Some thoughts crystalized by a recent book from David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count.
Baddiel is a well-regarded children’s author in the UK, comic television personality, twitterator, and — probably most famously — co-composer of the ubiquitous ache-for-better-days UK football anthem “Three Lions.” (Given a more formal presentation here.) He’s also visibly Jewish at a time when many prominent Jews in the UK haven’t sought to highlight their Jewishness.
Its message is that the left needs to raise its game, because there’s a problem it doesn’t know it has: too often, it doesn’t consider antisemitism to be a form of racism that needs to be actively fought — not really, not really really really. When it comes to fighting for ethnic minorities, there’s one that just seems not to count.
Jews Don’t Count is a brisk, funny, conversational essay asking the reader — presumed to be a basically good-hearted person who hasn’t plumbed the depths of the topic — to look more carefully how antisemitism appears on the left.
It’s also likely to be the only book in history ever blurbed by Sarah Silverman (“Quite brilliant… If you think YOU don’t need to read it, that’s just the clue to know you do.”), Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and Sir Keir Starmer, the current leader of the Labour Party in the UK.
Warm-up exercise
Is Donald Trump racist against American Blacks? Yes.
But there are two ways I, as someone who isn’t Black, could answer yes to that. (Three, if you count “boy howdy.”)
One would be: “Yes, he’s absolutely convinced me.”
But there’s a better answer. It goes like this: “You know, it’s not really my call to make. By all moral right, that call can only be made by the Black American community, who know and understand anti-Black racism far better than I do, growing up with it and growing old with it, having their lives shaped by it in a way mine is not.”
Well, then, how do you know what the Black community thinks? You ask them. In an objective, methodologically sound poll. And when you do that, you find that about 83% of the Black American community agrees Trump is a racist. That’s not just a majority, or a super-majority, it’s more than four of five. It’s a community consensus so undeniably solid and broad and wide that it would be perverse to say anything about it except that, you know, the Black community has made up its mind about Trump. It’s not unanimous, and there are some high-profile exceptions, but a community consensus doesn’t have to be unanimous to be undeniably solid and broad and wide.
So: “I can’t claim to know anti-Black racism better than they do. It’s their call to make, not mine, and they have made it unambiguously. If I’m anything like the ally I want to believe I am, I have to listen. There is nothing of significance I could add to the Black community’s verdict. Trump is racist, QED.”
Wouldn’t it be cool if it always worked that way?
Meanwhile: the Jews.
It doesn’t always work that way. Not even on the left. As I mention in my recent Corbyn timeline, Jeremy Corbyn, self-proclaimed antiracist and former leader of the UK Labour party, convinced not 83% but 86% of the Jews in the UK that he’s personally antisemitic. That is, he masterfully vaulted over the searing Trump/Blacks verdict, beating Trump at the racism game. Yet he’s on the left, and his supporters — who bristle at the suggestion that they aren’t the wokest of the woke — were very clear in their response: “So what? Who cares? Nobody has convinced me, Corbynista X, and I’m quite adamantly sure he’s no antisemite, and therefore the Jewish community verdict on Corbyn is irrelevant.”
The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Baddiel details an incident in 2021, again among those who surely must know better, the hyper-woke London theatre circle, including the Royal Court Theater. “Rare Earth Mettle”— a play about mineral rights and global corporations, which hit the boards last fall and is now essentially forgotten except for one thing: at one point during the play’s development the writer picked a name for a grasping American billionaire from Silicon Valley.
And the name of this mendacious and greedy American billionaire?
Hershel Fink. Just a tad Hebraic. On-the-nose, you could say.
But the part during the play’s development where someone in the creative team says, “you know, maybe we shouldn’t lean into a Jewish stereotype like that” ... that didn’t happen. The alarm never went off and the antiracism machinery never went into action. If it had been a crime boss they just happened to name Alphonse Capone Soprano-Gotti, or a software engineer they named Ching Chang, or some other glaringly obvious racial stereotype, someone would have stepped up and said: “Not a good idea, is it.” But a mendacious billionaire named Hershel Fink? Nobody’s racism detectors went off.
Among the wokest of the woke.
Well, actually, there a Jewish director who attended one of the workshops months before, was shocked, and had tried to get the message through to the creative team, but somehow nobody passed that little tidbit — you’re fostering an antisemitic stereotype — along to the writer.
Only weeks before the play opened, when the first promotional materials started getting distributed, and they found themselves having to explain to the Jewish community why there was an avaricious billionaire named Hershel Fink, did they say … whooops, maybe we should rethink this.
They could have spared themselves humiliating headlines. And other trouble too.
But wait, didn’t the Royal Court at that point already have a special arrangement with an antiracist group called Sour Lemons hired exactly to get at “subliminal racial prejudice” in their productions? Yep.
Guess they missed one.
The folks associated with the play are certainly certain that they aren’t antisemites. And they just can’t imagine how such a thing could slip through. Same with Sour Lemons. They can’t imagine how such a thing could slip through.
“Jews Don’t Count” is, in other words, the story of dogs that don’t bark, when they should be barking their asses off. This is an example, but good gosh there are lots of similar examples.
The big difference
Why isn’t the left better at recognizing antisemitism in its own circles? Because, Baddiel argues (and I agree) it doesn’t really understand, on a kishkes level, that antisemitism comes in more forms than the tiki-torchy type.
Antisemitism on the left is different than antisemitism on the right, but too much of the left doesn’t know it.
To a first approximation, right-wing antisemitism is loud and proud. Left-wing antisemitism, conversely, is in denial, certain of its purity and innocence, no matter how thoroughly they have to gerrymander the definition of antisemitism to clear themselves. Only the right wing can really be antisemites, they say, we’re too good for that.
Because it’s not (usually) of the let’s-go-shoot-some-Jews variety, left antisemitism too often goes unrecognized as real racism. It gets relegated to a second rank, not put on the “real racism” shelf. It gets waved away reflexively as unworthy of concern, or else a product of Jewish over-sensitivity, or something. When it comes to fighting racism, on the left, even among good-hearted people, somehow — in David Baddiel’s phrase — Jews don’t count.
A while back I did a diary about a stellar example of non-Jews fighting antisemitism at considerable personal risk. I titled it “How do you know who your friends are?”
My question here is: “Who has the right to say who your enemies are? And if the Jews don’t have that right, why not?”
Aside, can’t help myself
Now, some of this urgency in dismissing left-wing antisemitism without bothering to look at it first, at least in the UK, is down to the power of the coordinated, desperate Labour party communications operations denying that Corbyn had screwed the pooch with the Jewish community. It’s an interesting counterpart of the coordinated, desperate GOP party communications operations denying that Trump had screwed the pooch on COVID.
Just as party-fueled MAGA-ites suddenly all became self-appointed experts in virology, unshakably certain they understand disease transmission far better than the mere Dr. Fauci (refuah shlemah), party-fueled Corbynistas all became self-appointed experts in antisemitism, certain they understood it far better than the mere Jews. And just as MAGA-ites show they’re down with their Fearless Leader by dismissing vaccines and those who endorse them, so do the Corbyn cadre gleefully deride the very possibility that the Jewish community of the UK might have a point about antisemitism among the Corbynistas. It’s all a plot, that’s all you need to know.
What constitutes antisemitism anyway? Who gets to say?
Well, how does the Jewish community define antisemitism?
No single, simple definition can describe antisemitism flawlessly; antisemitism is fundamentally an attitude, and attitudes leak out in uncontrollably infinite ways. So every definition of less than infinite length will have its flaws and omissions.
And there’s also the basic problem that it’s sometimes hard to get two of three Jews to agree that the day after Tuesday is Wednesday (because Thursday is also a day, and Thursday is also after Tuesday, is it not? Just not immediately after. And therefore...).
But there’s a considerable and growing consensus around this “working definition,” a simple framework from the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (not to be confused with that other IHRA, the International Hot Rod Association).
Here’s the main payload:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The first and obvious thing to note is this: the definition isn’t enough on its own — it doesn’t offer any guidance on what sort of thing those “rhetorical and physical manifestations” might be that qualifies them as antisemitic. So the definition is followed by eleven illustrative examples of things that could be considered antisemitic “taking into account the overall context.” Those examples act as a bridge between the abstract principle of the definition, and the actual manifestations of antisemitism in the real world.
They are meant to address the central question: what do Jews see, today, as antisemitic?
They aren’t eleven hard and fast, clear-bright-line rules. Instead, the document clearly says: you have to take into consideration the overall context. I think of it like a modern dictionary, not describing how words must or must not be used, but rather showing how they are used. The eleven examples aren’t given as “thou shalt not,” but “when antisemitism is expressed, here’s a set of paths it is often observed by Jews to take.” That’s why it’s called a “working definition”— it’s not a flowchart, it’s a set of points to consider when judging a statement. It introduces the examples with: “Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:”
The document has been endorsed by the US State Department, at least twenty states, lots of countries, and the EU, along with lots of other organizations and universities.
It is used by dozens of countries, and recommended by multi-governmental organizations such as the United Nations, European Union, and Organization of American States. It has been adopted by scores of civil society organizations, universities, sports leagues, and businesses. ... The U.S. Congress, in encouraging Europe to do more to combat the resurgence of antisemitism, supported the extensive adoption and use of the IHRA Working Definition in the Combating European Antisemitism Act of 2017, which was signed into law two years later. Its adoption by left-leaning governments like Sweden and Spain and political parties such as the UK Labour Party demonstrate that the IHRA Working Definition and vigorous criticism of Israel are not mutually exclusive.
It’s the become the most important definition of antisemitism in terms of wide acceptance.
It is also entirely a Jewish product, which matters. It’s from the Jews, not imposed on the Jews.
I also like its approach. It presumes the reader is a grown-up capable of appreciating context. It’s also descriptive and experience-based, ready to meet the real world rather than purely abstract.
Denial and definitions
I’ve said before (and will repeat) that denial is an important facet of left-wing antisemitism, and that it often takes the form of “well, I’m not antisemitic by my definition, so case closed.” That’s why it’s better to have an imperfect and finite but widely accepted definition of antisemitism like the IHRA’s, the product of the international Jewish community, than a thousand ad hocs or none at all.
It’s not a coincidence that the events that fatally severed the relations between Corbyn and the Jewish community in the summer of 2018 were largely about Labour’s re-definition of antisemitism — the NEC attempt to look like they’d adopted the IHRA document without actually doing it, and then stepping in to gerrymander it, “improve” it, until their bluff was called by epochal intervention (insert Terry Gilliam cartoon of stomping foot here) from the Jewish community. Corbyn Labour wanted a mechanism by which they could perpetuate their denial. The Jewish community refused to let them.
Grasping the nettle
That paragraph from the American Jewish Committee grazes against a topic that can’t be ignored. If danced around it, you would rightly accuse me of having failed to grasp the nettle.
It’s a key question, because this is where the train so often derails.
According to this definition, is criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic, yes or no?
The IHRA document says: it can be. It’s not a yes-or-no question. Some is, some isn’t. It can be, because an antisemitic trope or image or bit of vocabulary doesn’t magically stop being antisemitic when you apply it to Israel or Zionism. But if it’s like the criticism other nations get, “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
That’s a grown-up answer. I think it’s the only right answer in the real world. What gets lumped together for argument’s sake as “criticism of Israel” is a really very long and disparate continuum, ranging from “it’s too hot in the summer” to “Zionists kill gentile babies to drink their blood.” Some of it clearly isn’t antisemitic, but some of it clearly is. One size does not fit all.
Daily Kos has understood this question pretty well — that not all criticisms of Israel and Zionism are equally morally valid, and some of them are genuinely hateful. For example, one of the favorite go-to methods of antisemites discussing Israel is the Nazi analogy. They know that it’s powerfully infuriating in the way it flips history to use the great Jewish tragedy against Jews. That is, it’s not merely dazzlingly wrong on the factual level, it’s meant to trigger Jews. That’s why antisemites like it so much. And that’s why it gets bone mojo here.
So, the answer is really really really simple. I’m going to set it off in a block quote box, even though it’s not a quote.
Is criticism of Israel antisemitic, yes or no?
The answer is not yes, and the answer is not no.
The answer is, it can be, and so you have to look at it case by case.
An antisemitic trope doesn’t stop being antisemitic when applied to Israel or its supporters.
When a lot of Jews claim that something or someone is antisemitic: believe them.
The barrel without bottom
But there is a part of the left — the left left, you could call it — that acts as if no sentence that includes either the words “Zionist” or “Israel” could ever possibly be antisemitic, and that anyone who disagrees or protests is just a far-right-wing paid agent of Israel trying to stifle debate. No rhetorical low is too low. No matter what you’ve said, nobody has any right to object to it, whatever the other words are, because “it’s only criticism of Israel.” There’s no bottom to the barrel and it is always possible to go lower, considering yourself a righteous anti-racist all the while.
If you’ve declared ahead of time that discussion of a heavily Jewish topic — Israel/Zionism — is inherently immune to even the possibility of antisemitism, that “it’s not antisemitism, it’s anti-Zionism” means that anti-Zionism can’t be antisemitism, then you’ve created a terrific environment for the growth of antisemitism. Racism doesn’t need friendly soil, just soil that isn’t unfriendly.
And this is the problem the left left has made for itself. It’s built this sort of breeding ground for unlimited nastiness applied to all sorts of Jewish-adjacent topics. As if it’s not clear what that can lead to.
Why does it get worse the farther left you go?
Here’s a link to a really fascinating deep dive about why the far left was particularly vulnerable to this sort of unconstrained antisemitism pretending to be anti-Zionism: the intentionally coarsely antisemitic anti-Israel propaganda efforts of the USSR. I may at some point do a diary about just this, because it’s a very interesting point.
Okay, so where is the line?
So good criticism of Israel and Zionism is fine, but bad criticism of Israel is antisemitic. That’s not helpful on its own, is it. What’s the pragmatic dividing line, then, on Israel and antisemitism?
Here are the relevant examples from the IHRA — again, always to be considered in overall context.
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
- Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
As you can see, it’s not about generally silencing criticism of Israel. It’s about spotting horseshit thumb-in-the-eye antisemitism that uses Israel as a pretext and which cares about the Palestinians only as a stick to beat Jews with.
But there’s also an important point worth calling out separately: recognition of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
If you believe — as I do — that the Palestinian people, as a people, have the innate right of a people to self-determination in a Palestinian-majority state, but then go on to say that the Jewish people, as a people, do not have the innate right of a people to self-determination in a Jewish-majority state, then what you’re saying is that you believe the Jewish people are a lesser people with lesser rights. And that is how 75% of American Jews will hear it, myself included. Criticism, even harsh criticism, is one thing. “It shouldn’t even exist” is another thing completely. And yes, we hear the difference.
An American example
I’ve used Corbyn as the poster boy for left-wing antisemitism, but there’s a good example closer to home.
Cynthia McKinney. Remember her?
She went from being a progressive Democrat in Congress to being a full flaming ravemonster antisemite. How much of a ravemonster antisemite? She literally wrote the foreword to Gilad Atzmon’s latest book. She also seems to have earned a PhD in Buy Yourself a PhD Studies from a now-closed campus.
If it’s been a blissful decade or so since you last thought of her, in all her red-queen awfulness, sorry to break the streak.
If you tend to treat antisemitism as only a feature of the right wing, you also tend to unintentionally give people like McKinney (she’s a big Corbyn fan, by the way) a free pass.
And yet how does McKinney defend herself? Same as Atzmon and Corbyn — insisting she’s no antisemite, heaven forfend, and that she’s only being called one for daring defend the Palestinians. Which is like Trump saying that Democrats hate him for his haircut.
This week’s American example
[Edit: whoops, left this out] From a couple of days ago in the Washington Post.
Late Tuesday, Boston’s arm of the loosely organized movement urged its followers, as it had several times before, to explore an interactive “Mapping Project,” which it said would show “how imperialism, racism, militarism & Zionism are systemically connected in our communities.”
It does none of those things. The BDS-promoted Mapping Project is just the latest manifestation of an antisemitic canard alleging secret, hidden Jewish control of, and the buying of influence over, academia, the media, corporations, charities, law enforcement and more.
The project is, as Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said, “an antisemitic enemies list with a map attached.”
Keeping my karma clean
My analysis is different from Baddiel’s on a couple of key points. Karmic law demands I note this.
Baddiel is an agnostic — publicly, at least — about Israel, not a Zionist but not an anti-Zionist. He’s adamant: it’s not his battle. His book therefore doesn’t spend much time on how hard-left anti-Zionism fuels antisemitism, and I wish he had expanded a bit on the topic.
The other is that he’s also agnostic — publicly at least — about Corbyn’s antisemitism. He’s clearly no Corbyn fan, but there’s a difference between antisemitism and mere fifty-thumbed ineptitude, and he’s only willing to credit Corbyn with the latter, not the former. Maybe that’s politeness, maybe that’s libel laws, but I also think that Baddiel doesn’t consider Corbyn’s passive-aggression to be aggression. He recognizes that Corbyn has a big blind spot regarding left antisemitism, and that the blind spot was the direct and proximate cause of the biggest antisemitism crisis in the UK since Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. He’s quite certain (as I am) that Corbyn will go down in history as primarily a destructive rather than creative force. But, says Baddiel, not an antisemite.
Here I think he’s not so much overcautious as — what’s the word? — wrongity wrongity wrong.
Suppose your house is on fire. You call up the fire station and say: “My house is on fire.” And the guy at the other end says: “Sorry to hear that. I’m opposed to house fires. Have a good day.” No fire truck arrives. You call back: “My house is on fire.” And the guy at the other end says: “I’ve already made it clear that I’m opposed to house fires and indeed all forms of home disaster. Thank you for calling.” You call back: “My house is on fire. Will you do something about it?” And the response is a different voice: “The station chief is no longer taking your calls, because we’re tired of your calculated right-wing campaign of harassment and lies about his so-called inaction. You lot are obviously scheming to get him fired. How much does Israel pay you to do this? We see straight through you, and yes, we will send someone around to your house.” And then you hear, not a fire truck, but a horde of protesters circling your house and waving signs saying “STOP ZIONIST TORY PERSECUTION OF OUR FIRE STATION CHIEF” and chanting “he didn’t SET the fire, did he.”
Then the kicker: you find that this is how fires get “fought” only in Jewish neighborhoods, and everyone else gets firetrucks and water hoses and such.
That was Corbyn and the antisemitism fire he just couldn’t be arsed to address. At any time he could have sent in the fire trucks. Double standard and sins of omission.
And what’s the word for a double-standard that cuts specifically against Jews?
TL; DR
There’s a good, funny, thought-provoking new book about antisemitism on the left; there’s also a good and widely accepted IHRA “working definition” of antisemitism you should know about; antisemitism is different on the left than on the right; antisemitism doesn’t always come festooned with swastikas; criticism of Israel is neither automatically antisemitic nor automatically not antisemitic; failure to recognize left-wing antisemitism among its leadership led the UK Labour party into a racism crisis only a couple years ago.
And Sarah Silverman thinks you should read Baddiel’s book. Because you should.