It feels downright naive at this point, but in 2016 Donald Trump shocked the political world with his campaign’s willingness to deploy antisemitic dog whistles to attack his political rivals.
Prior to this, the common sense of US politics long held that there was no quicker way for one’s political career to be torpedoed than to be credibly accused of antisemitism. Setting aside how accurate this view was, or the extent to which such ideas themselves reflected delusions of powerful Jews pulling the strings in Washington, it held real sway over politicos. Since at least the 1980’s, even fascist-adjacent politicians had overwhelmingly either disavowed antisemitism, or been disavowed themselves by their own parties. As a consequence, discussions of antisemitism in mainstream US politics became increasingly abstracted from the reality of anti-Jewish oppression, with the figure of the Jew being wielded more often against an insufficiently hawkish foreign policy regime than against anti-Jewish bigotry. By the turn of the 21st Century, the concept had been practically emptied of any sincere political content in the public imaginary, with Republicans lobbing nonsense accusations of antisemitism at Barack Obama over his offer of sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for nuclear non-proliferation.
When Trump shared an image from a far-right Twitter account showing Hillary Clinton surrounded by money and emblazoned with a star of David reading “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever,” there seemed something anachronistic about even this mild, but clear manifestation of covert antisemitism on the national stage. The Washington Post called it a “turning point for many Jews.” Those Jews, of course, turned out to be right: Trump’s campaign only increased the frequency and boldness with which it employed antisemitic allusions, translating into a wave of antisemitic abuse against Jewish journalists, an increase in the frequency and scale of antisemitic violence in the US from which we have yet to recover, and ultimately a generational paradigm shift in perceptions of Jews, Jewishness, and anti-Jewish politics. Even setting aside the Anti-Defamation League’s infamously unreliable statistics regarding antisemitic incidents, polls have shown dramatic increases in antisemitic attitudes in the years since. Simply put, 2016 heralded a qualitative shift in the character of antisemitism in the United States, re-introducing political antisemitism (however covert) onto the political mainstage.
The year 2023 is proving to have been an equally seismic year for shaping the political and social stakes of Jewish identity in the US. The reactions from various strata of US society to Operation: Al-Aqsa Flood (the Palestinian resistance operation which took place on October 7, 2023) have created a perfect storm for the growth of a new-old kind of political antisemitism: more overt, more popular, and with a much higher ceiling on institutionalized violence than the dog whistle anti-Jewish politics of Trump’s first term. This new face of anti-Jewish oppression is already manifesting serious threats: threats to Jewish people first and foremost, from both right-wing nationalists and the repressive apparatus of the state; and also threats to the project of liberatory social transformation itself. Moreover, with relatively small pockets of the left having done any organizing or learning about antisemitism beyond what is necessary to dismiss false claims of antisemitism from Zionists, our movements have proven ill-equipped to confront these new threats. As Benjamin Balthaser diagnosed in 2019, “Where the liberal is blind to all structural oppression, the leftist only denies that it operates against Jews.” Thus, as the state and various corners of civil society have taken strides toward open warfare against a postmodern Judeo-Bolshevik threat, many activists–and particularly the militant wing of the Palestine solidarity movement, Jewish and non-Jewish alike–have taken the bait; chalking up left-wing critiques of antisemitism and Jewish fears about rising violence to extensions of Trump’s farcical efforts to “protect Jews” through state violence against Jewish and non-Jewish activists alike. The left, in other words, has proven inept at spotting and combating the mobilization of structural antisemitism while Stephen Miller and the Anti-Defamation League are among its vanguard element.
The ongoing normalization of political antisemitism manifest in attacks on Jews and attacks on the left by way of Jewish bodies portends a full-blown crisis of philosemitism–that is, the ideological and political framework through which antisemitism has been administered for some 80 years. This development begs for a left-wing response; and while our movements are not yet fully up to the task, some Jewish militants and their comrades have pointed the way forward. Namely, the politics of militant Jewish and collective liberation embraced by the radical edge of the 2024 campus solidarity encampments represent a critical dimension of an anti-fascist movement capable of meeting the current moment.
Philosemitism In Trouble
After October 7, 2023, the propaganda machine using false and exaggerated accusations of antisemitism to delegitimize Palestinian protest went into overdrive. An overwhelming majority of politicians from both political parties condemned the protests, and capitalist media uncritically printed every sensationalist lie used to smear the student movement as a hotbed of antisemitism. And yet, to an unprecedented extent, the propaganda alone wasn’t enough: The ruling class was increasingly forced to rely on heavy-handed repression–financial, administrative, and brute-force–to stave off a growing anti-Zionist counter-hegemony.
Starting in May, 2024 and continuing under the Trump administration, majorities of both parties have sought to withhold federal funds in order to force universities to discriminately repress Palestinian political speech at significant cost to their legitimacy as liberal bastions of free speech. Prominent capitalists have used the same strategy to force the hand of both civil society institutions and politicians, contributing to the widespread repression of a movement which–measured in terms of support for a ceasefire–held nearly 80% support among US-Americans. Astoundingly, despite the fact that Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization that has been roundly condemned as categorically antisemitic and overwhelmingly unpopular among even pro-Palestine activists for decades, 26% of US-Americans and fully 60% of respondents ages 18-24 said in August that they supported Hamas over the state of Israel. This level of dissonance between political commonsense and public opinion has therefore necessitated millions of dollars of spending on the deployment of cops and fascist and Zionist thugs to meet Palestine solidarity actions with billy clubs, pepper spray, and detention and threats of deportation.
As Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz wrote for Jewish Currents, the ruling-class moral panic over campus antisemitism is a “surface-level sign” of an underlying “crisis of hegemony”:
“[T]he ‘new antisemitism’ reveals a series of deepening crises faced by Israel and US imperialism, as well as the interplay between the ideological institutions of the state (the media or think tanks and advocacy organizations, such as the ADL), and its repressive institutions (campus security, police, and the threat of the National Guard). Yet as they are put into high gear, these systems reveal their violent nature, and so they risk igniting further resistance faster than they can quash it—a dynamic that … exploded [in the Spring of 2024], after the initial mass arrests of Columbia students inspired an ever-expanding wave of encampments across the US and around the world.”
In this respect, the remarkable feature of the post-October 7 moment is not the strength of the ideological attacks on Palestine solidarity activists for antisemitism, but their weakness. The sound and fury of the Zionist repression is the death knell of a regime of hegemonic pro-Israelism in US politics, reflecting one aspect of the deepening crisis of hegemony besetting the US empire more broadly.
What underlies this political shift? Notably, the internal, political aspect of this crisis of hegemony has manifested not nearly so much as a challenge to US imperialism per se (see: hundreds of thousands marching in the first mass demonstrations of the current administration under a list of demands which included, “Hands off NATO”); but as a crisis of the kind of post-nationalist, pro-imperialist politics which Hannah Arendt saw in The Origins of Totalitarianism as supplanting the European system of nation-states. From the 1940’s into the 21st Century, the expansion of US imperial hegemony well beyond its national and strictly colonial borders eased the contradiction between nation and state that necessitated antisemitism at the center of the turn-of-the-century nationalist program.1 The nation was broadened: categories like Frenchman and German gave way to the Clash of Civilizations and the myth of the Free World. This internationalist scope of US politics in particular led to a reorganization of structural antisemitism in line with what critical theorists have called “secondary antisemitism”–more specifically, a species of it that I call here philosemitism.
Briefly, the Judeo-Bolshevik threat was recast as a threat posed by a 5th column of communist infiltrators, outside agitators, cultural Marxists, and coastal elites; one threatening the very regime that had liberated the Jews, welcomed them into the halls of power, and established the Jewish state, no less! (Notably, contrary to popular leftist belief, this development was not downstream from Zionism: Even as Eisenhower was pushing for sanctions against the state of Israel as part of an attempt to ally with Egypt, he could take up the philosemitic mantle: “Our forces saved the remnant of the Jewish people of Europe for a new life and a new hope in the reborn land of Israel. Along with all men of good will, I salute the young state and wish it well.”) When the results were just as manifestly anti-Jewish as the days of explicit antisemitism, a layer of court Jews–middle-class, white supremacist institutions like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federations, as well as an ascendent class of white, Jewish professionals and state administrators–could be called upon to legitimize the Christian state. Thus, the supposedly post-antisemitic United States has seen antisemites drive post-war immigration policy; dismantle West German denazification; blackball, incarcerate, and execute Jews in the name of anti-Communism through both the McCarthyite and Civil Rights periods; and capture the Republican Party with a Christian nationalist politics counterposing real Americans to the atheistic, communist influence of Hollywood and banking elites, all the while entangling with the antisemitic far right as it waged a low-intensity guerilla war on Jewish people and symbols of Jewish belonging in the United States throughout the 1980’s and ‘90s.
Now that the unfettered domination of US capital over most of the world no longer looks viable even in the medium term, the irredentist nationalism of the pre-war period has returned; and this philosemitic organization of anti-Jewish power has shown itself to be much more than the incidental fellow-traveller of a US imperialism with a particular narrative relationship to the events of the so-called Jewish Century. Antisemitism, as taken up by Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Moishe Postone, and others, is an immutable feature of the modern system of nation-states baked into the core ideological commitments of capitalist politics. Today, as evidenced by the growing number of Republican defectors from philosemitic politics on the one hand and the growing confidence of the Palestine solidarity movement in simply dismissing accusations of antisemitism–those made in good and bad faith–on the other, the philosemitic strategy of co-optation and collaboration in the exercise of anti-Jewish power is becoming increasingly unstable.
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The decline of philosemitic hegemony was already well underway before October of 2023. QAnon, a modern-day antisemitic blood libel, grew to millions of followers during the first Trump presidency and resulted in mass protests targeting prominent Jewish business moguls, politicians, and health officials. Ye’s antisemitic tirades in the Fall of 2022 produced a wave of antisemitic violence and political organizing unprecedented in decades, and polls from early that year showed rates of agreement with antisemitic statements approaching (and sometimes exceeding) those of the early 1960’s, when antisemitic immigration and education quotas and restrictive housing covenants still carried the force of law. (As of 2024, around a quarter of people polled in the US think that “Jews have too much power in the business world” and “Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street,” 2.5 times the respective numbers from a decade earlier.) Tailing these shifts in mass political culture, a layer of far-right political and media figures began to chafe against the bounds of philosemitic discourse, most notably resulting in Elon Musk’s routine endorsement and platforming of antisemitism on X and the antisemitic #BanTheADL campaign carried out by Musk and the far-right Groyper movement in 2023.
The outbreak of mass struggle in opposition to the genocide in Gaza hastened this process. Rates of antisemitic violence increased dramatically: In the six months following October 7, several hundred synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish-owned businesses were targeted by antisemitic bomb threats. Non-exhaustively, during this time, Jews were the victims of dozens of antisemitic assaults (not counting confrontations at protests), and antisemites burned down Jewish-owned businesses, smashed synagogue windows, disrupted dozens of government proceedings and Jewish community events, fired guns at two places of worship, and rammed a car into a school. Two were arrested before carrying out additional armed attacks at Jewish gatherings. Prominent antisemitic activists doubled or tripled their social media followings, amounting to millions of new followers of the antisemitic right. Antisemitic, right-wing anti-Zionists broke into the mainstream, leading a significant minority of the MAGA commentariat to break with either the state of Israel, or else with Zionist activists in the US, whom they characterized as opportunistic–willing to make sacrifices for their own narrow interests, but not for the overall plight of white settlers. In many cases, this led commentators into full-throated antisemitism: Candace Owens ran segments sympathizing with the Nazi brown shirts, defending Ye’s antisemitism, and suggesting that sinister gangs of Jewish elites in Hollywood and D.C. control pop culture and politics through blackmail. Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Nick Fuentes began speaking in dramatically more explicit, bigotedly anti-Jewish terms than ever before–even before the re-election of Donald Trump brought the world’s most high-profile antisemite into government.
Across the Republican Party, antisemitic activists made breakthroughs: the Conservative Political Action Conference reversed its ban on Nick Fuentes and other neo-Nazis attending, and the Executive Committee of the Texas GOP voted in December of 2023 “against barring the party from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.” Three months later, Mark Robinson won the Republican gubernatorial primary in North Carolina despite (or because of) a truly impressive history of support for Rothschild conspiracy theories and believing that Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew” and “a satanic marxist…to pull the shekels out of your Schv*rtze pockets.” Just last month, Tucker Carlson reversed his prior dismissive stance toward Nick Fuentes with a two-hour interview in which Fuentes attacked “organized Jewry in America.” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended the interview against what he disparaged as attacks by the “globalist class” on the Foundation’s values of “loyalty” to “Christ first, and America always,” marking a qualitative shift toward normalization of relations between the MAGA mainstream and its openly antisemitic flank.
In this context of a societal seachange vis a vis the permissibility and popularity of anti-Jewish bigotry, and particularly, broader forms of political antisemitism, it is naive to imagine that this phenomenon would somehow pass the left by. The friendliness of some segments of the Palestine solidarity movement with fascist opportunists feigning solidarity isn’t something to be buried for optics, but a serious political challenge to be addressed. Thus, maximalist claims from some anti-Zionists that antisemitism is totally absent from the movement are untrue.
There are unfortunately many instances of antisemitism from anti-Zionist protesters. During my own participation in last year’s encampments, I saw signs with antisemitic slogans like “Blood and Soil” and “America First”; overheard conversations speculating that Jewish counter-protesters might be Mossad agents sent to disrupt the movement; and generally witnessed plenty of political murkiness with respect to the precise relationship of Jewish institutions and the Israel lobby to the US’s continuing support for the genocide in Gaza, often betraying unchecked antisemitic assumptions about how political power works and who holds it. At a demonstration I attended earlier this year, activists threw pennies at a Jewish counter-protester. The word “Zio,” an antisemitic slur popularized by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, continues to be frequently and casually invoked, with concerns about the slur’s past often met with suspicion of Zionist sympathies. More conservative pro-Palestinian forces in the encampments even engaged in some of the same ideological patterns described below, warning students to beware of “outside agitators” and “white anarchists” who were supposedly conspiring to manipulate their protests into senseless violence.
So yes, there is antisemitism in the Palestine solidarity movement. How could it be otherwise? There has never been a social movement that hasn’t inadvertently reproduced aspects of the society it seeks to transform. To imagine or expect a movement in which antisemitism is unheard of is to deny the pervasiveness of antisemitism in US society–an ironic contradiction imminent to philosemitic politics which assert a constant, hyperbolic crisis of antisemitism in all places while refusing to take aim at the state, the exploiters, or any other structure which might actually enforce anti-Jewish oppression. Antisemitism just doesn’t pertain to the movement’s program. In fact, when the forces of fascism and the antisemitic state came to enact violence against Jews, the encampments were the first line of defense.
McCarthyism Is Antisemitism
On April 23, 2024, the NYPD descended on a Passover seder in Brooklyn, disrupting the service and arresting more than 300 Jews. Two days later, a hundreds-strong march of Kahanists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and other Zionists counter-protested the Palestinian- and Jewish-led encampment at Columbia University. The NYPD watched as fascists scaled the gates to hurl racist and antisemitic insults at the protesters. They specifically targeted Jewish activists, assaulting them and calling them “fake Jews” and “Kapos.” This scene, of course, paled in comparison to the would-be pogrom on UCLA’s campus on April 30 of that year, when a similar collection of Christian nationalist and Jewish fascists launched a brutal attack on Palestinian and Jewish protesters under the protection of the LAPD. As the fascist mob tore down the protesters’ barricades, one assailant was heard shouting, “we’re here to finish what Hitler started.”
These examples are representative of a persistent tendency of Zionist repression to collapse into anti-Jewish violence. As of January 31 of last year, 37% of the people arrested in Germany for “inciting racial hatred” and “anti-constitutional symbols” (laws originally targeting Nazis) since October had been Jewish. After the antisemitism crisis in the U.K. Labour Party, Jews are thirteen times more likely to be expelled by the party for supporting proscribed left-wing organizations and six times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism than non-Jews. Jews make up about 2% of the population of the United States and Canada, but members of Jewish organizations (not counting the many Jewish members of not-specifically-Jewish pro-Palestine groups) make up nearly 9% of entries on the Canary Mission blacklist of supposed antisemites. Though it appears stalled in committee, “the most punitive law against Jews to be enacted in the US since the Immigration Act of 1924” was reintroduced in February of this year in the name of “antisemitism awareness.”
While most efforts to explain this pattern of reactionary Zionism’s antisemitic impact have stumbled on the apparent irony of a state doing violence against Jews in order to protect Jews, this charge of hypocrisy misunderstands the stakes of the Zionist reaction. The repression of the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States is not, first and foremost, about protecting the Israeli state (and even less about protecting Jewish people); but about protecting the US state against challenges from below of any kind. Seen in terms of its structural function, Zionism proves to be wholly un-unique among strands of conservative-reactionary politics in producing anti-Jewish harm under an ostensibly secular or even Jewish banner. In fact, since the mid-19th century, the repression of revolutionary and progressive social movements has served as the central political project through which support for anti-Jewish power has been marshaled in the West, and on whose basis said power has been deployed. In this light, the farce of a police crackdown on Jews in the name of combating antisemitism appears less like a quirky accident of history than a serious threat to Jews living under Christian hegemonic states. The tendency of Zionist repression to penalize Jews in particular is not ironic hypocrisy: It is continuous with the generally antisemitic character of anti-radical, anti-communist, and otherwise reactionary politics.
A full explanation of the association of Jews with political radicalism is beyond the scope of this article. Briefly, perhaps the first instance of modern antisemitism as distinct from medieval regimes of anti-Jewish domination propagated precisely this association when Edmund Burke, following the French Revolution, wrote that it was the influence of radical Jews and Freemasons which drove the French masses to rebel.
Regarding the Dreyfus Affair, which galvanized modern European antisemitism around a fabricated espionage charge against a French Jewish artillery officer, Baroness Marguerite Steinheil wrote that it was “no longer between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, but between the Republic and enemies of the Republic, between radicals and socialists on one hand, Royalists and ‘anti-Semites’ on the other.” Regarding the British Union of Fascists’ antisemitic agitation in London’s East End, William Zuckerman wrote, “Fundamentally the British Fascists’ outburst against the Jews is an outburst against British Labour, ‘Reds’, Socialists and Communists … Its anti-Semitism is a guise under which its profounder class feeling is hidden.” The first English translation of material from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion removed any references to Jews and replaced them with “Bolsheviks.” And in a study of 581 essays written for a 1934 Nazi essay contest on the subject, “Why I Became a Nazi,” 63% of entrants treated “Marxists/communists/socialists … as the main enemy.” The figure for Jews was 18%, with one-third of essays expressing no explicit antisemitism whatsoever.
Does this suggest, as Zuckerman concludes, that antisemitism is “more political and economic than national and racial”? Only in the sense that every form of oppression must be grounded in the political and economic facts of life, and does not simply arise from some pre-social, simple bigotry. Oppressive ideologies do not primarily manifest in their full, genocidal potential to be taken up or discarded in the marketplace of ideas, but rather reproduce themselves through concrete systems, institutions, modes of politics, and techniques of control. Other forms of oppression are mobilized on the basis of defending the family, fighting crime, or protecting livelihoods. They live, in the final instance, not in the heads of their adherents, but in the institutions whose imperatives shape their unfolding in social life–police, prisons, schools, borders, banks, etc. In the case of antisemitism, its main themes, metaphysical assumptions, and ideological touchpoints–in a word, the antisemitic structure of feeling–is so embedded in this fundamental, necessary aspect of capitalism’s reproduction (i.e., anti-communism, and more generally, the politics of reaction as such) that it cannot help but be expressed in it.
The most important example of this phenomenon from US history, as mentioned above, is the Second Red Scare:
“Two-thirds of those questioned in the 1952 McCarthy hearings were Jewish, despite Jews accounting for under 2 percent of the American population. Congressman John Rankin delighted in ‘unmasking’ the Jewish names of Hollywood actors and directors while under HUAC investigation, and of course, the only two people ever executed on federal espionage charges during the Cold War, the Rosenbergs, were Jewish … Jewish members of the Communist Party referred to the Red Scare as an American pogrom.”
But this fact that no matter the intentions or identity of the anti-communist, the ideological figure of the Jew looms large over her understanding of the threat posed by radical politics, expresses itself across times and places far more inhospitable to political antisemitism than the United States of the 1950’s. During the 1960’s, chapters of the White Citizens Council who criticized the antisemitism of the Ku Klux Klan nevertheless forced whole towns’ Jewish populations to join their organization under threat of violence for fear that Jews were responsible for bringing Northern “outside agitators” to the South. In the 1970’s, Richard Nixon created a list of Jewish federal employees and dismissed antiwar protesters as “a hell of a lot of Jews.” In my research, I’ve found Jews to be wildly overrepresented among left-wing figures assassinated by the right in the post-war US–by a factor of perhaps ten or more. And today, even among the segments of the right not explicitly motivated by antisemitism, the same disparities play out. One need only invoke the names of George Soros, Jeffrey Epstein, or the alleged founders of “cultural Marxism.”
An application of this history to the present requires re-centering Western imperialism in our understanding of Zionism. The purported Jewishness of the European settler-colony in Palestine is ultimately immaterial to the US state’s orientation toward that project and the repressive activity in which it engages to defend it. Yes, many Jews–even the near-entirety of the elite-captured Jewish communal institutional apparatus–have enlisted in the political battle which has occasioned the wave of anti-Jewish violence described in the opening paragraphs of this section. This is nothing new: From the labor movement, to anti-racist organizing, to the gay liberation movement, to McCarthyism itself, Jewish elites and their institutions have never been shy about advocating for violence against their co-religionists in the name of Jewish interests (which just so happen to align with their own capitalist allegiances time and time again). This has never done away with the disproportionately anti-Jewish impact of political repression, nor even protected those Jewish elites from the bombings and shootings that waves of reactionary terror tend to unleash on Jewish communities.
Jews are (obviously) not Zionism’s central victims, and the fight against Zionism is not a fight to redeem Judaism. It is a fight led by Palestinians for their own liberation; and Jews have (so far) been spared the superlative state violence deployed against Mohammed Khalil and other immigrant students as the Trump administration transparently uses the Palestine solidarity movement as a wedge issue to push for the expansion of political policing and the state elimination of radicals. And yet, recognitions of this reality have too often discarded the Jewish stake in anti-Zionist struggle, with activists using slogans like “Zionism is antisemitic” as cheap rhetorical points in place of grappling with what that means for Jewish participation in this movement. Understandable though they may be, expressions of exasperation at having to talk about antisemitism again–or of disinterest “in memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans”–are misguided. In fact, the relative sway of that classic dog whistle of antisemitic McCarthyism–the “outside agitator”–even within our own camp emphasizes the degree to which our movement has not inoculated itself against the antisemitism of the US state, and must develop a better analytical lens vis a vis anti-Jewish oppression in order to defend itself.
Many anti-Zionists respond to the bad-faith deployment of the hyperbolic fears of Jewish students with simple denial; but there absolutely is an epidemic of antisemitism on college campuses. It is just not coming from anti-Zionist activism. It is coming from the cops and fascist agitators working to crush the few existing spaces available for Jews to live Jewishly without first enlisting in the projects of white supremacy and empire. When universities disband Jewish Voice for Peace, bar the celebration of Jewish holidays in ways that express solidarity with Palestinians, and punitively target Jewish organizers, they are engaging in a blatantly antisemitic form of forced assimilation: Jews in particular must practice loyalty to the US’s imperial stance on Zionism, or lose their right to practice Judaism–indeed, become illegible as Jews to the state, with all the implications for civil rights law and political protections against antisemitism that entails. Fortunately, the dominant trend in last year’s pro-Palestine encampment protests on college campuses was to show remarkable flexibility and political clarity in shifting to confront this oppressive threat head-on; not as a diversion from the battle to free Palestine, but as an expression of its conflict with the white, Christian supremacist state committing violence against Palestinians and Jews alike.
Jewish Politics In the Encampments
Returning to the issue of antisemitism in the campus solidarity encampments, what was remarkable was not the mere existence of slippages into antisemitism marginal to the movement’s political content: This, as stated above, was to be expected. What was remarkable was the encampments’ lived commitment to combating anti-Jewish oppression–a deeper and more textured commitment than has been the norm in left-wing movements for a long time.
No doubt, this was in large part a consequence of the scale of repression being meted out against Jewish activists in this wave of struggle. Left-wing Jewish organizations were banned, Jews lost our jobs and education, and we were doxxed and purged from the membership rolls of our synagogues at a scale unseen in a decade or more. When Itamar Ben Gvir came to New York, it was an Israeli-born Jew who survived mob violence by a group of Kahanists chanting “Death to Arabs.” In the post-October 7 political moment, the reality of the Jewish stake in the struggle for a free Palestine clarified itself in practice; and as a consequence, the relationship of Jews to this movement changed, for however brief a time.
As Jewish communal institutions became increasingly hostile to their anti-Zionist constituents, Jewish activists built new forms of Jewish life directly in the encampments. On campuses around the country, kosher-for-Passover food was more accessible in protesters’ food tents than in university dining halls, and Jews organized seders and daily minyanim for communal prayer–services which were defended by non-Jewish comrades. Given the inaccessibility of elite-captured Jewish institutions for poor Jews, Jews of color, and Jewish radicals even before October 7, these spaces were many protesters’ first experience of Jewish ritual life in years–a significant experiment in Jewish de-assimilation.
Encampments in many cities hosted political education and training programs on combating antisemitism. This kind of education–that is, education focused on combating antisemitism rather than defending against accusations of it–is exceedingly rare on the left. Inside the container of a liberated zone brought together by solidarity with Palestine, organizers were excited to create space for shared learning about their Jewish comrades’ struggle against oppression. Moreover, contrary to the assumptions of liberal Palestine activists and Zionists alike that anti-Zionism “slips into” antisemitism when taken “too far,” this trend of more deeply collective liberationist politics actually deepened as the level of militancy and the deployment of confrontational tactics within the encampments increased. With the weight of the police state coming down on the encampments and protesters being forced to defend their movement with some degree of force, concepts like movement “ownership” and allyship gave way to authentic solidarity; and the struggle for Palestine broadened into an abolitionist struggle, directly confronting the state. It is precisely this path of broadening and deepening of militancy–not the kind of deference politics which scapegoated militants for state violence–through which we might be able to construct a left prepared to undermine oppression, rather than merely recognizing it, and armed more generally to meet the current period of intensifying fascization.
Perhaps most importantly, the tone with which Jews approached and were welcomed into this phase of the movement was just different than at any other moment I’ve experienced as a Palestine solidarity activist of more than a decade. The predominant anti-Zionist response to antisemitism used to consist of outright denialism: In 2009, Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir released Defamation, a documentary which platformed many people, including multiple Jewish leftists, arguing explicitly against any talk of, or struggle against, antisemitism. “When you are the richest, wealthiest, most successful ethnic group in the United States,” says Norman Finkelstein in the documentary, “you’ve got the world on a platter … and you sit around and you’re talking about antisemitism. It’s just kind of shameful.” From Israeli peacenik Uri Avnery: “In America, hardly any anti-Semitism exists. It’s a myth. There is none.” Avnery and Finkelstein’s views have certainly declined in popularity since 2009, tracking the rapidly changing political milieu for Jews described above. Nevertheless, there are still two predominant, legible modes of engagement with the Palestine solidarity movement (and in many cases, the left more generally) for Jews interested in doing politics Jewishly: the role of an “ally” present in the movement to shield Palestinians from unfair criticisms, and the role of an intracommunal activist, for whom justice in Palestine is a Jewish issue–that is, a question of the redemption of Judaism from institutions who oppress others. Very little space has been made or claimed for Jews as leaders in their own struggle for liberation–part of a broader vision of collective liberation for all peoples.
This changed in the encampments. Hadas Thier gave powerful testimony on this subject in The Nation:
“I am an Israeli-born Jew who has been involved in Palestine activism for over 20 years, and I have never experienced the level of solidarity and the depth of understanding about antisemitism that I am seeing across college campuses right now. In the past, I had seen antisemitism only on the fringe of the movement … At the center of the movement, I always felt welcome and comfortable as an Israeli-born Jew. But, still, until the recent phase of the new movement for Palestine emerged on American campuses last fall, I had never before witnessed such a deliberate commitment to learning about and confronting antisemitism head on.”
The old scripts aspiring to define the horizons of Jewish political subjectivity within the constraints of “allyship” were still there in the anecdotes about Zionist propaganda in Jewish summer camps and in the iconic “Not In Our Name” shirts from Jewish Voice for Peace (i.e., strains of rhetoric which tacitly accept the Zionist assertion that a genocide is being prosecuted in Palestine on behalf of Jews, rather than empire). But new scripts also emerged in which Jews were positioned not only as allies, but comrades–fighters in a struggle for their own liberation, a struggle deeply intertwined with the struggle for justice in Palestine. Jewish activists articulated their stake in the movement in terms of the contemporary struggle against antisemitism: “‘They [University administration] do not care about the safety of the Jewish students that are … part of this movement. And they’ve shown that by arresting and by attempting to erase the fact that we even exist.’ Anti-Zionist Jews … ‘are not part of [the administration’s] fight against antisemitism.’” This understanding was affirmed by the movement at large in every small act of solidarity with Jews in the encampments and every message recognizing the Jewish stake in this struggle. It is notable, and novel, that in decrying the police repression of the occupation of Hind’s Hall, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine charged that “‘Safety’ does not apply to POC, Jewish [emphasis added], [or] Palestinian students at Columbia.”
It is this kind of solidarity–composed of both a confident Jewish movement for self-liberation and an enthusiastically supportive and co-conspiratorial broader left–which is needed to meet the moment characterized by a crisis of philosemitism. The collapse of philosemitism need not spell disaster for Jews: The implementation of philosemitism was not so much a step toward any kind of permanent Jewish integration in US society so much as a paradigmatic example of what Reva Siegel has called preservation through transformation, one with disastrous effects not just for the majority of Jews, but also for Black folks, Palestinians, and any number of other victims of US empire. The collapse of the philosemitic system has opened the door to horrors; but it is also a necessary precondition for the resituating of the struggle for Jewish liberation where it belongs, squarely among the fights of all the exploited and oppressed. Staving off those horrors will require a full-fledged revival of the kind of politics we saw blossom in the encampments: a militant abolitionism motivated by an ethos of collective liberation for all people, and a confident Jewish liberationism–one capable of breaking through the left’s inexperience in challenging political antisemitism and politicizing, organizing, and mobilizing the left’s general opposition to anti-Jewish oppression.
Notes
- See Jugen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, 2005.
Naomi Bennet is an antifascist organizer, writer, and political educator in Chicago, IL. Find her work on Jewish liberation and the struggle against antisemitism on the Socialism Conference podcast, as well as Jewish Currents, Truthout, Tempest, and elsewhere.
Feature image: The Columbia University Encampment. Photo by عباد ديرانية – Own work, CCo