Continuity and Discontinuity

This paper argues that antizionism must be understood, like the antisemitism that came before it, as an ideology. Here I draw upon Arendt’s definition of ideology as a radical distortion of social and political relations. I draw also upon Fine and Spencer’s understanding of the Jewish question as the antisemitic reaction to Jewish emancipation. I argue that antizionism is a reconfiguration of that reaction in the context of Jews’ modern emancipation in the form of national self-determination in the State of Israel. While that modern reaction, antizionism, displays both continuity and discontinuity with the antisemitism that came before it, it remains a manifestation of the Jewish question

Disavowal. Distinction and Repetition: Alain Badiou and the Radical Tradition of Antisemitism

My focus in this chapter on the militant French philosopher, Alain Badiou, emerges from my work into the various ways that the Shoah has been incorporated into antisemitic ways of thinking. In what follows, I argue that Badiou’s thoughts on what he terms “uses of the word ‘Jew’”3 in general, as well as on the Shoah in particular, offers a series of continuities with what can be called the radical tradition of antisemitism—a tradition that reaches back at least as far as Bruno Bauer’s anti-emancipationist, and avant le lettre, antisemitic texts of the 1840s. It simultaneously questions the notion of a sharp rupture between what have been termed “classical” and “new” antisemitism. It questions also the place of the Shoah in recent critical thinking within a dialectic of disavowal, dis-tinction, and repetition

Human Rights Revisionism and the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism

This article focuses on the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA): a self-appointed group of parliamentarians dedicated to extinguishing what it calls “the new antisemitism.” Working from a Gramscian perspective, we identify key discursive strategies in coalition publications and testimony and argue that despite the CPCCA’s pretence to being a forum for liberal-pluralist debate, in fact it is engaged in an ideological reframing of human rights designed to restrict political debate. It does so, paradoxically, by drawing on the language of left-liberalism, which contrasts with recent ideological interventions aiming to secure the priorities of the neo-liberal state

Being Jewish in Scotland

A Glasgow academic looks at recent data on being Jewish in Scotland and finds a disturbing intensification of antisemitism

Menorah Review (No. 66, Winter/Spring, 2007)

A Collection by MR\u27s Poet Laureate -- Examining Historiography -- Revisiting Jewish Radicalism -- The World of Rabbi Nathan -- Why a Dictionary of Antisemitis

Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98

Virdee's essay explores the relationship between English socialists and migrant Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice. Reading this labour history against the grain, with a greater attentiveness to questions of race and class, helps to make more transparent both the prevalence and structuring force of socialist antisemitism, as well as English and Jewish socialist opposition to it. In particular, the essay suggests that the dominant socialist discourse was intimately bound up with questions of national belonging and this directly contributed to a racialized politics of class that could not imagine migrant Jews as an integral component of the working class. At the same time, such socialist antisemitism was also challenged by a minority current of English Marxists whose conceptions of socialism refused to be limited by the narrow boundaries of the racialized nation-state. And they were joined in this collective action by autonomous Jewish socialist organizations who understood that the liberation of the Jewish worker was indivisible from that of the emancipation of the working class in general. With the help of Eleanor Marx and others, these latter strands entangled socialist politics with questions of combatting antisemitism, and thereby stretched existing conceptions of class to encompass the Jewish worker

Conversations with Robert: “Jews as Jews” and the Critique of the Critique

I first met Robert some twenty-five years ago. I had just begun my PhD. As time passed, it was evident that things were not working out between me and my then supervisor, and Robert, whom I had met earlier, stepped in and offered to take over. After a little hesitation (and for the very reasons Robert had identi- fied), I agreed. I think it would not be an over- statement to say that without that intervention, I would have simply given up. Robert had an uncanny way of building up what was, by then, my shattered confidence. It was only after I had finished that I realized how Robert put me back together both emotionally and academically. Robert would respond to my work, first, by saying how good it was, how insightful, and then spend the rest of the time gently taking it (but not me) to pieces while at the same time moving me in directions and making connections I did not see myself.</jats:p

A Quantitative Approach to Understanding Online Antisemitism

A new wave of growing antisemitism, driven by fringe Web communities, is an increasingly worrying presence in the socio-political realm. The ubiquitous and global nature of the Web has provided tools used by these groups to spread their ideology to the rest of the Internet. Although the study of antisemitism and hate is not new, the scale and rate of change of online data has impacted the efficacy of traditional approaches to measure and understand these troubling trends. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study of online antisemitism. We collect hundreds of million posts and images from alt-right Web communities like 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) and Gab. Using scientifically grounded methods, we quantify the escalation and spread of antisemitic memes and rhetoric across the Web. We find the frequency of antisemitic content greatly increases (in some cases more than doubling) after major political events such as the 2016 US Presidential Election and the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. We extract semantic embeddings from our corpus of posts and demonstrate how automated techniques can discover and categorize the use of antisemitic terminology. We additionally examine the prevalence and spread of the antisemitic "Happy Merchant" meme, and in particular how these fringe communities influence its propagation to more mainstream communities like Twitter and Reddit. Taken together, our results provide a data-driven, quantitative framework for understanding online antisemitism. Our methods serve as a framework to augment current qualitative efforts by anti-hate groups, providing new insights into the growth and spread of hate online.Comment: To appear at the 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2020). Please cite accordingl

“Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech”

The challenge posed by legal indeterminacy to legal legitimacy has generally been considered from points of view internal to the law and its application. But what becomes of legal legitimacy when the legal status of a given norm is itself a matter of contestation? This article, the first extended scholarly treatment of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s new definition of antisemitism, pursues this question by examining recent applications of the IHRA definition within the UK following its adoption by the British government in 2016. Instead of focusing on this definition’s substantive content, I show how the document reaches beyond its self-described status as a “non-legally binding working definition” and comes to function as what I call a quasi-law, in which capacity it exercises the de facto authority of the law, without having acquired legal legitimacy. Broadly, this work elucidates the role of speech codes in restricting freedom of expression within liberal states