. Anti-Chinese resentment in Indonesia, which led to pogroms in the 1960s and 1990s, shows numerous similarities with elements of antisemitic ideology. In the first half of the 20th century, antisemites in Mexico acted not only against Jews, but also against the Chinese, whom they saw as representative of wealth and “hoarding”. However, despite this structural similarity, it should be noted that these attacks had more in common with medieval forms of antisemitism. Whereas racist genocides or pogroms, such as the mass murder of the Armenians, attacks against the Chinese, or the mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, were motivated, as was medieval anti-Semitism, by dehumanization and the desire for elimination directed against a particular ethnic group as a concrete entity, modern eliminatory antisemitism never only targets the Jews, or the Jewish state, but everything that is imagined as Jewish. In this more abstract form, antisemitic resentment includes a disdain for the achievements of civilization and modernity itself, especially capitalism. Modern antisemitism thus feeds on resentment against secularism, individuality, intellectuality, liberalism, joviality, permissiveness, the civil subject in the original sense, and the “West” as their common denominator in the broader, and the universally evil United States in the narrower sense. Antisemitism often presents itself as its vulgar twin, a staggeringly naïve anti-Americanism, as the Glenn Greenwalds, Max Blumenthals and Aaron Matés of Twitter have demonstrated, regardless of their own Jewishness. In this sense, it functions as a complete, a holistic worldview. Antisemitism does not only concern Jews, but informs the antisemite’s relation to the entire political, cultural, historical world.
Antisemitism does not only concern Jews, but informs the antisemite’s relation to the entire political, cultural, historical world.
Because modern antisemitism is inclusive of a range of features that do not only target what could be directly identified as Jewish, it is more difficult to grasp than racism or medieval forms of antisemitism. One of the most central, if not the central differentiating feature of modern antisemitism against historical forms of racism is the delusional idea of the world-dominating power of the Jews, their limitless, shrewdly enacted, and conspiratorial power to rule the world. This is not found in the structurally related resentments of racism.
While racism is an expression of the demarcation against what is perceived as inferior, antisemitism is directed against the superior. The victims of racism are not faulted for their superiority, but for their inferiority. This is even the case when – to give an example – black men are perceived as “sexually more potent”. Imaginations of alleged sexual omnipotence do not challenge the assessment of the victims of racism as inferiors. On the contrary: the reduction of the racialized to a primary, “given” nature – the nature of the “savage” – finds direct expression here. By contrast, “second nature” would be the social being of Man that racism is unconcerned with. Racism thus dehumanizes its victims by identifying them with the concrete side of the capitalist valorization principle: they are viewed as the “market’s unwilling objects”, as the embodiment of immediate nature. Often enough, pity for the “savage”, seen as irrevocably tied to primary nature and unable to evolve into secondary nature – social being –, expresses itself in positively racist terms, as could be seen in Angela Merkel’s neo-colonial Willkommenskultur during the 2015 German refugee crisis.
Pity for the “savage”, seen as irrevocably tied to primary nature, expresses itself in positively racist terms. This could be witnessed, e.g., in Angela Merkel’s neo-colonial Willkommenskultur during the 2015 German refugee crisis.
Jews and everything they represent, by contrast, count as abstractly omnipotent. Abstractly, because, in contrast to the victims of racism, Jews are identified with the abstract side of capitalist valorization, and thus with social being or “second nature”: value, money, the entangled and overarching power of “finance”. This identification turns Jews into the personification of the principle of impersonal global domination and, by inference, identifies them with the global domination of the liberal Western world over the “Global South”. The Jew is the archetypical capitalist oppressor.
The Reductionist View of Capitalism: “Evil Money”
No one understood this unconsciously performed identification of Jews with abstract value as succinctly as Jewish-Marxian historian Moishe Postone (1942-2018). Postone examined the specificity of antisemitism in the left by showing its ties to a vulgar, fetishized anti-capitalism that only targeted the “circulation sphere”, as Proudhon would have it: money as abstract value. In “Antisemitism and National Socialism”(2008) , Postone argues that
“[it] is not merely that the Jews were considered to be the owners of money, as in traditional anti-Semitism, but that they were held responsible for economic crises and identified with the range of social restructuring and dislocation resulting from rapid industrialization: explosive urbanization, the decline of traditional social classes and strata, the emergence of a large, increasingly organized industrial proletariat, and so on. In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.”
As one would expect, the NSDAP took its fundamental world view from this form of antisemitism, but so did the Soviet Central Committee. What this overall assessment of the Jews ignores is the double character in the social form that capitalist modernity itself represents: of, on the one hand, abstract social value as money, representing the “circulation sphere” and, on the other hand, concrete use-value(s), representing the commodities emerging from “the sphere of production”– as the sale of the latter conditions the creation of the former, and vice versa: one is nothing without the other. In the modern anti-capitalist view, including fascism and socialism, the “evil side of capitalism” is reduced to and identified with the circulation sphere alone – money, banking, interest, in a word, “financial capitalism”.
In the modern anti-capitalist view, including fascism and socialism, the “evil side of capitalism” is reduced to and identified with the circulation sphere alone – money, banking, interest, in a word, “financial capitalism”.
The wage contract as well as the mode of production itself mysteriously disappears from this brand of vulgar anti-capitalism. Consequently, this narrow approach leads to a reductive understanding of modernity, in which, Postone contends,
“forms of anticapitalist thought … remain bound within the immediacy of this antinomy and tend to perceive capitalism, and that which is specific to that social formation, only in terms of the manifestations of the abstract dimension of the antinomy; so, for instance, money is considered the “root of all evil.” The existent concrete dimension is then positively opposed to it as the “natural” or ontologically human, which presumably stands outside the specificity of capitalist society. Thus, as with Proudhon, for example, concrete labor is understood as the noncapitalist moment opposed to the abstractness of money. That concrete labor itself incorporates and is materially formed by capitalist social relations is not understood.”
The concrete and organic side of capitalist production – the production of use-value – is then counterposed and fetishized as benevolent, even healthy, wholesome, and organic. The historical Nazis, as well as the Soviet regime, celebrated “production” as the measure of “organic” collectives and communities. It was also seen as a potential counterweight to the cold and calculating world of interest rates.
The Nazi distinction between “creative” and “money grubbing” capital became a reoccurring theme in the left, dating back to the cultural shifts of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Nazi distinction between “creative” and “money grubbing” capital – “schaffendes und raffendes Kapital” – has its origins here. Such a distinction also became a reoccurring theme in the left dating back to the cultural shifts of the 1970s and 1980s (think, for example, of film maker Rainer-Werner Fassbinder’s adoption of that theme). But for Postone, only an understanding of capitalism as a totalizing social form, in which both value and use value present two sides of the same relations of production, can overcome the predicament of fetishizing use value as the “innocent victim” of the cold abstractness of value. In the following, we shall see how the fetishization of use value relates to the fetishization of race.
The Race Fetish
Postone issued a damning verdict on most left-identifying politicians, activists, and scholars whose reductive view of capitalism turns “anti-capitalist” activism into a self-caricature. But Postone, who died in 2018, did not live to see its worst manifestations.
Indeed, the “racial capitalism” debate that flared up again in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests presented itself not only as a broad fetishization of “race”, but in hindsight also as a negative mirror-image to the left’s “nothing to see here”-antisemitism. While working-class blacks, like everybody else, are subordinate to the wage contract, leftists involved in these debates (from Ta-Nehisi Coates to the more elaborate accounts of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò) fetishize them as the victims of whiteness, i.e., a category of primary nature given in the color of one’s skin. Blacks’ “primary nature”, in contrast to their social “second nature” as wage workers, suggests the existence of an obstacle to the smooth circle of capital valorization, vulgarly identified with “whiteness”. “Blackness” (or “non-whiteness”) is fetishized as the natural “other”of the cold and cruel world of money making, as potential resistance to the world of abstract value. This fusion of racial fetish and pseudo-liberation became even more insistent in the 1619 project. Here, slavery – misunderstood as being motivated by racism rather than economic constraints – exemplifies the original sin of white people as well as the founding moment of the self-awareness of blacks, their “becoming conscious” of their own blackness against the white oppressor ex negativo. In the wake of the 1619 project debates, anti-black racism became finally naturalized as “running in the very DNA of this country”, the US. Slavery, the postmodern legend goes, has constituted both the idea of “race” in the true sense of the left, as well as the potential shattering of capitalism through “black empowerment” – the capturing of the left-wing intellectual sphere by a new race realism being a case in point.
“Blackness” is fetishized as the natural “other”of the cold and cruel world of money making, as potential resistance to the world of abstract value. This fusion of racial fetish and pseudo-liberation became even more insistent in the 1619 project.
With the 1619 project, in short, the fetishization of “race” has permeated key institutions of American society. Accordingly, the authors of Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, claim that “race will always be at the center of the American experience”. This claim is not to be understood as a critique of the preoccupation with race. To the contrary: “… without a racial identity, one is in danger of having no identity.” The left’s problem with racism does not consist in objecting to concrete discrimination, or to the purported existence of “races”, but rather to the insufficient attention given to the issue of “race”, claimed to be something that has affected every cell and corner of political life. A racist for the left is someone who rejects the view that racism is the primary motivator for anything that happens in the political or social sphere.
In ideological terms, the ultimate consequence of the 1619 project that had put “race” at the heart of American political consciousness was the left’s reaction to the Hamas pogrom. It is here that antisemitism disappeared as a problem altogether: not only did the attack not sensitize the left to the problem of eliminatory antisemitism but completely eclipsed it.
The ultimate consequence of the 1619 Project that had put “race” at the heart of American political consciousness was the left’s reaction to the Hamas pogrom.
In the attacks of October 7th, 2023, it was not Jews who were the victims, but people perceived as “white”. We can see here how the “race” narrative overwhelms any other explanatory framework, so as to serve the antisemitic denialism of the left: in a video documenting an Oakland City Council meeting of many visibly left-oriented anti-Zionists, it was said that it would be “racist” to condemn Islamist terrorist groups for their actions. The race narrative can then be used to justify genocidal terror attacks if only the victim (the Jew) is perceived as white: for then he is not a victim, but an “oppressor”. Here lies the secret to the identification of Zionism with “racism”: there is no greater evil than “racism”, and the murdered, mutilated, injured, abducted Jews only testify to the justness of the anti-racist case. If these atrocities ever happened at all, that is, for the denial of the existence of antisemitic cruelty belongs to the basic operation of the antisemite. Consequently thought through, antisemitism is the enacting of the left man’s (or woman’s) anti-racism.
As someone who has spent many years – too many years, in fact – in the British and US Marxist academic scene, none of this is new to me. The sporting of Palestine flags at Marxist conferences, not to mention café murals depicting the plight of Palestinians with Kindergarten-level artistry, was the rule. A special issue of my former publisher’s academic journal on Identity Politics essentially held that identity politics is great and important, except where it concerns Jews. The responsible editor carried an aura of repressed rage against “Zionism” that could have supplied the city of Oakland with electricity for a year. But all in all, despite their academic jargon, they were just some unhinged kids on the SOAS campus with an unfortunate dress sense (remember that cool kids have never worn keffiyehs, and no, not even in the 1980s). Their “socialism of fools” was clearly confined to the sphere of the SWP sect, whose political analysis was limited to chanting slogans, and who have never been taken seriously by any self-respecting person I have met.
With the greater acceptance of vulgarly leftist, “anti-capitalist” positions in the mainstream – climate activism, decolonialization, transgenderism, anti-racism – antisemitic views have followed suit. But while the racism hyperbole has begun to crumble here and there, as “race reductionism” in the Diversity Left has suffered various blowbacks, antisemitism is thriving. Unless the same people who justly point to the “unconscious” of race ideology begin to wake up to the perfidious double standards that underpin progressive ideology in terms of antisemitism, the denial of antisemitism, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, will only prolong its existence.
