antisemitism

Even after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 US presidential election, the rise of the far right remains a defining feature of our time and a central challenge for the left. As analysts have pointed out, Trump’s losing vote total was the second-highest ever won by a US presidential candidate. Events since the election have confirmed his hold over the Republican Party and its transformation into a nationalist party of the far right. Even as Republicans continue to enjoy broad support from capital on such issues as tax cuts and social and environmental deregulation, multinational capital has lost the hegemonic influence over the Republican Party that it exercised over both major US parties from the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. [1]

Nor has Trump’s narrow defeat dented the prospects of far-right parties elsewhere, including in Western Europe. Besides the US, this article focuses on three northwest European states: Britain, France and the Netherlands. In all four of these countries, the far right is now either sharing power or a serious contender to gain or regain power.

In England, the ruling Conservative Party has since the 2016 Brexit referendum been undergoing a transformation into a right-wing nationalist party, even if its transformation is not yet as far-reaching as Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party. In France, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen won a record 41.5% of the vote in the second round of the presidential election in spring 2022, and the 89 seats her party won in the subsequent legislative elections made it the single biggest opposition party in parliament. In the Netherlands, the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) and Forum for Democracy (FvD) won almost 16 per cent of the vote in the 2021 parliamentary election.

The clear main task for the left in this situation is to organise the broadest, most effective possible resistance to the far right’s advance. At the same time, the prospect looms larger of having to resist the far right, in one or more countries, after its accession to government – as in the US under Trump from 2017 to 2021. This increases the importance of understanding the ideology that binds the far right together, helping account for its support in some parts of the population and its vulnerability in others.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

The central and defining ideological hallmarks of the far right today, along with hostility to the left, are nationalism and racism, and particularly in northwestern Europe what is called ‘Islamophobia’. Strictly speaking, this is a relatively new, culturalised permutation of racism in which ‘the Muslim immigrant has replaced the Jew’ and ‘fear of multiculturalism and hybridity … brings up to date the old anxiety about “blood mixing”’.[2] With nationalism and racism as the core elements in its popular appeal, the far right can be flexible and even opportunistic on other issues in different countries, or even from year to year in the same country. On many issues, demogogy is the far right’s only consistency.[3]

This flexibility and opportunism are evident in relation particularly to Jews and LGBTIQ people. Historically, antisemitism and hostility to gay people were manifest in Nazism and many other fascist movements; for the Nazis, antisemitism was central. Today, however, the far right’s relation to Jews and LGBTIQ people is more variable and complicated. This article traces and analyses the far right’s varying, shifting and contradictory relationship to Jews and LGBTIQ people in Britain, France, the Netherlands and the US.

The article argues that the contemporary far right’s conflicted attitudes towards its countries’ Jews reflects its hesitation to wholeheartedly embrace a vision of a racially pure, culturally homogenous nation. This reflects processes of capitalist globalisation and European capitalist integration that are so far advanced as to make a complete break with them seem dubious even to leading sectors of the nationalist far right. Similarly, women and lesbian/gay people have come to play such an extensive and visible role in the North American and European waged labour force as to make a complete rejection of feminism and of lesbian/gay rights seem implausible even for many far-right forces that try to draw the line at ‘gender ideology’ and transgender liberation.

At the same time, far-right leaderships’ quest for a modus vivendi with capital fuels tensions with the intense nationalism, racism, sexism and heterosexism, not only of more extreme far-right currents, but also of much of the far right’s own broad base. Hostility towards Jews and LGBTIQ people among many of the far right’s adherents reflects a vision of both groups as prosperous and powerful. This is a drastic distortion of reality, even if Jewish working classes have declined since 1945 and there have been new openings for professional and managerial careers for gay/lesbian people since the 1970s.

This article contends, however, that feminist social reproduction theory reveals a certain rational kernel in far-right hostility to Jews and queers. In very different ways, Jews and LGBTIQ people play distinctive roles in the mutating social reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies: Jews disproportionately in cultural and ideological sectors, and LGBTIQ people in shifts from ‘biological’ to market-oriented families. Antisemitism and anti-LGBTIQ ideology feed on deeply rooted anxieties among millions of working-class and petty-bourgeois people about threats to ‘their’ cultures and ways of life, anxieties on which the far right can sometimes capitalise.

All these contradictory trends result in a constant tension on the far right between rejection of Jews and LGBTIQ people, on the one hand, and efforts to harness some Jews and some lesbian/gay people to the project of a more authoritarian, nationally-oriented and socially-conservative capitalist order, on the other. The clash between strands of the far right that are explicitly antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ and strands that are only implicitly antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ correlates, though far from perfectly, with the divide between far-right currents that I would define as ‘post-fascist’ and ‘neo-fascist’. ‘Post-fascist’ parties, by my definition, are those that are less committed to the effective suppression of opposition parties, opposition media and civil society, as carried out in recent years by ‘neo-fascist’ regimes in countries like Hungary and Turkey. While post-fascist leaderships retain the European far right’s trademark anti-Muslim racism, they present their criticism of Islam as a defence of European democratic values, and even of Jews’, women’s and lesbian/gay rights.

This post-fascist strategy can sometimes enable far-right parties to appeal to some Jews and some LGBTI people. More often, it can help inhibit even Jews and LGBTI people who vote for the left or centre-left from taking part actively in mobilisations against the far right. Jews and LGBTIQ people can for example be reluctant to mobilise against the far right because they have been influenced by right-wing portrayals of blacks and Muslims as antisemitic and homophobic. Even many left-leaning Jews and LGBTIQ people can be inhibited by ideological presuppositions that they share with the far right: homonationalist presuppositions among LGBTIQ people, Zionist presuppositions among Jews. Although the available data do little to justify portrayals of blacks, Muslims and the radical left as the main reservoirs of antisemitism and hostility to LGBTIQ people today, these portrayals are influential enough to complicate solidarity against the far right.

Fortunately, this article concludes, a base exists among both Jews and LGBTIQ people for radical antiracism, wide-ranging internationalist solidarity and defence of democracy from below. Growing minorities that embrace such perspectives exist today among both Jews and queers. A large minority of young US Jews today support antiracism and Palestine solidarity, for example, and queer antiracist and internationalist activism has been on the rise in both North America and Europe. There are grounds for hope that Jews and queers can be a significant part of the struggle, however challenging, against the far-right threat.

Roots of far-right ambiguities

The far-right threat to Jews and queers, though daunting, is ambiguous. The ‘fine people’ in far-right groups whom Trump saluted when they mobilised in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’, yet Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner played a prominent role in his administration. This ambiguity was reflected in Trump’s contortions in trying to distinguish between the ‘bad Jews’ who opposed him and the good Jews who supported him.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch Zionist Israel Documentation and Information Centre (CIDI), despite its traditional ties to social democracy, showed sympathy for years for the far-right, pro-Israel Forum for Democracy (FvD). It gave FvD leaders a public platform as recently as May 2020, praising them for their support for Israel – until 2021, when the antisemitism of Thierry Beaudet and other FvD leaders, notably in comparing public health restrictions in the COVID-19 pandemic to the Holocaust, finally impelled CIDI to take its distance.[4]

The far right also takes contradictory positions on LGBTIQ issues. Trump repaid white evangelicals for their support by defending their ‘religious freedom’ to discriminate, yet he gave gay Republican Richard Grenell several high-ranking jobs and used him as an envoy to the European far right while Grenell was ambassador to Germany. US Republicans remain divided today on gay issues: when the 2022 Texas Republican Party platform called homosexuality an ‘abnormal lifestyle choice’,[5]  Florida’s right-wing Republican Senator Rick Scott criticised the Texas position as not ‘inclusive’.[6] In France, Le Pen has tried to rally gays by emphasising the Muslim threat to them, yet pledged to repeal same-sex marriage if elected.

Beyond pure opportunism, these contradictions have deeper roots. They reflect the open-ended, ambiguous character of far-right societal projects today, rooted in the contemporary crisis of capitalist political economies.

Like the European far right of the 1920s and 1930s, the far right today feeds on the crisis of a prior wave of capitalist internationalisation. In countries like Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the internationalisation of capital from the 1890s to 1914 had been dislocated by the First World War, and further derailed by tariff wars in the 1930s. In response, Nazism in power opted after a few years for an economic model of virtual autarky,[7] with ‘Jewish capital’ being a convenient bogeyman standing in for the capitalist internationalisation the Nazis were rejecting.

By contrast, as Robert Went has shown, the wave of internationalisation of capital from 1945 to about 2008 went much further and deeper, linking and internationalising all three circuits of capital: not only trade and finance, but also production.[8] Today’s far right, while seeking to enlist more nationally-oriented sectors of capital in an effort to turn back the clock to some extent, still has a hazy ultimate horizon for its economic project. The Trump administration’s renogotiation of NAFTA, Boris Johnson’s attempt to renogotiate the UK’s relationship to the EU, and Le Pen’s shifting attitude towards the euro are examples of this unclarity.

The contemporary far right’s attitude towards its countries’ Jews ideologically reflects its hesitation so far to wholeheartedly embrace a vision of a racially pure, culturally homogenous nation. Its attitude towards Jews is further complicated by its sympathy with far-right Zionism, which today promotes its own vision of a racially pure, culturally homogenous nation (Israel). Similarly, while pre-Second World War fascists openly denounced feminism and at least claimed to champion women’s return to the domestic sphere, today’s far right strives to roll back women’s professional, political and sexual emancipation without (as yet) a consistent vision of the gender and sexual order it advocates.

Especially in those far-right currents that continue today to centrally emphasise militant nationalism and traditional Christian identity, anti-LGBTIQ ideology, like antisemitism, remains a key mobilising theme. Even in those far-right parties that most strongly insist on their democratic character and attachment to Western humanist values, both anti-LGBTIQ ideology and antisemitism have a persistent appeal to their base and cadres. A range of far-right currents, besides seeing Jews as unreliable allies or even adversaries in the defence of white and/or Christian civilisation, see ‘gender ideology’ or ‘LGBT ideology’ as undermining the natural and/or Christian family. This has been manifest notably in attempts in the US and several European countries to block or roll back transgender rights.

By analogy with the philo-gay/lesbian ‘homonationalism’ in the service of imperialism that Jasbir Puar has described,[9] anti-LGBTIQ ideology today can be seen as ‘heteronationalism’, mobilising hostility to LGBTIQ people as a way of channeling popular anger at neoliberalism.[10] In a reflex response to the instrumentalisation of LGBTI rights by neoliberalism, heteronationalism has been instrumentalising anti-LGBTI attitudes in the service of right-wing populism, particularly in increasingly authoritarian countries from Poland to Brazil but also for example in the 2012 mobilisations against same-sex marriage in France. Even in power, the right can play on resentment of neoliberal ideology even as it maintains many key features of neoliberal economics, allowing neoliberal austerity and far-right reaction to continue to feed on one another.[11]

In this climate, violence against pride events, notably in Eastern Europe, has been partly the work of neo-fascist groups who believe that the European Union is ‘run by “fags”’.[12] The EU’s policy of imposing legal LGBTI rights since the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam as part of its ‘acquis’ helps fuel such beliefs.[13] In fact credence in the malevolent power of LGBTIQ people, and of Jews, extends well beyond the far right.

Far from being limited to fascist and neo-fascist groups, antisemitism and anti-LGBTIQ attitudes lie just beneath the surface even in far-right parties that deny any continuity with the fascist past. Trump’s attempts to reach out to ‘good Jews’ evoked no sympathy from his admirers in Charlottesville who chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’. In France, despite the far-right National Rally’s appeals to gay voters, it could not resist the temptation in 2012 when a centre-left government’s project for same-sex marriage elicited mass resistance to claim leadership of the crusade against marriage equality. In its programmes for the 2017 and 2022 elections it tried to square the circle, pledging to convert existing same-sex marriages into civil unions.[14]

Similarly, even where far-right parties ostensibly abjure antisemitism, their rise has propelled substantial increases in antisemitic harassment and violence. There were more antisemitic incidents in the US in 2019 than in any year since the Anti-Defamation League began collecting records 40 years earlier, a rise which the ADL’s head has blamed partly on Trump’s failure to condemn far-right antisemitism.[15] UK Home Office figures show a spike in hate crimes generally in post-Brexit England and Wales.[16] This paralleled a 78 per cent rise in anti-LGBTIQ harassment and violence in France in the year after the massive movement against same-sex marriage took off there in 2012.[17]

The fact that antisemitic and LGBTIQ attacks are usually the work of gangs of hooligans or ‘lone wolves’ allows the organised far right to deny responsibility. Yet the connection is evident. As a result, while most Jews and gay/lesbian people do not experience the constant levels of violence suffered by black and other racialised people, the fear that intermittent violence creates affects Jews and LGBTIQ people generally. The far right’s rise has plunged them into lives of endemic if unequally felt anxiety. 

Antisemitic and heteronationalist themes are sometimes bizarrely linked in far-right psychopathology. In Ben Lorber and Heron Greenesmith’s words, many on the far right ‘believe Jews advance “white genocide” – in addition to engineering increased immigration of Black and brown people, orchestrating racial justice movements, controlling the government and giant corporations, using space lasers to start California wildfires, and other dastardly schemes – by liberalizing societal attitudes around gender and sexuality’.[18] Despite the sexual conservatism of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, far-right ideologues depict Muslims as promiscuous and sexually barbaric,[19] explicitly or implicitly linking them to queers.

There are notable parallels between antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ ideology, despite the drastically different character of their respective targets: on the one hand, Jewish communities defined by shifting religious/ethnic/cultural identities transmitted across centuries; on the other, LGBTIQ communities that have to be reinvented in each generation through the coming out of diverse, initially isolated individuals. Even the two groups’ geographical location varies: unlike Jews, LGBTIQ people are present in substantial numbers in every country, including dependent countries, though less visible in countries where repression and persecution are most harsh. Yet the far right attacks Jewish and LGBTIQ groups in strangely similar ways, seeing them both as alien and threatening to the nation – as an insidious, barely visible enemy within.

The far right today still sometimes – if not always – harkens back to the classical far-right stereotype of the Jew ‘as the embodiment of marginality, otherness, cosmopolitantism, and critical thought’.[20] It also takes up the old far-right loathing of Jewish cosmopolitans like Rosa Luxemburg, ‘figures who profoundly marked the modern definition of internationalism’, as well as of Jewish champions of the cultural and intellectual avant-garde.[21] It also sometimes – if not consistently – replicates the hostility to homosexuality that Dagmar Herzog has described as one of ‘the distinctive markers of fascist sexual politics’,[22] exemplified in the Nazis’ 1928 declaration rejecting the ‘love between men or between women’ that ‘emasculates our people’.[23]

Transgender people are a special focus of contemporary far-right attacks, even in milieus where more normalised lesbian and gay people enjoy apparent acceptance. Trans activism is seen as part of a scheme to ‘overrid[e] biological sex with the amorphous concept of gender identity’.[24] In more moderate forms, such attitudes are echoed on the more mainstream conservative right. Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss has written that ‘feminists who believe there are biological differences between men and women’ are being intimidated by a ‘zealous cabal … that has control of nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life’.[25] In its more virulent forms, the anti-trans offensive has been sweeping much of the US as part of the general far-right offensive – orchestrated to some extent while Trump was in office from the top of his Justice Department.[26] Views like this have global far-right support. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for example declared in a speech at the UN in 2019 that efforts are being made to ‘destroy the innocence of our children, perverting even their most basic and elementary identity, the biological one’.[27]

Even far-right parties that avoid adopting a virulently anti-LGBTIQ profile adopt positions that threaten LGBTIQ people widely, particularly LGBTIQ people who have or want to have children. The far-right defence of the so-called ‘natural’ family order against ‘gender ideology’ often entails opposition to LGBTI parenting rights, such as adoption (including partner adoption) and medically-assisted procreation. Even far-right ‘tolerance’ of LGBTIQ people thus means keeping them second-class citizens in the fundamental sphere of social reproduction.

Jews, queers, class and social reproduction

Understanding far-right hostility to Jews and LGBTIQ people from a Marxist standpoint is complicated by the difficulties of analysing these target communities’ class composition and positions. The far right portrayal of both Jews and LGBTIQ people in general as wealthy and powerful can be refuted without much difficulty – and should be, particularly since this imagery is widely shared beyond the far right. This is a complex task, however. The image of Jews as wealthy and powerful flourished even in societies and periods when the great majority of Jews were in fact poor and persecuted. It has acquired somewhat more superficial plausibility in the decades since the Second World War, as official and ruling-class antisemitism has become less virulent and relative Jewish poverty has become less widespread.

Clearly the socioeconomic reality of Jewish and LGBTIQ communities is more complex than the ideology. Of course, all ethnic, cultural and sexual groups are divided by class, with all the social and ideological differentiation that this entails. However, some groups are more divided by class than others. Marxist analyses of black and similarly racialised groups trace the structural racism against them back to the low position they generally occupy in segmented labour markets and their outsize share of the reserve army of labour.[28] Neither Jewish nor LGBTIQ groups can be analysed in such straightforward class terms.

The long historical record of Jewish communities in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies reveals a continually shifting and always highly differentiated class landscape, with Jews playing notable roles at different times in petty commerce, working-class sectors largely excluded from heavy industry, more or less intermediate positions in welfare-state sectors such as teaching, healthcare and social work, and law and finance.[29] Unfortunately, contemporary data is scarce, geographically uneven, and couched in sociological categories that tend to obscure class affiliation.

In the US, the National Jewish Population Survey, last conducted 20 years ago, does show relatively higher levels of education and income for US Jews than for the US population at large. Twice as many Jewish households surveyed in 2000 (34 per cent) reported incomes above $75,000 than the US average (17 per cent). At the same time, the Jewish population was on average older, less likely to be in the workforce, and not that much less likely to have a household income below $25,000 (22 per cent as opposed to 28 per cent).[30] While PEW surveys have shown that Jews are disproportionately likely to have postgraduate degrees,[31] this category unites people in high class positions with some who are notoriously insecure and marginal.

As for LGBTIQ people, in the increasingly class-divided communities of a country like the US, studies have shown that both gay men and lesbians are under-represented in higher income brackets, that gay men in particular are over-represented in the lower income brackets, and that 39 per cent of LGBT adults in the US have incomes under $30,000 (compared with 28 per cent of adults in general). Trans people were even worse off, with one San Francisco study showing that 9 per cent had no source of income at all.[32] Poverty is a reality for millions of Jews and LGBTIQ people, with the Jewish and LGBTIQ elderly being especially vulnerable to it.

In short, the picture painted by far-right antisemites and heteronationalists, of communities that are largely prosperous and invested in maintaining the economic status quo, is a drastic distortion of reality, even if Jewish working classes have declined since 1945 and there have been new openings for professional and managerial careers for gay/lesbian people since the 1970s. There is of course no one-to-one correspondence between class position and politics. Still less can politics be explained by simplistic, non-Marxist analyses that equate ‘working-class’ with ‘uneducated’, and conclude that the far right has predominantly working-class support.

More careful, particularly Marxist analyses have shown that Brexit and Trump voters in particular have not only had higher average incomes than their opponents but have been proportionally stronger in petty-bourgeois layers.[33] Confusions of education with class are particularly prone to distort the class position of Jews and LGBTIQ people. Still, class analysis narrowly speaking does not yield full explanations of the position of Jews and LGBTIQ people in relation to the far right.

Nevertheless, despite the psychotic aspects of the conspiracy theories that many far-right groups peddle, a nuanced, intersectional Marxist approach can reveal a certain rational kernel in far-right hostility to Jews and queers. This analysis must be founded, not on class alone, but on feminist social reproduction theory.[34]

In very different ways, Jews and LGBTIQ people both play distinctive roles in processes of social reproduction of contemporary capitalist societies. In the case of Jews, this reflects their exclusion in mediaeval and early modern Europe from owning land or bearing arms, on the one hand, and the emphasis in rabbinical culture on literacy and study, on the other. In Enzo Traverso’s words, ‘Their culture oriented to writing placed them at the centre of an emerging cultural industry, based around publishing and press.’[35] These factors have resulted in the relative prominence in capitalist societies of Jews in such fields as the media (the Sulzberger family’s ownership of the New York Times in the US recalls the liberal-leaning, Jewish-owned publishing firms of Mosse and Ullstein in Weimar Germany[36]), academia and cinema. This has helped make Jews in these sectors convenient targets, explicit or implicit, of the far right from Hitler to Trump. Trump summed up his idiosyncratic twist on this old theme in a recent podcast: ‘they’re Jewish people that run the New York Times’, he said, and the newspaper ‘hates Israel’.[37]

The historical exclusion of Jewish men from traditional male roles in the exercise of violence has helped give far-right antisemitism a gender and sexual dimension.[38] What the far right perceives as Jewish men’s failure to conform to its model of proper masculinity parallels its vision of LGBTIQ people, especially transgender people and the most openly queer, as enemies of the family. Paradoxically, attempts by Jews and LGBTI people to adapt to predominant gender and sexual norms can seem as diabolical to the far right as open nonconfirmity. In France in the 1890s, the presence of a Jewish officer like Alfred Dreyfus in the army only convinced right-wing antisemites that he had to be a traitor to the nation. Today, many LGBTI people’s efforts to marry, adopt children and found socially-reproductive families only convinces right-wing heteronationalists that there is a plot to destroy the family from within.

Intersectional analysis can help illuminate the ways in which gender, class and racism interact in the far right’s vision (or paranoid fantasies) of the danger that Jews and LGBTIQ people pose to proper gender roles, proper capitalist economic relations and a world of white and/or Christian predominance. Queer Jews, located at the point where these perceived threats converge, epitomise them. At the same time, the parallels between far-right demonisation of Jews and LGBTIQ people sometimes seem to be less illuminated by intersectional analysis than by a relationship of structural homology, or even the simple concept of ‘adjacency’.[39] However different the real economic and social dynamics of Jewish and LGBTIQ communities are, there is just enough substance to Jewish transnational ties and to LGBTIQ  ‘chosen families’ to juxtapose them in far-right fears and fantasies.  These parallels can burgeon in far-right discourse into an elaborate ideological edifice in which fact sits cheek by jowl with free association run amok.

Between post-fascism and neo-fascism

There is a constant tension on the far right between a virtually psychotic rejection of Jews and LGBTIQ people, on the one hand, and efforts to harness some Jews and some lesbian/gay people to the project of a more authoritarian, nationally-oriented and socially-conservative capitalist order, on the other. The clash between strands of the far right that are explicitly antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ and other strands that are only implicitly antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ correlates, though far from perfectly, with the divide between far-right currents that I would define as ‘post-fascist’ and ‘neo-fascist’.

What is distinctive in the far right today, especially in the US and northwestern Europe, is the salience of institutionalised, less blatantly violent parties alongside the violent groups that more clearly harken back to a fascist past. To some extent, the far right’s contrasting attitudes to Jews and LGBTIQ people parallel this divide. Alongside groups that see all Jews and queers as evil, there are large far-right parties that allow for the possibility of inoffensive Jews (particularly those in or loyal to the state of Israel) and inoffensive gays and lesbians. This divide overlaps with the distinction between those far-right forces that can be defined as ‘neo-fascist’ or ‘post-fascist’.

As used in this article, the terms ‘neo-fascist’ and ‘post-fascist’ refer to the character of governments that the far right could participate in or even dominate. A survey of current or recent far-right governments or governments with far-right participation around the world shows that none of them so far fully meets the classic Marxist definition of fascist regimes: regimes that effectively suppress the independent labour movement and other social movements, opposition parties and opposition media.[40] This makes the concept of fascism, in Enzo Traverso’s words, ‘both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality’.[41] Instead many analysts describe most of the world’s major far-right parties and actually existing far-right governments as ‘post-fascist’ or ‘neo-fascist’.[42]

The difference between post-fascist and neo-fascist governments can be of crucial importance in elaborating strategies of resistance. As used in this article, the difference between them relates particularly to different degrees of commitment to the effective suppression of opposition parties, opposition media and civil society. The Trump administration in the US from 2017 to 2021, for example, despite its links to violent, racist, extraparliamentary paramilitary groups, never effectively subjugated the AFL-CIO, the New York Times, the courts or even state-level Republican election officials; it can be defined as post-fascist. By contrast, Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary, despite its superficial adherence to constitutional rule and multi-party elections, has managed to progressively bring the courts, the major media, the state apparatus and much of civil society under its control.[43] I define Orbán’s and kindred regimes as neo-fascist.

One feature of the new far right which has a bearing on its post-fascist or neo-fascist character is its varied, shifting ideological profile. Marine Le Pen in France pioneered the process of ‘de-demonising’ the National Front after she became its top leader in 2011, ultimately renaming it ‘National Rally’, for example by dropping the antisemitism that had characterised it under her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. In its new packaging, the National Rally has retained the European far right’s trademark anti-Muslim racism, but presents its criticism of Islam as a defence of European democratic values, and even of women’s rights – a tactic deployed by the Italian and Dutch far right as well, as Sara Farris has shown.[44] The National Rally’s marketing strategy has been widely replicated, particularly on the Western European far right.

Renunciation of antisemitism in particular is a marker of a post-fascist ideological profile. More than anything else, it enacts the adaptation of post-fascist parties to the official, liberal Western European and North American mainstream. In the years after 1945, condemnation of antisemitism and integration of Jews into society was seen as proof of a definitive break with the defeated Nazi adversary. It also served as evidence of Western democracy’s superiority to the Soviet Union and much of the East Bloc, where manifestations of institutionalised antisemitism were not hard to find.

With the rise of racism (anti-Muslim as well as anti-black) on the European right since the 1980s, Jews have largely been incorporated into its vision of embattled Western civilisation, and its spokespeople have denied the evident links between antisemitism, colonialism and racism. Israel in particular is imagined as sharing a common ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’.[45] It is no accident that censures of her father’s antisemitic statements were an early hallmark of Marine Le Pen’s rebranding of the National Front, and that Geert Wilders tried from the outset to keep his PVV free of members tainted by the earlier antisemitic traditions of the Dutch far right.

Yet increasingly in recent years, the far right’s post-fascist new look has proved difficult to keep up. In Western Europe, far-right parties with a new look face competition from others that harken back to a more sinister past. In the Netherlands, for example, the PVV lost terrain (for a few years) to the FvD of Thierry Beaudet, whose misogyny and peculiar championing of ‘boreal [read: ‘white’] civilisation’ have become increasingly notorious.[46]

To some degree, antisemitism and heteronationalism are particularly characteristic of neo-fascist, as opposed to post-fascist currents. Yet the growth of antisemitism and anti-LGBTIQ ideology cuts across this divide, with the rank and file and low-level leaders of ostensibly post-fascist parties being far from immune to them. Even in the more post-fascist-looking parties, the top leadership faces challenges from harder-line mid-level cadress and embarrassing statements and actions by the rank and file. An official Dutch study concluded in 2011 that despite the far-right PVV’s public pro-gay statements, its voters showed more anti-LGBTIQ attitudes than those of any other major party.[47] Beyond Europe, the US Republican Party seems to have been permanently affected by Trump’s sympathies for Klan groups, neo-Nazis, the QAnon conspiracy theorists and various neo-fascist splinters.

Challenges for Jewish and queer resistance

The continued prominence of antisemitism and heteronationalism, both on the neo-fascist far right and in supposedly ‘de-demonised’ post-fascist parties, should make the far right’s rise a cause of particular alarm in Jewish and LGBTIQ communities. Yet there are factors that hinder even the majority of Jews and LGBT people who vote against the far right from taking part actively in broad alliances and mobilisations against it.

In some cases, this is due to a failure by anti-far-right organisers to actively reach out to Jews and queers. This can at times reflect heteronormative attitudes among them, or discomfort with ‘too Jewish’ Jews. At the same time, Jews and LGBTIQ people can be reluctant to mobilise against the far right because they have been influenced by right-wing portrayals of blacks and Muslims as antisemitic and homophobic. Even many left-leaning Jews and LGBTIQ people can be inhibited by ideological presuppositions that they share with the far right: homonationalist presuppositions among LGBTIQ people, Zionist presuppositions among Jews.

Particularly in the US and northwestern Europe, sectors of the far right have taken advantage of conservative trends that influenced growing minorities of Jews beginning in the 1960s, and of open gays and lesbians beginning in the 1980s. Enzo Traverso’s The End of Jewish Modernity uses Henry Kissinger as the emblematic figure of a divorce among some Jews from the centre-left and radical left to which they had been loyal for much of the twentienth century.[48] By the 1990s a visible gay/lesbian right emerged, epitomised by figures such as Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.[49]

The growth of a conservative minority among Jews has in part been a response to tensions with increasingly militant movements of black and immigrant communities and other racialised groups. In the US, some Jews have been reluctant to accept the implications of the reality that most Jews in the course of the twentienth century had been incorporated into majorities defined as white (thus marginalising Sephardic, black or otherwise racialised Jews).[50] The rise of a disproportionately Jewish neoconservative current under Reagan and the two Bushes in the 1980s[51] prefigured some US Jews’ ambiguous relationship to the right in the era of Trump, which can hinder solidarity against the racist far right. The reasons for solidarity are clearer and more dramatic than ever, epitomised in the killing of ten people in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Buffalo in May 2022. The white supremacist killer expressed sympathy for ‘great replacement theory’, which blames Jews for subverting the white race, and claimed the 2018 shootings that killed 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 as an inspiration. The American Jewish Committee tweeted in response, ‘White supremacist violence is a threat to us all.’ Yet at the same time the Anti-Defamation League, one of the Jewish organisations that condemned the Buffalo killings, continues its surveillance of pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter organisers and continues to back police exchange programmes with Israel that contribute to racist police violence. As Rebecca Pierce commented, ‘there are unfortunately some within the Jewish community for whom investment in whiteness ranks above any interest in shared struggle’.[52]

In northwestern Europe, despite British and Dutch Jews’ tradition of support for their countries’ labour parties, tensions have risen in recent decades between established Jewish organisations, like the British Board of Deputies and the Dutch CIDI, and activists of Muslim immigrant origin. Israeli attempts to magnify Jews’ fears, along with a few European Muslims’ inclination to target Jews in general in retaliation for Israeli actions, have exacerbated this dynamic. Against this backdrop, several repulsive attacks on Jews by people of immigrant origin have given rise to charges of widespread Muslim antisemitism. In both the US and northwestern Europe, tensions like these have strained Jews’ earlier ties to the left and facilitated some Jews’ movement towards the right.

All these trends can complicate Jewish integration into mobilisations against the far right. Jews are aware of growing antisemitism, which was manifest for example in the murderous attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the US in 2018, which killed 11 Jews. Since people gradually became aware after the Second World World of the full extent and horrors of the Nazi genocide, fears of recurrence have become a basic constituent element of Jewish identity in countries in Europe and the Americas with sizeable Jewish communities (as well as a liberal ‘state religion’, in Enzo Traverso’s words[53]). Yet Jewish fears of resurgent antisemitism have taken different forms over the decades.

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Jewish communities, particularly in much of Eastern Europe and North America, were to a substantial extent made up of working classes, organised in labour movements, which explicitly and rightly linked antisemitic threats to far-right ideology and attacks.[54] Consequently, masses of Jews influenced by working-class  movements were particularly likely to identify the right and far right as hotbeds of antisemitism. For several decades after 1945, as Jewish labour movements shrank, a left-wing and proletarian interpretation gave way to other interpretations of antisemitism. There was a spread of Zionist ideology that portrayed non-Jews as inherently prone to antisemitism, and of racist ideology that portrayed Muslims and blacks as a main source of antisemitism.[55]

Large-scale immigration of Jews since the late 1950s and 1960s from the Maghreb, especially Algeria, accentuated this slippage, notably in France. Algerian Jews combined devotion to the French Republic (which had emancipated them and given them citizenship) with colonial, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudices.[56]

Recently this immigration to France indirectly contributed to the rise of the far right through the 2022 presidential candidacy of Eric Zemmour, a descendant of Algerian Jews who is an apologist for the Vichy regime’s antisemitic crimes and an anti-Muslim racist, as well as an opponent of LGBTI rights. Zemmour’s candidacy sowed divisions in the French Jewish community;[57] although official French Jewish organisations boycotted his candidacy, he won 53.6 per cent of the first-round presidential vote among the few thousand French citizens voting in Israel (versus barely 7 per cent of the vote in metropolitan France).[58] Ian Buruma has pointed out that Dutch far-right leaders Wilders and Beaudet have settler-colonial family roots, in their case in the former Dutch colony Indonesia.[59]

Allegations of ingrained Muslim antisemitism have spread in northwestern Europe in the far right and beyond. Analysing the relative weight of different sources of antisemitism today is a challenging task. Surveys show a steady, significant level of antisemitism in many contemporary societies. Clearly it has deep roots in European cultures going back to European mediaeval expulsions of Jews and nineteenth-century mass antisemitic movements, which had few parallels in the mediaeval and early modern Islamic Middle East or North Africa.

Yet today the European right tends to hunt for antisemitism mainly in immigrant communities of Muslim origin – citing evidence mostly in expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. Some pro-Palestinian protesters in Europe in fact identify with Hamas, whose 1988 charter reflected an amalgam of anti-Zionism and hostility to Jews first concocted in the 1920s and 1930s.[60] Most crudely and provocatively, this amalgam has surfaced in some young Dutch protesters’ chant ‘Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas!’ (‘Hamas, Hamas, gas the Jews!’).[61] Right-leaning Jewish organisations have seized on the prevalence of such antisemitic discourses in northwest European immigrant communities.

The available evidence, while limited, gives a more nuanced picture. One 2022 survey in the Netherlands for example showed that 36 per cent of people of non-Western immigrant origin (most of them from Muslim countries like Morocco and Turkey) blamed Hamas for the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared with only 59 per cent who blamed Israel and 26 per cent who blamed the Palestinian Authority.[62] A report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London found no polling that indicated a prevalence of antisemitism among Muslim populations.[63] In France, studies show that the recent wave of anti-Jewish attacks has coincided with a marked decline of antisemitism in public opinion.[64]

The available data do little to buttress assertions that ethnicity, religion or nationality are key factors in explaining antisemitism. A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League – not an organisation known for its sympathy for the radical left or for non-Jewish immigrants – showed that in Western Europe religion was a minor factor in forecasting antisemitic attitudes, with Christians (at 25 per cent) wedged in between Muslims (29 per cent) and atheists and unaffiliated (22 per cent). Gender differences were at least as significant (males 27 per cent, females 21 per cent).[65] As for nationality, although the range was much greater, Germany had the same ranking as Belgium (27 per cent).[66]

Such data provides little basis for the widespread argument on the right that the fight against antisemitism in Europe and the Americas should take immigrant communities and the left as its main targets. This issue has been highlighted in Britain by the campaign by the Board of Deputies, the country’s most prominent established Jewish organisation, to portray the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as pervasively and exceptionally antisemitic. Taken up and amplified by much of the media, the Board of Deputies’ campaign succeeded in obscuring the well-documented fact that Labour Party members have less antisemitic attitudes on average than backers of the Conservative Party. Research has shown that antisemitic attitudes are less prevalent on the British left than on the right, and declined among Labour supporters between 2015 and 2017.[67]

The British data fit in with the outcomes of other studies, suggesting that differences between the left and right are more significant overall in accounting for antisemitism than religion or ethnicity, and that the right is more antisemitic. Referring to France, one major European survey concluded, ‘The radical right remains the most attractive political area for those expressing racist and antisemitic attitudes, whereas people who vote for the radical left are the least racist and the most likely to consider Jews and Muslim as French.’[68] The surprise here is that there is no surprise: so pervasive have efforts been in recent years to overturn evidence correlating far-right support with antisemitism, drawn from almost two centuries during which antisemitism ‘had been symbiotically interwoven within all European nationalisms’.[69]

Signs have been multiplying that a wide range of far-right currents still suspect Jews of undermining the nation and white/Christian culture by promoting the ‘Great Replacement’ and ‘Eurabia’. This tendency cuts across the divide between violent, conspiracy-minded extremists and more ‘respectable’, ‘rational’ intellectuals on the post-fascist right. In response, Jewish individuals and groups participate actively and visibly in mobilisations against new outbreaks of far-right antisemitism. Yet many Jewish organisations perceived as representative are absent from anti-far-right mobilisations – due in part to tensions around Israel.

Zionism

Liberal and post-fascist condemnations of antisemitism and far-right flirtations with antisemitism meet and mix strikingly in a shared allegiance to Zionism. From a minority current among Jews almost everywhere before the Second World War, Zionism became the focus of Jewish loyalties broadly after the foundation of the Israeli state, cementing a newly secured integration of Jews into the ideological order of the capitalist ‘free world’.

This shift in world Jewish opinion reflected in part the fact that, following the Nazi genocide and the massive emigration of Jews from the Arab region to Israel, the global Jewish population outside Israel became more concentrated than ever before in the imperialist states of North America and northwestern Europe.[70] By the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, these imperialist states (especially the US) were closely allied to Israel. This reinforced the steadily growing tendency of Jews in these countries to rally around Israel. The popularity of Zionism made support for Israel a convenient vehicle for Jewish political, ideological and social integration.

The minority of Jews seeking a place on the political right often justified their rightward moves by portraying the Palestinian struggle, and its supporters on the global left, as motivated by hostility to Jews – a portrayal buttressed by a tendentious reading of history. Gilbert Achcar’s painstaking reconstruction of Palestinian and Arab history has demonstrated for example how instances of collaboration with Nazism by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem have been used to construct a globally false characterisation of the Palestinian struggle as a whole as antisemitic.[71]

Room for even right-wing Jews in neo-fascist currents today is very limited. Yet the US and European right has a natural affinity with the Israeli right. For Geert Wilders of the Dutch PVV, Israel is ‘the West’s first line of defense against Islam’.[72]

For Jews on the centre-left, by contrast, even in the past when the Histadrut and the kibbutzim were the public (though in reality never representative) face of Zionism, sympathy for the Israeli project always had unsettling implications for European Jews. However much they tried to combine support for Israel with defence of Jews in the ‘diaspora’, they shrank from forcefully denouncing the central Zionist tenet that Israel is Jews’ only ultimate refuge. They found themselves caught up in a sort of official philosemitism that, as Houria Bouteldja has noted, itself embodies an oppressive position and has a certain underground affinity with antisemitism.

By contrast with an earlier tendency to link Jewish integration with cultural assimilation (outside the privatised sphere of religion), today’s apparent philosemitic message – we accept and even love the Jews – is combined with an implicit message: we love them in their ineradicable differentness.[73] This became glaring in recent years when Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting France in the wake of antisemitic attacks, declared that Jews had no future there and would be better off all emigrating to Israel.

As Sai Englert has pointed out, Zionist rhetoric has duplicated commonplaces of antisemitic ideology, identifying its aims as ‘casting off the pariah, the weak, the parasitic, and replacing it with the conquering, the productive, and the strong’.[74] Focusing on the UK and US, Englert has identified a dynamic of separation at the heart of the liberal project of integration: ‘The emergence of the nation-state … placed the Jew firmly outside of its limits … accompanied by the application of colonial processes of racialisation to explain this exclusion’. More recently, Jewish historical memory of the Nazi genocide and the establishment of Israel have been situated in ‘a state-led framework that has both placed Jews at the centre of Western hegemony while simultaneously keeping them at arm’s length of full integration’.[75]

The neo-fascist far right’s combination of Zionism with antisemitism thus makes explicit a substratum that has existed all along in the anti-antisemitism of the liberal mainstream. It also evokes strands of historical, classic fascist thought that have largely been buried in more recent historical memory, going back to the early Nazi regime’s Transfer Agreement with the German Zionist movement to facilitate German Jewish emigration to Palestine.[76]

Today the Israeli right’s ties to the increasingly antisemitic European far right are creating tensions with US and European Jews. The growing prominence of antisemitism on the far right should both spur Jews to redouble their activism against it and focus non-Jewish activists’ attention on understanding and fighting antisemitism wherever it appears. At the same time, the history of the past 60 years makes clear that effective Jewish opposition to the far right would benefit from an ideological change of course (already under way particularly among young Jews) towards allying with victims of other forms of racism and taking a greater distance from Zionism.

Homonationalism

In parallel to the post-fascist renunciation of open antisemitism, some far-right currents, particularly in northwestern Europe, have taken their distance from the crudest forms of anti-LGBTIQ ideology. As with antisemitism, far-right appeals to some gays and lesbians have piggybacked on earlier rightward trends in LGBTI communities and on movement by a minority of gays and lesbians towards the mainstream conservative right.

The neoliberal hard right under Reagan and Thatcher initially courted Christian heteronationalists, for example through a wave of reactionary campaigns in the US against lesbian/gay anti-discrimination ordinances beginning in 1977 in Dade County, Florida, and British Conservatives’ adoption of the anti-gay Section 28 in 1988. In the course of the 1990s, however, space opened up in Western European and North American right-wing parties for openly gay conservatives. This development was linked to a right-wing turn in US gay/lesbian politics manifest in the national lesbian/gay rights march in 2000.[77] The new gay right adopted (with some delay) the cause of same-sex marriage, with one gay right-winger defending it on the grounds that marriage in conjunction with an unfettered market imposes discipline and privatises dependency among the poor.[78]

Following on Lisa Duggan’s exploration of the links between neoliberalism and homonormativity, Jasbir Puar’s account of neoliberal homonationalism has focused on widespread gay/lesbian celebration of the imperialist order. The rightward turn in gay/lesbian communities gained momentum in the US after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, as the ‘American flag appeared everywhere in gay spaces, in gay bars and gay gyms’.[79] This new homonationalism fostered an apparently ‘seamless articulation of queerness with an imperial nation state’.[80]

Homonationalism gained strength in European countries like the Netherlands as well, fuelled by anti-gay pronouncements by Muslim fundamentalists,[81] making the PVV the most popular party among Dutch white gay men in the 2010 elections. As Gloria Wekker has noted, the dominant Dutch narrative became that ‘everything was fine with gay and lesbian liberation until Islamic people turned up and … caused a rupture in the trumphant march of progress’.[82]

Like tensions between Jews and Muslims in France, anti-Muslim racism among gay men has fed on real fears of violence. The role in anti-LGBTIQ violence of young immigrants of Muslim origin has however been blown out of proportion. While a study in Amsterdam showed that young men of Moroccan origin are disproportionately charged with such crimes – a statistic that may reflect the Dutch police’s documented propensity to charge racialised people more often than white ones for the same offences – it showed that the majority of anti-LGBTIQ violence is still committed by white, native-born Dutchmen.[83] Anti-LGBTIQ violence in the Dutch fundamentalist Protestant ‘Bible Belt’, though well known, gets far less media attention than violence by young people of immigrant origin.

Besides the influence of skewed media coverage, the focus on violence by immigrants of Muslim origin may express a desire among some gay men to safeguard what they perceive as their newfound acceptance and social integration. They may feel that they can cement their integration into the white majority by adopting prejudices that have spread in white society.

Many LGBTI people who adopt homonationalist rhetoric still identify with the left. Yet this rhetoric creates a more favourable climate for some gays and lesbians to move to the right or even far right. The meteoric rise of gay far-right politician Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands in 2002, with his simultaneous attraction to and repulsion at Muslim men, played a role in launching this dynamic.[84] Although Fortuyn’s party quickly collapsed in the years after his assassination that same year, by 2006 Geert Wilders and his PVV had taken over Fortuyn’s supposedly pro-gay, anti-Muslim message,[85] with significant success among gay male voters in the 2010 election (as noted above).

The French far right has sometimes won gay voter support as well: an estimated 32.45 per cent of married gay couples in the 2016 regional elections.[86] Gay support for the far right has also been observed outside the US and Europe: a poll in Brazil the week before the second round of the country’s 2018 presidential election showed that 29 per cent of self-identified non-straight voters planned to vote for Bolsonaro despite his open homophobia.[87]

Jewish and queer internationalism

This article has dwelled at length on the challenges facing efforts to build Jewish and queer resistance. A forthright acknowledgment of the obstacles posed by racism (particularly anti-Muslim racism), Zionist sympathies and homonationalist attitudes among Jews and LGBTIQ people is a precondition for building clear, consistent Jewish and queer opposition to the far right. Yet the challenges are only one side of the picture. The potential for radical Jewish and queer resistance to the far right is there as well.

Paradoxically, the far right’s suspicions of Jewish internationalism and of queer subversion of the family, however exaggerated and even pathological, point towards potential Jewish and queer contributions to building an internationalist, sexually liberatory alternative to right-wing reaction. Jews working in the media, academia and the arts have skills to contribute that are badly needed to help the left reach out broadly in the ‘culture wars’ against the right. Queers pioneering new forms of personal and domestic life can show the groundlessness of anxieties about change, while demonstrating that alternatives are not the exclusive privilege of an economic elite or subcultural ghetto. In these ways, Jews and LGBTIQ people, particularly working-class and otherwise subaltern Jews and LGBTIQ people, can be an integral part of mobilisations against the far right. This potential is greatest among Jews who turn away from Zionism and queers who reject homonationalism.

A base exists among both Jews and LGBTIQ people today for radical antiracism, wide-ranging internationalist solidarity and defence of democracy from below. Growing minorities that embrace such perspectives exist today among both Jews and queers. Israeli and Zionist leaders have been shocked by signs of disaffection among Jews outside Israel, especially young Jews. A 2021 survey showed, unprecedentedly, that 25 per cent of US Jews were willing to characterise Israel as an ‘apartheid state’.[88] There are far-flung, growing Jewish networks in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, which converge (and overlap) with international queer solidarity against pinkwashing.[89] This solidarity took a leap forward in the US a decade ago with the organisation by radical queers (many of them Jewish) of a countrywide speaking tour by Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).[90] It has grown since then.

Pro-Palestinian internationalism reflects the international character of the lives lived by many Jews and many queers. Queers in particular today ‘live in a global world, bound to each other by the transnational flow of images and artefacts … and the migration of queer bodies across continents.’[91]

Besides internationalism, Jewish and queer integration into struggles against the far right also call for critical perspectives on racism and neoliberalism. On these terrains too, there are active Jewish and queer minorities promoting and developing such perspectives. Since 1990, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice has been organising in New York, notably against Trump’s Republican Party under the banner of Jews Against Fascism. Similarly, Queers for Economic Justice, active in New York from 2002 to 2014, sought to overcome the invisibility of poor queers in both LGBTI rights and economic justice movements.[92] More recently, the unprecedently massive Black Lives Matter mobilisations against police violence in the US in 2020 were accompanied by unprecedented mobilisations on the theme Black Trans/Queer Lives Matter, echoed internationally from the Netherlands to Brazil. In Britain, Jewish Voice for Labour has now broken the monopoly long held by the Zionist establishment in the Labour Party.

Taken together, these groups are still minorities in Jewish and LGBTIQ communities. The scale and imminence of the far-right threat confronts them with a daunting challenge. Nor are they are without their political ambiguities. On the one hand, the magnitude of the far-right threat and the weakness of the radical left put pressure on all the far right’s adversaries to accomodate to the forces of political neoliberalism. Although it is precisely neoliberal policies that created the conditions over the past forty years for the far right’s rise, the short-run imperatives of electoral politics tempt even radical Jews and queers to throw their support to Democrats in the US and to liberal, social-democratic and pro-neoliberal green parties in Europe – a temptation that should be resisted. It risks disfiguring opposition to far-right racism into a defence of the neoliberal caricature of cosmopolitanism.

What radical resistance demands instead is a far-reaching analysis of structural racism and a programme that rolls it back. For Jews and queers in particular, this raises some thorny issues. Jewish and LGBTIQ sympathy for the right has fed for example on fear of and anger at violence, especially antisemitic and anti-LGBTIQ violence among some Muslims. Without ever making excuses for such violence or the prejudices that underlie it, radicals need to take a hard look at the socioeconomic dynamics that can contribute to it – like gentrification, in which, cruelly, lower-income white Jews and LGBTIQ people are particularly likely to be caught up as both gentrifiers and victims. While there are no simple answers to problems like these, accomodating to neoliberalism makes solutions impossible.

On the other hand, the manifest dangers of accomodating to neoliberalism tempt some radical Jews and queers to turn away from the difficult work of reaching out to the masses of Jews and LGBTI people who are not yet ‘woke’, and focus exclusively on building safe spaces for themselves. Important as safe spaces are, this temptation, too, needs to be resisted. The far right can never be defeated without mobilising millions of people, including Jews and LGBTIQ people; and as long as the far right is not defeated, no space can be safe. The decline of Jewish working classes since 1945 and the new openings for professional and managerial careers for gay/lesbian people since the 1970s only increase the necessity and urgency of finding broad new left constituencies among Jews and queers, which can be found particularly among the large numbers of educated but economically marginal or precarious people.

Marxists obviously do not have ready-made answers to all these difficult strategic issues. The far right’s varying, shifting and contradictory relationship to Jews and LGBTIQ people, which this article has explored, complicates the issues all the more. Yet a sophisticated Marxist analysis can make an important contribution to responding to them. This makes a concerted effort by Marxists at intellectual and practical solidarity with Jews and queers organising against the far right all the more urgent.

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Lemoine, Cécile 2022, ‘Zemmour domine dans le vote des Français d’Israël’ (‘Zemmour Dominates the French Vote in Israel’), Terresainte.net, available at: <https://www.terresainte.net/2022/04/zemmour-domine-dans-le-vote-des-francais-disrael/>.

Leon, Abram 1971, The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, New York: Pathfinder.

Levin, Nora 1977, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871-1917, New York: Schocken Books.

Liebman, Arthur 1979, Jews and the Left, New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Lorber, Ben and Heron Greenesmith 2021, ‘Antisemitism Meets Transphobia’, The Progressive, available at: <https://progressive.org/magazine/antisemitism-meets-transphobia-greenesmith-lorber/>.

Moody, Kim 2007, ‘Who Put Trump in the White House?’, Against the Current 186, available at: <https://againstthecurrent.org/atc186/p4859/.

Moser, Laura 2021, ‘My Grandfather Fled the Nazis. I Moved to His Old Neighborhood’, available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-grandfather-fled-the-nazis-i-moved-to-his-old-neighborhood>.

Obermaier, Lena 2021, ‘Far-Right Parties in Europe Have Become Zionism’s Greatest Backers’, Jacobin, available at: <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/09/germany-afd-zionism-antisemitism-isr…;.

Oudenampsen, Marijn 2018, De Conservatieve Revolte: Een Ideeëngeschiedenis van de Fortuyn-Opstand (The Conservative Revolt: An Intellectual History of the Fortuyn Uprising), Nijmegen: Vantilt.

Parrot, Clément 2017, ‘Le Front national est-il vraiment devenu “gay friendly”?’ (‘Has the National Front Really Become “Gay-Friendly”?’), France Télévisions, available at: <https://www.francetvinfo.fr/politique/marine-le-pen/le-front-national-est-il-vraiment-devenu-gay-friendly_2061745.html>.

Pengelly, Martin 2021, ‘Trump Condemned by Anti-Defamation League Chief for Antisemitic Tropes’, The Guardian (18 Dec.), available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/18/donald-trump-antisemitic-tropes-anti-defamation-league>.

Pierce, Rebecca 2022, ‘Shared Grief Is not Enough’, Jewish Currents, available at: <https://jewishcurrents.org/shared-grief-is-not-enough>.

Post, Charlie 2020, ‘Beyond “Racial Capitalism”: Toward a Unified Theory of Capitalism and Racial Oppression’, Brooklyn Rail, available at: <https://brooklynrail.org/2020/10/field-notes/Beyond-Racial-Capitalism-T…;.

Puar, Jasbir 2007, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rosenberg, Jordana and Amy Villarejo 2012, ‘Introduction: Queerness, Norms, Utopia’, GLQ 18, 1.

Schulman, Sarah 2012, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Sears, Alan 2017, ‘Body Politics : The Social Reproduction of Sexualities’ in Tithi Bhattacharya and Lise Vogel (eds.), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto Press.

Seymour, Richard 2018, ‘Labour’s Antisemitism Affair’, Jacobin, available at: <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/labour-party-jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-jewdas>.

Shield, Andrew D.J. 2017, Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution: Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Singh, Kanishka 2020, ‘Watchdog Reports Record Number of Anti-Semitic Incidents in U.S. Last Year’, available at: <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-antisemitism-idUSKBN22O1LK&gt;.

Stryker, Susan 2017, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, New York: Seal Press.

Traverso, Enzo 2016, The End of Jewish Modernity, London: Pluto Press.

Traverso, Enzo 2019, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right, London: Verso.

Trotsky, Leon 1932, What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat, New York: Pioneer Publishers, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm>.

United Jewish Communities 2004, National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001, New York: UJC, available at: <https://cdn.fedweb.org/fed-34/136/National-Jewish-Population-Study.pdf>.

Vogel, Lise 2014, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Chicago: Haymarket.

Volkskrant 2011, ‘PVV-kiezer negatiefst over homo’s’ (‘PVV Voter Most Negative about Gays’) (6 Sept.).

Weinstock, Nathan 2002, Le Pain de Misère: Histoire du Mouvement Ouvrier Juif en Europe (2 vols.), Paris: La Découverte.

Weiss, Bari 2021, ‘The Self-Silencing Majority’, Deseret News (2 March), available at: <https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2021/3/2/22309605/the-silenced-majority…;.

Went, Robert 2002, The Enigma of Globalization: A Journey to a New Stage of Capitalism, London: Routledge.

[1] Thanks to Christopher Beck, Ashley Bohrer, Sai Englert, Layal Ftouni, Michael Löwy, Alan Sears, Andrew Shield, Enzo Traverso, Alan Wald and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. It has benefited enormously from their feedback, but I alone am responsible for the views expressed in it.

[2] Traverso 2019, pp. 66, 69.

[3] Thanks to Enzo Traverso for this phrase (in an email to the author).

[4] Hamburger 2021.

[5] Lavietes 2022.

[6] Colvin 2022.

[7] See e.g. Kitson 1992. This brief contrast obviously cannot do justice to the vast subject of pre-1945 fascist economic policy.

[8]Went 2002.

[9] Puar 2007.

[10] Drucker 2016.

[11] Drucker 2019b.

[12] Herzog 2011, pp. 190-1.

[13] Drucker 2017; Chetaille 2013.

[14] Drucker 2019b.

[15]Singh 2020.

[16]BBC News 2019.

[17]Le Monde/AFP 2014.

[18] Lorber and Greenesmith 2021.

[19] Puar 2007.

[20] Traverso 2019, p. 66.

[21] Traverso 2016, pp. 31, 41-42.

[22] Herzog 2011, p. 60.

[23] Haeberle 1989, p. 374.

[24]Bilek 2018.

[25]Weiss 2021.

[26]Gill-Peterson 2021; Stryker 2017, pp. 201-02.

[27] Lorber and Greenesmith 2021.

[28] Post 2020.

[29]Past Marxist attempts to analyze the class structure of the Jewish community include labour Zionist Ber Borochov’s concept of the ‘inverted pyramid’ (see Abidor [n.d.]) and Trotskyist Abram Leon (1971)’s concept of the ‘people-class’.

[30] United Jewish Communities 2004, p. 6.

[31] Dashefsky and Sheskin (eds.) 2015, p. 43.

[32] Drucker 2014, pp. 228-31, 259-60.

[33] Moody 2017.

[34] Vogel 2014; Ferguson 2019; for a specific analysis of LGBTIQ people’s role in social reproduction, see Sears 2017.

[35] Traverso 2016, pp. 10-11.

[36]Gay 1968, pp. 134-38.

[37]Pengelly 2021.

[38] Boyarin 1997.

[39] Hettinga 2021 has used this concept of adjacency insightfully to explore the relationships between transgender bodies and disability.

[40]Traverso 2019, pp. 97-8; Drucker 2019, pp. 10-11. For a classic Marxist definition of fascism see Trotsky 1932: ‘After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands … the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives…. [T]he workers’ organizations are annihilated … and … a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses‘.

[41] Traverso 2019, p. 4.

[42] Traverso 2019 e.g. uses neo-fascism to refer to ‘the attempt to perpetuate and regenerate an old fascism’ (p. 6). In his terms, therefore, what I call neo-fascism is simply one variant of post-fascism.

[43] Drucker 2019a, p. 10.

[44] Farris 2007.

[45]Obermaier 2021.

[46]De Jong 2019.

[47] Volkskrant 2011.

[48] Traverso 2016, pp. 2-3.

[49] Drucker 2014, p. 285.

[50]Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007.

[51] Traverso 2016, p. 54.

[52] Pierce 2022.

[53] Traverso 2016, pp. 113-27.

[54] Among the more extensive surveys of the Jewish working-class left are Weinstock 2002, Levin 1977, Liebman 1979 (on the US) and Hofmeester 2004 (on London, Amsterdam and Paris).

[55] To the extent that antisemitism is seen as a real and present danger today in Europe, the danger is often traced back, not so much to the heritage of fascism and the rise of the new far right, as to some innate tendency to antisemitism lurking in national cultures or psyches. Moser 2021 provides a striking example: a thoughtful article by a Jew who grew up in the US before moving to Germany, herself a left-leaning Democratic Party activist, who describes herself ‘watching in horror as white supremacists attacked the Capitol’, and yet discusses her fears of antisemitism in Germany without mentioning the rapid growth of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

[56]Drucker 2015.

[57]Cohen 2021; Abidor and Lago 2021.

[58]Lemoine 2022.

[59]Buruma 2021.

[60]Achcar 2009, pp. 113-19, 250, 253, .

[61] Author’s personal observation.

[62] I&O Research 2022.

[63]Obermaier 2021.

[64] Traverso 2019, p. 77; see also Traverso 2016, pp. 87-90.

[65] ADL 2019.

[66] ADL 2019.

[67]Seymour 2018 (among many other articles marshalling similar evidence).

[68] European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2004, p. 111.

[69] Traverso 2019, p. 66.

[70] With only scattered exceptions: the USSR/Russia and Hungary in Eastern Europe, Argentina in Latin America.

[71]Achcar 2010.

[72]Obermaier 2021.

[73]Bouteldja 2017.

[74] Englert 2019, p, 167. This is a central theme of Boyarin 1997.

[75] Englert 2018, pp. 154, 167.

[76] Brenner 1983.

[77]Drucker 2014, pp. 280, 283-5.

[78] Duggan 2003, p. 64.

[79] Puar 2007, p. 43.

[80] Rosenberg and Villarejo 2012, p. 10.

[81] Herzog 2011, p. 201.

[82] Wekker 2016, pp. 109, 119.

[83]Buijs, Hekma and Duyvendak 2011.

[84] Wekker 2016, pp. 127-30; for a general account of Fortuyn’s movement see Oudenampsen 2018.

[85]Shield 2017, pp. 1-2.

[86] Parrot 2017.

[87] Drucker 2019b.

[88]Kampeas 2021.

[89] Drucker 2014, pp. 339-40.

[90] Schulman 2012.

[91] Drucker 2014, p. 391.

[92] Drucker 2014, p. 356.

Mr. Hoffman: Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room. You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh?

The Court: Mr. Marshal, will you ask the defendant Hoffman to –

Mr. Hoffman: This ain’t the Standard Club.

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman –

Mr. Hoffman: Oh, tell him to stick it up his bowling ball. How is your war stock doing Julie? You don’t have any power. They didn’t have any power in the Third Reich, either.

The Court: Will you ask him to sit down, Mr. Marshal?

The marshal: Mr. Hoffman, I am asking you to shut up.

Mr. Rubin: Gestapo.

Mr. Hoffman: Show him your .45. He ain’t never seen a gun.

The Court: Bring in the jury, Mr. Marshal.

Mr. Rubin: You are the laughing stock of the world, Julius Hoffman; the laughing stock of the world. Every kid in the world hates you, knows what you represent.

Marshal Dobkowski: Be quiet, Mr. Rubin.

Mr. Rubin: You are synonymous with the name Adolf Hitler. Julius Hoffman equals Adolf Hitler today.

~“At the Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin et al.[1]

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

Early in the research for this project, I interviewed a long-time comrade in Chicago, Joel Finkel, who I knew as a socialist, 4th Internationalist, and active anti-Zionist with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).[2]  Eager to learn how his socialism, anti-Zionism and Jewish identity intersected, I sat him down for a long, nearly three-hour conversation at the famous Jewish deli in the strip mall zone west of the Loop, the last fragment of what used to be a thriving Jewish neighborhood before urban renewal and the expanding University of Illinois obliterated it -- a reminder that the suburbanization of Jews was done as much by bulldozer as it was funded by racially restricted FHA housing loans.  Like a number of other Jewish activists of his generation I have known through the years, Joel downplayed how much his Jewishness was central to his becoming a revolutionary: he wasn't religious, his parents were progressives but not in the Jewish left, and he underscored that the primary movers of his political life were objective and historical events such as the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement.  He had a clear analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, the historical conjuncture of the 1960s, the role of Zionism in global imperialism, and thought of questions of personal identity as slightly foreign to his ears, as if I had asked him about his moon sign.  And then, perhaps two hours into the conversation about how he got involved in the movement and developed his political outlook, he choked up, flushed, and almost sobbed, "we couldn't let it happen to anyone else."  It, I asked?  "The Holocaust.  It couldn't happen again."[3] 

Finkel's formation is one I encountered often while reading memoirs and interviewing Jewish activists who were part of the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s.  In another interview with Susan Eanet (now Klonsky), a former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist and founder of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) and later the new communist October League, explained her own dedication to Palestinian liberation through Holocaust memory.  After talking for several hours in her northwest Chicago home about her Jewish upbringing, about her father who was a founder of a liberal temple in Washington D.C., and about how that related to her anti-Zionist writings for the SDS newspaper New Left Notes, she finally explained:  "we couldn't be good Germans."[4]  Jews, she said, more than anyone, should know the price of the world's silence as a genocide is taking place.  Tellingly, also Mark Rudd framed his resistance to the Vietnam War in the exact same way in his memoir of SDS, saying he "can't be a good German.”[5]  "In my home, as in millions of Jewish homes, "Hitler" was the name for Absolute Evil," Rudd explains, going to further to say "only this time, it was us, the Americans."  Like Klonsky, Rudd evoked the Holocaust not to suggest that Jews are special victims of a unique tragedy or to justify or rationalize their behavior, but to explain why they felt a personal responsibility to oppose fascism and colonialism done in their name, either as Jews and/or Americans.  Shortly after her release from prison, for Weather Underground member Kathy Boudine recollected that her decision to support the Black Liberation Army's campaign of bank robberies and jailbreaks rested on her analysis that America was in the process of committing multiple genocides and that she, like Rudd and Klonsky, thought "a lot about Germany" during the Holocaust: "how do you live a life when your government is doing what its doing?"[6]  In other words, she neither could be a "good German."

The idea that there is a particular Jewish responsibility to oppose fascism and the genocidal race theory behind it was expressed clearly by another member of SDS and early friend of Rudd, David Gilbert.  "For myself and many other Jews in the movement," Gilbert wrote in his memoir, "the bedrock lesson from the Holocaust was to passionately oppose all forms of racism" explaining also that he because of the Holocaust, he could "never join the oppression of other people.”[7]  And even though Gilbert's describes his parents as apolitical, he asserts "they taught me racism was wrong" a conclusion drawn from witnessing the violence of antisemitism.[8]  Rudd also locates the meaning of the Holocaust not only with destruction of European Jewry, but specifically with "racism; that's what anti-Semitism was.”[9] "Racism" as an explanation of antisemitism does not locate antisemitism as something unique to Jews, but as part of a larger structure of white supremacy, in so far as it connects the persecution of Jews to the oppression of people of color. In this way Rudd connects his support for SNCC not only with a political project, but his own personal story.  "With the solipsism of a child," he writes of reading Anne Frank's diary and looking at the death camp tattoos of his relatives, and "saw myself among the dead.”[10]  For Rudd and for many Jews in the movement, their attachment to fighting racism was a way of articulating their own feelings about being Jewish.  As historian Arlene Stein suggests, "I developed an intense, vicarious identification with the struggles of African Americans" as a means to better understand "the collective experience of trauma" after the Holocaust.[11] While Stein articulates this as a form of displacement, for Rudd and others it was a way to passionately connect with and honor their Jewish heritage.

It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the emergence of the Black Power movement engendered a split between Jews and the New Left.[12]  This story is told by both progressive and reactionary historians alike, and is memorialized in iconic images such as the Jewish Defense League standing in front of a Brooklyn synagogue in sunglasses to “defend” it from a planned speech by Black Panther James Forman or Abbie Hoffman’s 1967 editorial for the Village Voice decrying to expulsion of the mostly Jewish white activists from Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (a position he soon, nonetheless, recanted after conversations with Stokely Carmichael and others).[13]  This split between Black Power and the anti-imperialist left is often said to coincide with the emergence of Holocaust memorialization.  Some, such as Norm Finkelstein understand the sudden rise of Holocaust memorialization in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a cynical move to “exploit Jewish suffering” for the project of Jewish nationalism, while others such as Michael Staub locates increased public expression of Holocaust memory within the context of a late 1960s Jewish revival.[14]  Either way, both narratives assume a tension between left-wing Jews and Black Power and anti-imperialism as given, and locate a new American Jewish commonsense of Jewish nationalism abroad and a quickening of Jewish identity politics at home as both totalizing and hegemonic.  The only problem with this narrative is that the most prominent, and visible, Jewish radicals of the 1960s and early 1970s – Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Susan Eanet/Klonsky, Rennie Davis, Dick/Mickey Flacks, David Gilbert – did not agree.  Not only did much of the Jewish New Left in organizations such as SDS and SWP continue to back the anti-Zionist Black Panther Party, many deployed Jewish memory of the Holocaust, the Red Scare, and antisemitism to formulate their revolutionary global politics. It is not so much that Finkelstein and Staub are incorrect, as their readings of a Jewish 1960s tend to write out of history how Jews in revolutionary – and non-Jewish -- organizations formulated a Jewish sensibility through Jewish memory, particularly of the Holocaust and the experience of right-wing antisemitism.

In this sense, Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert, Hoffman, and Finkel’s deployment of the Holocaust speaks to ongoing and present debates about its meaning and relevance in the politics of Jewish memory and identity. There is a growing consensus that supposed silence among American Jews around the Holocaust was at best partial.  Scholar Hasia Diner counters the narrative that the Holocaust was "unspeakable" until the late 1960s, or that Jews refused to remember or honor the dead out of fear of antisemitism, or shame of victimhood.[15]  Diner documents how memorials, religious ritual, journal articles and art were created and disseminated by Jewish organizations, synagogues, and in private homes and community events.  Far from distant from the minds of Jewish Americans, the presence of the Holocaust reconstructed Jewish American life in personal and public ways.  Indeed, the Holocaust was a common enough reference point in Jewish life that Philip Roth's first published story in the late 1950s not only evokes the genocide, uses it as the punchline of an ironic joke.  Grossbart, the Jewish private who wants to avoid combat in the Pacific and leave base for treyf eggrolls on Passover, manipulates the scrupulous Sergeant Marx by suggesting Jews "let themselves get pushed around" in Germany and needed to "stick together."[16]  Indeed, one can read the entire collection of stories in Goodbye Columbus as a kind of meditation on the Holocaust, from "The Conversion of the Jews" to "Eli, the Fanatic."  The Jewish community in "Eli" are so desperate to not attract antisemitism they wish to ban a Yeshiva, but also so concerned about Jewish cultural continuance after the Holocaust, they do whatever their children ask of them, even convert to Christianity.  In evoking the Holocaust with irony and complexity, Roth signals less a silence on the topic, as much as an intimate knowledge of it and of the many ways it complicated and animated Jewish American life - a near decade before the 1967 War.

 Even for scholars like Diner acknowledge the "myth of silence" is a construction, however, there is an assumption that the Holocaust made the Jewish community fundamentally conservative and assimilationist.  As Norman Finkelstein documents, the 1967 Arab Israeli War sparked not only a wave of support for the victorious Israeli armies, government officials from the State Department to the Pentagon began to understand how Israel could be a strategic ally. “The Holocaust proved to be the best defensive weapon deflecting criticism of Israel,” Finkelstein writes.[17]  In service of Israeli nationalism, the Holocaust he argued was transformed from a fascist genocide that was part of a larger far-right racial project, to something very particular and “unique” that happened only to Jews.[18]  European historian Enzo Traverso takes this analysis a step further to suggest "the Shoah closed a cycle of European intellectual history, in which Jews had been a central part," transforming Jews from a "pariah" class to an integrated part of Western culture.  It is Henry Kissinger for Traverso, not Trotsky who inherits the meaning of the Holocaust in global politics.[19]  Citing the ways the Nuremburg Laws and American triumphalism celebrated both the inclusion of Jews into the fabric of mainstream American life and Israel into the sphere of the capitalist West, "the Jew" for Traverso has gone from being counter-modality to European modernity to its most ideal subject.  Citing both Israel and human rights law, Traverso argues that the "former trouble makers and disrupters of order had become its pillars.[20]  Historian of antisemitism Paul Hanebrink frames it another way:  as the victory over Nazi Germany became absorbed into the narrative of global American power, so did the Jews go from being a "Judeo-Bolshevik menace" to part of the "Judeo-Christian West.”[21] 

In an essay by Mark Tseng-Putterman in Protocols, he argues that the mobilization of the Holocaust not only justifies the state of Israel for a Zionist Jewish establishment, its very memory actually makes Jews less likely to see Israeli "culpability in the so-called conflict."[22]  For Tseng-Putterman, Holocaust narratives create a kind of "Jewish-exceptionalism" that serves as the ideological infrastructure for Zionism, and more broadly, blinds white Jews to ways in which they mobilize their own whiteness.  "Far from progressive," Tseng-Putterman continues, "the absolution of Jewish participation in white supremacy" by focusing on the Holocaust as the singular event defining antisemitism, "halts opportunities to challenge Jewish complicity."  Indeed, the article argues it is precisely through the American narrative of the Holocaust that Jews have been conscripted into the institutional relations of American liberalism and American empire.  That the U.S. can place itself as the protector of the Jews reinforces and can be understood to be the modality through which liberal white supremacist state maintains is legitimacy.  Not only are the Nuremburg Laws part of the legal superstructure of the global American empire, the incorporation of a certain kind of Jewish suffering is the way the state disavows its own history with eugenics and genocide.  "There is an order" to state violence, the author declares, and by centering the Holocaust as a primary part of that order, Jews literally whitewash their own complicity with whiteness and empire as well as allow the state to benefit from Jewish investments in a normative history of antisemitism.  In the order of state violence, the Holocaust is low on the hierarchy, and more silence, rather than less, is necessary.  The article suggests that Holocaust narratives cannot be mobilized outside of a context of whiteness and cannot but help, in such as a context, redeploy it. 

“Just as organized Jewry remembered The Holocaust when Israeli power peaked, so it remembered The Holocaust when American Jewish power peaked,” Finkelstein argues, suggesting that the Holocaust not only deflected criticism of Israel, but also deflected white Jews from criticism of their whiteness.[23]  As Jewish studies scholar Ben Ratskoff wrote in Jewish Currents, Jewish analogies to the Holocaust are the "narcissistic" means by which Jews "disavow" concern for and their complicity in white racism and the normative violence of liberalism.[24]  "2017 may have offered a strange solace" Tseng-Putterman writes, posing that antisemitism actually reassures Jews of their safety in the world, rather than threatens it, as it mobilizes the state in their defense.  Jewish memory of antisemitism not only exaggerates the threat of antisemitism, antisemitism is the very means by which Jews align their interests with the state – antisemitism is a form of state power.  Antisemitism in this formation, makes white Jews whiter; it solidifies their relationship to narratives and institutions of American power.  One may look no further than attacks against Jeremy Corbyn and progressive American socialists to see the ways in which a discourse of antisemitism protects the powerful, and is deployed as a weapon against democracy. 

Rudd, Klonsky, Gilbert and other New Left radicals articulate however a challenge both to the mainstream Jewish establishment’s Zionist conscription of the Holocaust, as well as to Traverso and Tseng-Putterman's narrative about post-Holocaust memory and Jewish identity.  While Traverso, Finkelstein and Tseng-Putterman are certainly accurate to point fingers at an increasingly reactionary Jewish establishment, their analysis tends to evacuate other possibilities for progressive Jewish life outside of or even oppositional to such institutions, with a logic, history, and subjectivity of its own.  Such discourse tends to flatten Jewish experience into an expression only of large – if quite powerful – Jewish institutions. As Michael Rothberg documents, Holocaust memory is "multidirectional," and emerged in the context of anti-fascism and de-colonial discourse in the 1940s and 1950s long before it emerged as a pillar for a muscular Israeli and/or U.S. nationalism.[25] While widely divergent in their political commitments and perspectives, both Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Aimé Césaire'sDiscourse on Colonialism, published in the early 1950s, locate both the origins of fascism and the roots of the Holocaust in European imperialism, in transnational, or perhaps supra-national projects of economic expansion and political repression.  Indeed, as Norm Fruchter wrote for the summer 1965 edition ofStudies on the Left, the wide-ranging anger at Hannah Arendt for her condemnation of both Jewish nationalists and Jewish leadership during and after the Holocaust was a markeddeparture for an American Jewish community that substituted the "secular values...of social justice, use of intellect, the pursuit of knowledge" for Zionism and its "myth of the victim which Jews tend to substitute for their history."[26]  This Rudd and Klonsky who do not wish to be "good Germans," the violence of fascism is not something that happens only to Jews, or can be accounted solely through Jewish history or Jewish victimization.  The violence of fascism is a structural part of imperialism, whether the genocidal levels of violence deployed against the Vietnamese during the U.S. invasion, or ethnic cleansing and militarism of the Israeli state.  The question for Jews is less how to memorialize the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish tragedy, but rather what is the ethico-political stance the Holocaust requires of a Jew.

As Gilbert makes plain, Jewish survival is not the primary lesson the Holocaust imparts. While it is clear that Gilbert, Klonsky, Rudd, Deutscher and others understood Jews to be targets of fascist violence, they also understood that social solidarity, not Jewish particularism, or nationalism, was what Holocaust memory should mean. As Deutscher writes "I am a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated."[27]  Note the construction - it is not solidarity with other Jews that makes Deutscher Jewish, it is particular "force" that marks his passion and his solidarity.  It is the depth of commitment against persecution and extermination that makes the Jew.  While Gilbert does not explicitly say this, one could possibly derive that the lengths was willing to go, eventually to a life sentence in prison, marks the "force" of his solidarity, and hence his Jewishness. And yet Gilbert is also clear to normalize such feeling.  His parents, who he describes as apolitical, his father an Eisenhower Republican, mother a relatively liberal but not zealous Democrat, explicitly articulated that the lesson of the Holocaust was to stand against racism.  That this was the opinion of Jews who were otherwise politically in no way remarkable suggests less their idiosyncrasy by the articulation of a Jewish commonsense in the decades immediately following the Shoah, not an aberration.  When Rudd writes, "I saw myself among the dead" when he imagined the Holocaust as a child, it did not lead him to think Jews were exceptional - rather it led him into the struggle to oppose genocide and imperialism wherever he encountered it. 

Perhaps the most sustained engagement with the radical usable past of the Holocaust is Suzanne Weiss’ memoir, Holocaust to Resistance:  My Journey.  Weiss, a Polish survivor who spend the last years of the war in hiding and then in a Jewish orphanage in France, emigrated to the United States when two Jewish members of the Communist Party in New York adopted her in 1950.  The first time Weiss articulates herself as a Holocaust survivor in public however is many years later, during an official state visit by Ariel Sharon to Toronto in 2003.  Framing her own experience as both unique and yet at the same time part of larger structures of racialized state violence, she spoke the following at a rally outside of Sharon’s hotel:

Hitler's Holocaust is unique in history; nothing is 'similar' to it.  Still, many Israeli techniques -- the expulsions, the ghettoization, the pervasive checkpoints -- have a disquieting resemblance to Nazi methods. To oppose Sharon is not anti-Jewish....a united resistance can, like the anti-Nazi Resistance of my childhood, win out against the aggressors.[28]

Before this point, Weiss was no stranger to politics:  she had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) since her teenage years, and had organized antiwar demonstrations, visited Cuba on an official delegation, and worked in heavy industry trying to form unions among other workers.  And yet it wasn’t until she undertook a personal journey first to Poland, then as a social worker among Holocaust survivors that she articulated the meaning of her experience:  “I wondered whether Holocaust survivors differed from survivors of other traumas, tragedies, or genocides, such as Palestinian families subjected to daily terror, the destruction of their families, and the loss of their homes, possessions, and homeland,” she asked. “Holocaust survivors, I concluded, must be addressed not through comparison with other historic disasters…Yet working with Holocaust survivors sharpened my awareness of the suffering of all peoples emerging from genocide and societal traumas.”[29]  This double turn, in which Weiss recognizes the specificity of Jewish trauma does not make it perfectly analogous to other forms of oppression, yet her increasing awareness – unlike Traverso and Tseng-Putterman’s claims – increases her feelings of solidarity with other oppressed people, especially with Palestinians. 

It’s also clear in Weiss’ narrative that her conclusions regarding the Holocaust are not a rupture with her family’s past or her experience, but rather as she articulates it, a final culmination.  Throughout her text she sprinkles comments from her mother, such as “’Jewish people have a natural affinity to Negroes seeking human dignity,’ Mom said” on walking past a lunch-counter protest, or “The Ku Klux Klan hated Jews just as much as they hated Blacks," noting a synagogue was dynamited the same week as a Black church.[30]  During the Suez crisis in 1956, Weiss’ father confirmed his continued critique of Zionism by noting “Israel is on the wrong side again,” aligned with imperial west.[31]   Weiss’ most succinct articulation of a Jewish anti-Zionist subjectivity was in high school.  Troubled one day when a Jewish friend ask if she was a Zionist, she replied “no, I’m Jewish.”  For Weiss, her Jewish identity both preceded the question of Zionism, and also excluded it.  When she asked her red-diaper baby boyfriend about the incident, he explained that a “Zionist is anyone, Jewish or not, who defense the settlement of Israel as the Jewish homeland.”[32] 

Neatly separating Zionist politics from Jewish identity, Weiss’ sense of Jewish identity was reaffirmed, and reflected that Jews will experience antisemitism wherever they go, no matter the location or country – and couldn’t see how a nation-state would solve such a question.  She asked her rhetorically, “wouldn’t it be a convenient place to get rid of us all at once?” In this way Weiss both articulates an anti-Zionist common sense, in which Zionism is something both alien from her point of view, but also troubling:  she didn’t understand why it seemed important to her friend when it was something that seemed so far, so removed.  And her response – though equally laconic, was common diasporic reason – antisemitism is global, it makes sense then to be a global and dispersed people, on the move.  More than anything else, it was the brevity of the passage that was remarkable – in less than a page in a 300 page memoir, the question of Zionism was settled in her mind.  Are you a Zionist?  No I’m Jewish, seems paradoxical, yet it is the governing logic of the 1960s Jewish New Left.

While the central political “journey” in My Journey is from Holocaust survivor to revolutionary, the physical journey Weiss undertakes is from Poland, to France, to the United States, and then finally, in the 1980s, back to Poland.  While one cannot call it kind of reverse-Aliyah back to Europe, it is clear that Weiss finds a kind emotional and historical sense of closure by visiting the towns in which her family once lived.  For Weiss the return back to Poland is filled both with melancholy and also optimism. She travels to the Jewish cemetery in Piotrkow, where her mother and grandmother ran a bakery.  Finding the cemetery “overgrown with weeds” and the townspeople unconcerned with its upkeep, Weiss writes that “alone, I listened to the melancholic murmur of the breeze swaying leaves” before returning to Warsaw.[33]  Yet while in Warsaw, she is heartened to learn that the Solidarnosc movement, which the SWP supported, printed “anti-racist leaflets and posters…as proof that the union stood firm against xenophobic sentiment.”[34]  These twin feelings, that the murder, and erasure of her family from Poland, and the “Polish Spring” with the Solidarity movement, suggests that whatever her fight around Jewish identity and the Holocaust may be, there are European problems to be resolved in Europe.  The entire journey of the text, from survival to finally awakening of the political implications of the Holocaust, live within a political cycle around questions of capitalism, fascism, human rights, the state, and Jewish memory.  Israel’s only presence in the text is read only as an interloper, literally – as Ariel Sharon visits Toronto, much to the dismay of the Weiss and her comrades. 

The Anti-Zionism of the Jewish New Left

It is often assumed that with some exceptions, that the emergence of Holocaust memory among American Jews coincided with general American jubilance over the Israeli victory in the 1967 War.  As Norm Finkelstein writes, “American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel” after the Six-Day War, while Keith Feldman takes this step further to suggest, after Norm Podhoretz, “nothing less than the mass conversion of the American Jews to Zionism.”[35]  Amy Kaplan, Eric Dollinger and Melanie McAlister also document how the U.S. press and much of the Jewish and non-Jewish institutional world deeply identified with Israeli's lightening victory over Arab states, contrasting Israeli missiles blowing up Soviet jets before soaring over Africa to free hostages with "with images of Americans fleeing in helicopters from rooftops in Saigon."[36]  Many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, identified on a personal level the Israeli victories as if they were their own.  For many scholars of Jewish life, the sudden identification of the United States with Israel, combined with Jewish class ascendency after World War II, marks the end of Jewish otherness in the United States:  internationally, and domestically, Jews had entered the mainstream of American life.  Rudd’s narrative it would seem, asks us to question that assumption.

On the level of large Jewish institutions, this narrative of Jewish “conversion to Zionism” and the sense of belonging it implies would seem to bare itself out.  Historian Matt Berkman notes how such jubilation followed the money:  he tracks how after the 1967 War, a massive institutional shift in communication strategies, donor accounts, and political priorities towards supporting Israel -- even among mainstream Jewish institutions such as the American Committee for Judaism (ACJ) that had up to this point remain non-Zionist.[37]  Prior to the late 1960s, most Berman comments that large Jewish institutions mostly focused on the plight of Jews in the U.S., including refugees and Holocaust survivors.[38]  This shift in funding not only suggests a turn to Zionism as definitional for American Jewish life, it also suggests that large Jewish institutions felt Jews were no longer, in the main, a special case needing extensive extra-governmental support.  And more than this, for many Jewish liberals who were turning away from what they understood as the excesses of the radical left, Israel seemed to be like America, only better - "there were no draft dodgers in Israel," historian Michael Fischbach writes of the new pro-Israel consensus, and Vietnam War, no burning ghettos, no drug addicts, no crime.[39]  This merger between liberals and conservatives on Israel was perfected by Otto Preminger and Dalton Trumbo's 1960 film Exodus, based on Leon Uris' novel of the same name.  As Kaplan notes, it frames Uris' narrative of Israel's founding as violent retribution for the Holocaust, while also maintaining concern with international legitimacy, the United Nations, and world peace after World War II.[40]  The new support for Israel seemed to both be a progressive war of liberation by a persecuted people, while also magically defeating America’s enemies supported by the Soviet Union.  Jews were America’s best story.  

For center-right and even liberal commentators such as Nathan Glazer and Irving Howe, supporting Israel took on a "mystical" importance, cementing Israel for the first time as not only a center, but the center of Jewish American life.[41]  For liberals such as Howe and liberals-turned-neocon such as Glazer, Jews who were outspoken in their antagonism against Israel or support for Palestinians, ceased to be Jews. As troubling as Howe and Glazer's conclusions are for their gate-keeping of Jewish identity, there are a number of radical historians who ironically uphold Glazer and Howe's thesis:  as Keith Feldman argues in his study on the role of Palestine in the formation of American empire, "both the Jewish left and the Jewish right felt threatened by the Black Power movement," especially Black Power activists' critique of Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.[42]  For the right, the Black left was dangerous because of their attention to Jewish practices of economic exploitation and their rising class status.  Jews Glazer felt, were singled out as the enemy of Black Power.  While for Feldman, the Jewish left does not descend into such racist rhetoric, Black Power organizations' increasingly hostile stance towards Israel and ouster of Jewish activists from Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meant for them the historic and often quite material alliance was over.  In titling his chapter "Jewish Conversions," Feldman documents the right-ward drift of former Jewish leftists, as their support for Zionism and multiethnic democracy isolated them from the radicalizing currents of the anti-imperialist left. 

While the convergence of Holocaust memory and support for the state of Israel became a mainstay of Jewish institutional life on both the center and right, it is often forgotten how marginalized Jewish centrists and conservatives felt themselves to be in the 1960s, especially on the question of Zionism.  Indeed, if anything, the Jewish mood by the late 1960s was quite the opposite: from the overheated rhetoric of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) to the more dulcet tones of Jewish professors and the Jewish press, the assumption was that Zionism was in crisis on the Left, even and perhaps especially because of the left's Jewish constitution.  The sense among Jewish right wing radicals, and liberal intellectuals seemed to be that Jewish youth sided far more with SDS than with the IDF, let along the JDL.  The mood was so dire that in 1970, a conference was convened by the Histradrut Cultural Exchange Institute in New York's Arden House, gathering over a dozen leading liberal to left Jewish intellectuals to discuss the crisis. The lineup included sociologist Nathan Glazer, socialist historian Irving Howe, distinguished Hebrew professor Robert Alter, Mordecai Chertoff, Harvard professor Seymour Lipset, journalist Leonard Fein among others, and with the exception of Noam Chomsky, there was broad consensus that the Jewish left had turned against Zionism and thus, in their reading, the Jewish people.  For Jewish activist and journalist Leonard Fein, he summed up the mood of the New Left by saying "considerable intellectual support the left once had for Israel is gone.”[43]

One fact that perhaps also would puzzle a contemporary readership was how Jewish these dignitaries of liberal Jewish life also assumed the left to be. Irving Howe laments that “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as revolutionary the Egyptian dictatorship…a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah.”[44]  Buried in Howe’s lament is not only the grief over Jewish youth’s rejection of Zionism, but that in their revolutionary fervor, they are “indifferent to the antisemitism of the Black Panthers,” suggesting that Black Power and Jewish nationalism are diametrically opposed.[45]  Seymour Lipset also notes accurately that the "New Left is disproportionately Jewish," and concludes that then the New Left Jewish youth have joined a tendency " opposed to the Jewish people as a people.[46]  For Lipset and many others on the panel, the post-Bolshevik left has long opposed Jewish nationalism and Jewish culture, and the opposition to the state of Israel was not about American empire, but rather, the long war of the left to destroy Judaism in the name of universalism and advocacy for the most marginalized.   While some such as Walter Laqueur and Chertoff, this was explicable as a Jewish rebellion against one's liberal Zionist parents, and attributable the wider youth movement.[47] And for others such as Lipset, joining the left is blended with the desire to "assimilate" and to use the left as a vehicle to become fully American, for nearly all, there was an assumption that Yet for most, there was a broad recognition that the New Jewish Left, like the Old Jewish Left, was hostile to Jewish nationalism, or "particularism," especially as it manifested in the Israeli state.  For Glazer, this was all about race, as he cogently and perhaps aptly summed up the many alliances and solidarities of the left by saying bluntly:  "the New Left supports the Arabs because the blacks do" - which for Rudd and Klonsky would be a point of pride; for Glazer, an act of "sycophancy.”[48]  For nearly all the authors, again, Chomsky excepted, "there are Jewish interests and it is the thrust of the New Left to oppose them.”[49]  Or as SWP leader Gus Horowitz dryly summarized in 1971, "the Zionist forces are...on the defensive.  They are much less confident of public sympathy than they used to be.”[50]

What makes the New Left's anti-Zionism legible beyond just the opinions of individual activists and appear as an existential threat to Zionists and the Jewish right is that anti-imperialism had become perhaps the central slogan, the ideological anchor of New Left movements by the late 1960s.  The U.S. invasion of Vietnam was increasingly understood as part of the left commonsense as less a policy mistake, or even a crime, but an expression of U.S. imperialism, and one episode in a global fight between the Third World and the West.  As Martin Luther King reframed the War in his famous "Beyond Vietnam," no longer was the call for the U.S. to fulfill its own principles of democracy, but rather to grasp U.S. was on the "wrong side of a worldwide revolution," a phrase that would be understood commonly in the 1960s to mean the anticolonial uprisings from Vietnam to Cuba to Algeria to Ghana to South Africa.  King's shift in this moment was not only surprising to many because he "broke the silence," but he also signaled his support for New Left and their analysis of the War and the role of America in the world.  This connection between Black liberation and the struggle against imperialism was the core focus of the Black Panther Party, and came to be the dominant frame of radical analysis for the leadership and much of the membership of SDS.[51]  As David Gilbert summarized Eldridge Cleaver, “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem; either on the side of the people of the world or of imperialism.”[52]  For the Jewish intellectuals gathered by the Center for Cultural Exchange, they understood very well what this broad global analysis would mean for Jewish nationalism - and indeed, the 1967 War seemed to cement Israel in the minds of much of the New Left as yet another imperial power.[53]

While high profile Jewish, left wing writers and activists such as I.F. Stone, Isaac Deutscher, Irwin Silber of the National Guardian and Noam Chomsky were publicly critical of Israel after the 1967 War, what obscures the Jewish left critique of Zionism obscured today (even if it was quite clear in the 1960s), is that the liberation of Palestine was understood by members of SDS and SWP as part of a larger anti-imperialist struggle against Western capitalism.  Rather than summarize the conflict as between competing religions or ethnic groups, SDS, SWP and their allies tended to frame Palestine, much as they did the struggle in Vietnam and Cuba, as part of a wider global conflict between the Third World and the capitalist West.  As Richard Saks, a member of SDS and later the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), framed it: in so far as “imperialism was at the center of our analysis of American capitalism,” we also understood that “Israel was an outpost of American empire.”[54] As Rudd summarized, support for Palestinians “It distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals” and he wanted to be on the side of anti-imperialism.[55]   It was an issue that marked the New Left’s rupture with the liberal 1960s consensus, clarifying that the U.S. failure in Vietnam or the unpopularity with the draft were not particular issues to be solved, but systemic crises in a world system they meant to overthrow.  In 1968 the SDS leadership decided to explain its position Palestine in a series of articles by Eanet a staff writer for New Left Notes and someone close to leadership.  Eanet also expressed in an interview that it would be strategic for the articles on Palestine to be authored by someone who was not only known to be Jewish, but the daughter of the founder of a major synagogue in Washington D.C.[56]

Despite or perhaps because of Eanet’s background, her articles to do not frame the conflict in the Middle East as a Jewish and Arab issue, but rather in an editorial note describing the series, the editor argues that "outside of Vietnam" the "movement against imperialism in the Arab countries....may be the leading struggle against U.S. imperialism in the world today."[57]  Turning the New Right thesis that Israel is like America, but better, Eanet describes a country like the United States, only perhaps worse - as the dispossession of Palestinians from their land and Israel's expansive agenda is far from complete, and the Israeli working class saturated with racism. Eanet marks in the beginning of the article that the "situation in Palestine was analogous to the flight of early colonists in America...to a land already occupied by Indian people." Noting that the it was the racism of early Jewish colonists that prevented them from joining with the Arabs against the British, Eanet also argues that it was Jewish racism that informed the Kibbutzim labor policy of hiring only Jews, not socialism.  Divesting Palestinians from their land and "means of production" in the cities was just a start:  "Zionism was an ever expanding policy," Eanet writes, and given the "metaphysical concept of a 'homeland' and 'chosen people'" the Israelis will "expand as they can militarily."  With the rise of Al-Fatah and its "support of the Arab masses" one should not only see the analogy to Vietnam, but the analogy to the United States:  one can stop an Indian War before it is over.  This analogy was furthered by a second SDS pamphlet by Larry Hochman, who argued the "fundamental...central issue in Southwest Asia is the fact that a Jewish state has been established in the Arab midst without the invitation or consent of the indigenous population...at the aegis of Western imperial rule."[58]  

The SWP was generally aligned with SDS and with Black power positions on Israel-Palestine.  And like SDS, it was largely the Jewish members who argued and debated the policy on Palestine, at least in print – Peter Buch, Pete Seidman, Gus Horowitz, and John Rothschild.  In part the Jewish authorship of SWP pamphlets was explained by the need to defend the organizations against claims of antisemitism.  But it also seemed to come from a sincere desire by the Jewish members to not only shield the organization, but also address the ways in which SWP’s position is derived from a long, and proud, history of American Trotskyists taking a principled stand against Zionism, antisemitism and fascism, even when other Marxists were quiet.  The adopted resolutions and supporting materials, later published as a small book of around 80 pages titled “Israel and the Arab Revolutions,” was chiefly authored by Gus Horowitz, one of the few Jews in SWP who had grown up in an orthodox, Zionist household.  The pamphlet offered two major lines of argument – the first, that the Palestinian movement for self-determination was, unlike Nasserism and Ba’athism, a democratic people’s movement of the broader Middle East, and as such, an “advance” over the anti-colonial bourgeois nationalism that had come before in the region.  And because the movement was democratic in nature, Horowitz argued, it had the real chance to “appeal to the Jewish masses” and win them “away from Zionism.”[59] 

While SDS approached Israelis through the lens of “white skin privilege,” Horowitz tended to view the Israelis as both exploited by nationalism at the same time as they formed an “oppressor nationality” in relationship to Palestinians.[60]  Arguing that SWP is not only the strongest voice “against Zionism” on the left, it also is the “strongest opponent of anti-Semitism,” Zionism for Horowitz “does not advance the interests of the Jewish people – in Israel or anywhere else in the world.[61]  While Horowitz grants that Zionists have constructed their own “Hebrew nationality” that is distinct from diasporic Jewish identity, a Jewish-only state aligns Jews with “imperialism” and with their own bourgeoisie.[62]  It is for this reason that Jews in Israel do not have an independent working-class movement, fear invasion from the Arab world, and fear their growing pariah status globally – Israelis have sacrificed the possibility for peaceful cohabitation with their neighbors for a violent bourgeois nationalism.  Yet unlike the Arab national governments that are neither serious about Palestinian liberation and will deploy antisemitic rhetoric, Horowitz argues, the democratic nature of the Palestinian liberation struggle offers a place for Jews within it, if they are willing to give up on an ethnic state.  The fear that Palestinians will drive Jews into the sea is not the fear of antisemitism, but fear of revolution:  “to consider that the Arab revolution will necessarily threaten the national oppression of the Israeli Jews is an unfounded fear of the revolution itself, a fear which is incited for counterrevolutionary reasons by the imperialists and Zionists.”[63]  The situation for Jews in Israel Horowitz concludes, is not that of a religious or ethnic minority as it is in other countries, but as an oppressor – and the liberation of Palestinians will be their own liberation. 

While neither Eanet nor Horowitz identify themselves as Jewish in their articles, nor do their articles claim a particular Jewish subjectivity, for them as well as the other two-dozen or so New Left revolutionaries I interviewed, they understood their socialist anti-imperialism, including their anti-Zionism, as a continuation rather than a rupture with their Jewish sense of self.  For some such as Horowitz, Saks and SDS activist Steve Goldman, they identified primarily as Marxists and anti-imperialists, and yet, toward the end of the interview, echoed similar sentiments, that the “Jewish tradition” is to “side with the underdog,” and “the oppressed,” and because of this, most Jews are “less inclined to anti-communism,” and probably “more likely to sympathize with people of color.”[64]  This position – that they were both inside a tradition they could define and yet also, not defined by the tradition – was a common, perhaps the most common, sentiment among the activists – so much so I might almost call it a kind of Jewish subjectivity itself.  For for former SWP organizer Linda Loew, who like Saks came from a red diaper background, she summed it up simply by saying that she both liked being part of a multi-ethnic movement in which she could organize with farmworkers, students, and civil rights activists, and not feel that she was burdened by a sense of identity – which she thought of as her father’s intense sensitivity around perceived and real antisemitism.[65]  Yet she also prided herself on being the kind of Jew who opposed Zionism, and felt very much that she was carrying on the legacy of her parents.  “I didn’t feel there was a break,” she said, between her life in the New Left and her parents’ life, either in the kind of revolutionary work she was committed to in the SWP, or with her sense of what it meant to be Jewish.  Like Yuri Slezkine’s commentary on Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman” Hodel running off to be a revolutionary – even or especially an anti-Zionist one -- is in a larger Jewish sense, still all in the family.[66] 

New Left Anti-Fascism and (Jewish) Red Scare Memory

One reason for a Jewish left to oppose Zionism during the 1960s while also affirming a Jewish subjectivity may have been due to the way progressives tended to see the post-war prosperity in very different terms than large mainstream Jewish institutions such as AJC and ACJ and their adherents.  As Marc Dollinger writes, “American Jews celebrated the postwar consensus,” enjoying their “integrating into the suburbs” and finding “common ties” with their new often white, Christian neighbors.[67]  Along with this new consensus, of course, there was also a rapid rise in class ascension, fueled by the GI Bill, university entrance in greater numbers, and the beginning of the end of restrictive covenants backed by FHA loans – all things, it should be noted, denied to most African-Americans during the same period.  Yet while large numbers of Jews ascended into the middle class, for the many hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Communist and socialist left of the 1940s and the decade of the 1950s, the era of course, looked quite different.  For Jews on the left, whether in the Communist Party, as members of Communist affiliated unions and organizations, or simply people with strong left sympathies, the era appeared less as the birth of a new post-war consensus, and more like the emergence of a post-war fascism.                                                                                                                      

Several years before Philip Roth ironized Jewish assimilation in Goodbye Columbus, Jewish Communist writer Howard Fast published a different tale about Cold War Jewish life in the United States:Peekskill USA.  The short book is a first-person narrative of Fast’s role in the infamous Peekskill riot of 1949, in which gangs of right-wing vigilantes twice attacked the concert goers and supporters of Paul Robeson.  Fast was part of the initial organizing committee, using his name and reputation to help publicize the event, and on the first night, was also one of the concert attendees who organized resistance to the mobs: he and two dozen other men fought off the fascist attackers, protecting the concert space while others fled to safety. Fast’s analysis, supported by the Civil Rights Congress that urged him to write it, was that this event was the opening salvo of a new form of fascism that was emergent in American life.  As Fast writes, “thePeekskill affair was an important step in the preparation for the fascization of America and for the creation of receptive soil for the promulgation of World War III,” as a way he concluded to both prepare the U.S. for necessary “violence” to put down the left, and also begin preparations for new military conflict.[68]  As one of the many instances of “force and violence against the left” Fast saw the coming Cold War, what Dollinger refers to as “consensus,” as less a coming sign integration and liberal democracy, than as a right-wing purge of the left, and the intensification of a militarized state.[69]

The racial and political coordinates of the vigilante violence were quite stark to Fast.  The crowd that assaulted the concert goers shouted racist and antisemitic slurs, “screaming at us in a full frenzy…full of the taste of death,” promising that “every n- bastard dies here tonight!  Every Jew bastard dies here tonight.”[70]  Rather than just a random event or stray racial epithets, Fast cites both the ACLU and the Civil Rights Congress documentation of how both riots were premeditated, and done in full view of local and state police.  Fast not only witnessed police intermingling with the vigilantes, he watches as a cop “beat the windshield of the car in with his club while he drew his revolver with another hand, while “another policeman” was “smashing in the windshield of a car that asked for directions.”[71]  The racist and antisemitic rhetoric Fast also documents as systemic and premeditated.  Stickers were printed and plastered all over town reading “COMMUNISM IS TREASON.  BEHIND COMMUNISM THE JEW” and a statement from one of the groups organizing the riot read:

You Jews, and we mean you Communist Jews, have made yourself obnoxious and offensive to the American people, and you are only using the American Negro as a “Front” in your criminal un-American activities.[72]

Fast additionally documented an attempt to assassinate Robeson, with a sniper’s nest discovered in the trees behind the stage, and even before the full assault on the concert goers, black people were dragged out of cars in town and beaten in broad daylight.  Fast described the mob not as “lumpen” but as “prosperous-appearing men, well set up, well dressed, real estate men, grocery clerks, lunch counter attendants…” – not a rabble but “decent citizens” and civic leaders.[73]  It was an organized assault, from the top down.

Fast said he wrote the book to wake Americans up, for he felt Americans have an “amazing resistance…toward” the “acceptance” of an “unmistakable phenomenon – the cultivation and growth of American fascism.  We simply do not believe it.”[74]  As if to prove his own point, Fast himself documents multiple moments in the text when he either refuses to recognize what he is seeing, or refuses to listen to advice from people who had a better understanding of what transpired that week.  Frequently “Mrs M,” his children’s nurse, and a Black woman, admonished Fast for not understanding how “white folks behave” and left town before the second concert.[75]  Likwise, the night of the second concert, Fast frequently documents how he fails to comprehend what he sees:

"Then suddenly we had to slow down. The car ahead of us had fared worse than we; every window was smashed, even the rear window. I remember saying to R-

"The road is wet. They must have gotten the gas tank or the radiator."

There was a dark wetness that flowed out of the car ahead of us; and then we realized that it was blood, but an enormous flow of blood that ran from the car that way and into the road."

Even at the level of Fast's sentence, the "but" creates an opposition between what he sees and the enormity of it, revealing his own sense of unreality as he faced yet again another barrage of violence on the way out of the concert grounds. Through his Black nurse and his own feelings of unreality, Fast quietly documents not only the slowness of his own perceptual response, the much longer lineages of fascism his nurse seems far more aware of: “how white folks behave.”

Perhaps the most important Communist organization to make the connection between the U.S. and home-grown fascism was the Civil Rights Congress (CRC).   Founded in 1946 to replace the International Labor Defense, it took an explicitly antifascist approach to organizing against racism and anti-union suppression.  Placing the Holocaust at the center of its analysis of capitalism, William Patterson, its director, compared the fate of African-Americans in the United States to Jews under the Holocaust.  Furthering the analysis of Negritude theorist Aimé Césaire, Patterson held the origins of fascism lay in colonialism and slavery, systems that in an era of crisis, returned back to Europe to form fascism.  Following this logic, perhaps the CRC's most famous and controversial act was the We Charge Genocide petition delivered to the United Nations in 1951, claiming that under the U.N. charter, the United States was committing genocide against African-Americans, and U.N. intervention against lynching and Jim Crow was necessary.  What was remarkable about the CRC was that it was one of the few organizations with a sizeable grassroots Jewish and African-American membership and leadership to denounce the Rosenberg trial as a site of fascist violence.  One might even say that because of its Jewish and African-American members and leadership, it was uniquely suited to make such comparisons.  Unlike the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the NAACP that both denounced the Rosenbergs, the CRC connected the execution of the Rosenbergs to lynchings of African-Americans in the deep south and Nazi genocide in Europe[76].  The CRC, like the Communist Party and later the BPP saw the violent backlash against Communism, including the execution of the Rosenbergs, the bloody riot at Peekskill against Paul Robeson, and the jailing of Communists under the Smith Act as signs of incipient fascism.  Had the CRC not been banned in 1956 as a "subversive organization" under the same Act, it is very possible that it would have been among the groups sponsoring the BPP's "United Against Fascism" conference.  

Stanley Aronowitz's 1960s pamphlet on the specificity of American fascism likewise connects the Holocaust to the "systematic and conscious genocide against generations of blacks, both North and South," linking the Nazi mass murder to "lynchings" and the "brutality" with which "American Indians" were treated by an "advanced industrial country.”[77]  Aronowitz, who comes out of the left-labor tradition and was not allied with SDS, nonetheless saw in the Panther's description of the United States as fascist something that aligned with a longer left tradition in the United States.  Fascism for Aronowitz, is not merely a kind of lower middle-class populism, but a modality of rule that arises when the traditional modes of parliamentary hegemony are no longer sufficient to resolve contradictions or quell rebellion.  But rather than see fascism as a departure from normative modes of rule, fascism exists within and is an expression of U.S. liberal institutions, founded as they were on forms of capitalist violence.  Thus Aronowitz concludes, much like the CRC, that the "anticommunist purges" of the late 1940s and 1950s constituted a "prefascist stage" of American capitalism, which culminated in the "public trials of countless communists...the murder of Rosenbergs....witchhunts against trade unions....and the McCarren Act" which banned any organization affiliated with the Communist Party.[78]  Unlike the Zionists who might refer to the Holocaust as a form of Jewish exceptionalism, or radicals such as Tseng-Putterman who would order the Holocaust on a hierarchy, the CRC, Aronowitz, the CP and others thing of racial genocide and fascism in its many intersecting forms as a totality of capitalist rule. 

In this context, it makes sense that the most serious left-wing pamphlets and articles on antisemitism in the 1960s would appear from Marxist organizations.  While most New Left organizations had significant Jewish presence, their considerations centered on defending groups like SNCC and the BPP against charges of antisemitism for calls against Zionism.  In part because there is a lengthy Marxist literature on antisemitism, and in part from their own analysis of the role antisemitism plays in the construction of fascism, both the CPUSA and SWP devoted extensive resources to discussing the present role of antisemitism in America and its relationship to Zionism and the right.  Both CP and SWP publications do not single out antisemitism as a transcendent evil, nor mark the Holocaust as a singular event in human history.  Like Marcuse and the BPP, they locate the Holocaust within the larger structures of capitalism and imperialism, and see antisemitism as a structural and reoccurring feature of capitalist life.  In collection of essays in late 1970s on antisemitism and Zionism from Jewish Affairs, Communist author Hyman Lumer documents still active presence of antisemitism in American life.  Quoting from a University of California study, Lumer writes that two-thirds of Americans are antisemitic, one of third hold such views "private," another third are "outspoken antisemites" and a last tenth "advocate doing something to take 'power' from the Jews.”[79]  Lumer roots antisemitism in capitalism and imperialism, and in doing, places the "Nazi Holocaust" alongside the "millions of Africans" who "suffered death at the hands of slave traders" and the "genocidal extermination of the Indian people in the Western hemisphere.[80]  Like Hannah Arendt, Lumer locates antisemitism in both the economy in so far as he documents Jews' exclusion from "top executive and administrative positions" in banks, corporations, and elite universities, but he primarily aligns antisemitism as part of a political formation, the far right.[81]  "With a sharp swing toward reaction on the part of the Nixon administration....fascist elements...rise in an open, virulent expression of antisemitism," Lumer argues, further documenting the "desecration of synagogues" in recent months.[82]  Lumer who was one of the members of the Communist leadership who went underground in the 1950s and later arrested and jailed for a year under the Taft-Hartley Act for "conspiring to lie about membership in Communist Party" as an organizer in a labor union, was very familiar with both the fascist and antisemitic nature of the American state.  Like generations of Marxist critics before him, Lumer locates the rise of antisemitism as a means to deflect from the power of global capitalism, and shield the ruling classes from scrutiny. 

The specificity of antisemitism for the left, was not then simply an afterthought.  Pete Seidman, a red diaper baby whose father lost his job during the red scare, wrote the position paper for SWP on antisemitism.  While Seidman had been personally aware of antisemitism from a young age, as he was bullied and school and his father was a blacklisted former communist, it was the experience of being attacked by the ADL for SWP's support for Palestinians that goaded him into serious study on the question.  What is perhaps most remarkable about Seidman's study is the emphasis it places on the failures of liberal democracy to protect Jews from structural antisemitism both before and after WWII.  Antisemitism, for Seidman, is less a means for market liberalism to disavow the racial modalities of capital accumulation as Tseng-Putterman and Ratskoff suggest, than a structural part of the liberal state itself.  Focusing on the Roosevelt administration, Seidman shows how even while Roosevelt made token gestures toward Jewish inclusion and courted Jewish leaders of well-heeled organizations, on its most fateful policy decision, whether to allow Jewish refugees from Europe fleeing fascism, Roosevelt collaborated with assimilationist Jewish organizations to keep Jewish refugees out.  Not only did the Roosevelt administration not raise quotas, it intervened to ensure that even existing quotas were not filled, even after Kristallnacht made the Nazis' plans quite clear.  This did not change even after the full knowledge of the Holocaust was widely shared:  Roosevelt and later Truman's policy of keeping Jewish refugees out of the United States remained -- fearing that Jews, as the Nazis felt, would bring with them communism and other "unassimilable" ideas.  For Seidman, the Roosevelt administration's refusal to allow Jewish refugees was entirely in line with the antisemitic culture of assimilation, enthusiastically embraced by many Jewish organizations, including B'nai B'rith and the AJC, which felt that becoming "good Americans" was important than rescuing Jews from the Holocaust.  Seidman goes so far as to accuse the Roosevelt administration of conscious antisemitism, noting that despite the "carefully cultivated reputation as a friend and benefactor of the Jews," placed a know antisemite and fascist sympathizer, Breckinridge Long, in charge the administration's Jewish refugee policy.[83]

Since June 2013, when a mass movement took to the streets of Brazil, the country has undergone significant political polarisation. This movement has had an impact on the way Brazilian society and the Jewish community have related to the Palestine/Israel issue. On the left, a growing number of social movements and political parties, such as PSOL^[1], have committed to a stance of radical solidarity with Palestinians, adopting BDS as part of their platforms. On the right, Israel has come to play a central role in the political agendas of evangelical and neo-fascist groups that make up the base of the Jair Bolsonaro government, elected in 2018.

In 2017, a group of far-right Zionist Jews invited Bolsonaro to hold a lecture at a Jewish recreational club in Rio de Janeiro. Amid laughter and applause from an audience of over three hundred Jews, Bolsonaro openly attacked Brazil's indigenous and quilombola communities.^[2] ‘Not one centimetre will be demarcated for an indigenous reserve or quilombola. Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth [to be exploited] underneath’.^[3]

Outside the club, a crowd of over a hundred protestors made up mostly of young Jews from left-wing Zionist youth movements, decried Bolsonaro's presence, waved Israeli flags and chanted in Hebrew. The protesters expressed their disapproval not only of Bolsonaro's approach to Brazilian politics but to Israeli politics as well. ‘Zionist Jews don't vote for fascists,’ they shouted. Left-wing Zionist intellectuals considered the event an important milestone that signified an unprecedented crack in the hegemony of the progressive-liberal agenda of the Brazilian Jewish community.^[4]

Indeed, the demonstration would lead to a public repositioning of Zionist Jews who are supportive of progressive agendas to join the rest of the Brazilian left in defence of oppressed peoples and in the struggle against fascism.^[5] From the point of view of left Zionists, anti-Semitism in the pro-BDS radical left is the reason they are excluded from both the struggle for justice in the Middle East and the battle against the Brazilian far-right. According to them, the Brazilian far-right and far-left both uphold an ‘Imaginary Israel’ that rejects the plurality of Zionism and Israel.^[6]

According to this logic, Left Zionism would represent the only viable alternative against ‘extremism’. Left Zionists argue that dialogue alone would be capable of resolving the Palestine/Israel question and the divergences within the Jewish community and the Brazilian left. This neoliberal discourse that claims ‘there is no alternative’ has managed to attract growing support among Brazilian Jews and relevant sectors of the Brazilian left who are in denial about the reality in Palestine/Israel.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the double-volume Marxism and the Critique of Antisemitism special issue of Historical Materialism. Further additions will still be made before then. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months. We ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.All Illustrations are by Natalia Podpora.

It is possible to observe a global crisis of Left Zionism, from Israel to Brazil, to the US and the UK.^[7] Jewish communities worldwide have undergone transformations in race and class relations after WWII.^[8] This explains in part why Brazilian Jews have not completed the polarisation observed in Brazilian society to integrate the anti-Zionist left, instead joining ranks with the new neo-fascist right.

Based on an analysis of the intellectual reflections and actions of this group, we argue that, with the help of Zionist elites and the coercion of the Brazilian state, left-wing Zionists act as a gatekeepers to prevent left-wing Jews and sectors of the moderate left from composing radical movements for the emancipation of oppressed and exploited peoples in Brazil and Palestine. As such, they manage to uphold both Israeli colonial claims of sovereignty over Palestinian territory and the legitimacy of Zionism within the Brazilian left.

We ground our critique in reflections by anti-Zionist Jews, anti-colonial and settler colonial perspectives to demonstrate how Left Zionism functions as a soft, patronizing version of the old colonial chauvinism. To that end, we test the hypothesis put forward by the Jewish American Marxist Alexander Bittelman, writing in 1947, that Zionists align with the reactionary forces of the nation-state in which they reside.^[9]

We understand the Zionist Left praxis as a counter-revolutionary strategy to maintain the hegemony of Liberal Zionism based on the exclusion of anti-Zionist alternatives, inside and outside the Jewish community. Historical analysis of the politics of the anti-Zionist Jewish movement disrupts the idea of a harmonious coexistence inside the Jewish community claimed by the Brazilian Zionist Left.

The erasing of the Jewish anti-Zionist left from the history of the Brazilian Jewish community is a direct result of its historical defeat against Zionism.^[10] Academia has been an important tool that has helped Liberal Zionism maintain its hegemony in the country. The few Brazilian authors who approach the particularity of the Jewish question from a Marxist point of view^[11] are invariably accused falling prey to essentialism when treating the relationship between Jews and anti-Zionist communist movements.^[12]

We propose an alternative reflection that examines the anti-Zionist Jewish left, racism and colonialism as key elements to understand the contradictions between actually existing Zionism in Palestine and the progressive-liberal hegemony that prevails in the Jewish community in Brazil. We aim to provide a counter-hegemonic critique for an emancipatory praxis that rejects colonialism and understands the particularity of the Jewish question without subsuming it to class analyses.

First, we present the dominant literature’s understanding of the role played by the Zionist Left in the Jewish community and in Brazilian society at large. Next, we provide a critique of the concept of ‘Imaginary Israel’ and locate it within the counter-revolutionary praxis of the Zionist left. Finally, we point to ways in which the Zionist movement has acted to dismantle Jewish anti-Zionist alternatives in Brazil.  

The crisis of the progressive-liberal hegemony of the Brazilian Jewish-Zionist community

An alignment with the WZO^[13] is at the foundation of the Zionist movement in Brazil in the 1910s. It eventually undergoes dynamisation when, in 1927, Russian immigrant Aron Bergman founds the Brazilian headquarters of the Poalei Tzion in Rio de Janeiro.^[14] Socialist Zionists constituted a majority of the Jewish community in the late 1930s, and were responsible for building schools, libraries and youth movements, which formed their main social base.

These entities played a fundamental role in the expansion of Zionism, the establishment of Hebrew as the Jewish national language, the support of the Brazilian State to Israel and the mobilization of financial and human resources for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, such as military training in youth camps for the formation of new settlers.^[15]

According to Monica Grin, the post-WWII period saw a rise of the progressive-liberal agenda in the Jewish community.^[16] The country’s democratisation after 1945, following the end of the Estado Novo,^[17] resulted in a new model for institutions representing the Jewish community in a territorial form. These entities were directed by Zionist elites to represent all Jews in Brazilian society, in particular to the national government. Nevertheless, they were open to anti-Zionist groups, which were still numerous then but remained autonomous.

The Jewish community's positions in favour of human rights, social justice, the fight against anti-Semitism and the defence of Israel as a democratic nation among authoritarian countries in the Middle East would form the basis of a new social cohesion. The defence of universal rights and citizenship, in particular, and the expansion of ethnic and religious minority rights, would lead to Jews having their rights respected as individuals and as a group.^[18]

This agenda brought about links with other social groups in support of national multiculturalism, religious freedom and the fight against racism. It turned various progressive groups in society, such as sectors of the Catholic Church and the Black Movement, into allies in the fight against anti-Semitism.^[19]

Another example includes the alliances of Left Zionist groups with the Brazilian left. According to Michel Gherman, the relation between Zionists and the Brazilian left went from one of empathy in the 1930s to one of hostility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. According to him, even before the recognition of Israel by the USSR, there was proximity between left Zionists and the PCB,^[20] the main representative of the Brazilian revolutionary left at the time.^[21] There was even sympathy among sectors of the PCB for the collectivist aspects of the Jewish state.^[22]

Even at the height of the ‘zionization’ of the Jewish community after the 1967 war, a relative proximity between left Zionism and the Brazilian left endured. This proximity persisted during the re-democratisation of the country in the 1980s when Zionist groups approached the PT^[23], the main party of the Brazilian left, which adopted the liberal international consensus of peace, coexistence and two states. Thus, both Jews and the left welcomed the ‘critically Zionist’ position.^[24]

However, this Liberal Zionist hegemony would experience a crisis after the Second Intifada (2000-2006), when, according to Gherman, binary interpretations would result in extremist positions on the Brazilian left towards Israel and Zionism. This kind of critique from the left conflated Jewish, Zionist and Israeli identities.

Gherman purposely conflates anti-Zionist critiques of left-wing Zionism with isolated anti-Semitic statements by individuals on the Brazilian left. He claims that the same reasoning underpins texts which accuse ‘minority groups of Jewish origin’ of possessing a ‘hidden power’ that would help them dominate the world^[25] and those which point to the structural characteristics of settler colonial Zionism in Palestine, including on the Zionist Left.^[26]

Therefore, any critique of Left Zionism and its colonial features could easily be framed as a denial of its possibility to exist. Left anti-Zionism would be a new kind of anti-Semitism.

In this sense, Jews cannot be right or left; they are exclusively Jews. Zionism, here, takes the place of an ‘original Judaism,’ replacing the typical accusations found in traditional forms of political anti-Semitism … Brazilian Jews are seen as ‘representatives’ of an alleged ‘Zionism’ that is determined to defend the interests of Israel. Not exactly the real State of Israel, but an imaginary one, that possesses superpowers and is able to exploit and dominate other countries and economic systems.^[27]

Furthermore, according to Gherman, the BDS movement encourages ‘dangerous and generalizing’ confusion between Zionists, Jews and Israel, allowing the anti-Semitic left to reaffirm its position in support of boycott campaigns. BDS Brazil would thus benefit from anti-Semitism on the left.

BDS activists seem to exploit the local confusion between national Jewish and Jewish religious identities, between Jews and Israel, between Israel and the attitudes of specific Israeli governments in order to reinforce their influence and political agenda among specific Brazilian political groups.^[28]

On the other hand, Gherman, Grin and Caraciki understand the political growth of conservative evangelical groups in the 2010s, historical champions of Israel, as a factor that pressured Bolsonaro to embrace Israel as an ally in the defence of Western Judeo-Christian values against threats coming from the East, Islam and the left.^[29] In 2014, Bolsonaro was baptised by an evangelical leader in order to gain the support of evangelicals. Since his inauguration, Bolsonaro has become one of Israel's foremost partners and Israeli flags have become ubiquitous at Brazilian far-right demonstrations.

As a result, this has ignited a neo-Zionist and ultra-conservative agenda led by previously marginalised far-right groups within the Jewish community. These have sought to break with the progressive-liberal consensus and exclude ‘critically Zionist’ Jews. Far-right Israel apologist groups have replaced leftist movements as the Zionist elites’ main allies.^[30]

Therefore, we would be witnessing a ‘de-conversion’ of left-wing Zionists coupled with a symbolic conversion of evangelicals and Bolsonarist supporters of Israel. Far-right Zionist groups, which see themselves as the ‘true’ representatives of Jewish interests in Brazil, would be promoting a ‘cleansing’ within Jewish-Zionist entities. This would be causing a rupture of the solidarity within the Jewish community and a crisis of representation supposedly never seen before.^[31]

A novelty underpinning the alignment between evangelical extremism, Bolsonarist fascism and ultra-nationalist Jews is their essentially positive view of Jews, Zionists and Israel as defenders of their moral and political values. In fact, for Liberal Zionist intellectuals, this essentially positive representation would not be a form of anti-Semitism, although many, including Bolsonaro himself, espouse openly anti-Semitic positions.^[32] That is, their ultra-Zionist and anti-Semitic positions do not overlap but exist as complementary phenomena. On the left, however, there would be an overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The depoliticizing “Imaginary Israel” framework

As a way of explaining the crisis of hegemony of Liberal Zionism, Gherman developed the concept of an ‘Imaginary Israel’, which transmutes with that of the ‘imaginary Jew’, elaborated by Alain Finkielkraut for late twentieth century France.^[33] For Gherman, as for Finkielkraut, there would exist, both on the left and on the right, social constructions that are responsible for making Jews, and by extension Israel, exceptional and guided by a supposed essentialist nature.^[34]

The left would see the Jewish-Zionist-Israel nexus as racist, colonising, imperialist, capitalist and right-wing. The right would interpret this nexus as religiosity, messianism, conservatism and the defence of Western Judeo-Christian society. Neither of these imaginary perspectives would have room for the plurality and diversity of the ‘real Jew’ or the various types of Zionisms and opposing strands in Israeli society.

The new Brazilian right ... seems to attract groups from the new left. And, in a bear hug, this ends up killing both, since the most important thing is to suffocate those who contradict the versions of both sides, in this case, progressive Jews, liberals, left Zionists.^[35]

The theoretical elaboration of the ‘Imaginary Israel’ has guided, in particular, the actions of IBI^[36], an organization founded in 2017 that advocates for a liberal Zionism that aggregates left and right liberals in defence of a progressive-liberal hegemony. Its actions are aimed at representative entities of the Jewish-Zionist community and important circles of Brazilian society, such as literary festivals, film fairs, political parties, the media and public universities.

IBI’s slogan ‘Zionism is plural’ functions as a veil of multicultural tolerance behind which lies an ambition to antagonise criticism from Palestinians and radical left-wing movements that point to the settler colonial characteristic of actually existing Zionism in Palestine. For Gherman, director of IBI, and Thomaz, pointing out the ways in which colonialism structures reality in Palestine/Israel constitutes a misrepresentation that erases the complexity of the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ in a similar argumentative vein to those who would wish to erase thecomplexity of Jews.^[37]

According to IBI's president, David Diesendruck, the organisation was funded as a reaction to the ‘pain’ caused by polarisation in Brazilian society.^[38] In an ethnographic research conducted between 2015 and 2017 with Brazilian Jews who identify as left-wing Zionists, Bianca Marcossi noticed a shared pain among those who claim this identity.^[39] This suffering would stem from isolation and marginalisation in Brazilian society as a result of polarisation around the Palestine/Israel issue.

Common ground for Brazilian left-wing Zionists includes a support for the Palestinian State and the end of the occupation of the Palestinian territories, and a Zionism based on Jewish humanist and ethical values. Marcossi notes a common effort of left Zionists to self-define their Zionist identity in an idealistic way that bares no correlation with actually existing Zionism.^[40]

Marcossi highlights how this desire to end the occupation is regarded as a priority required to save Israel and the Zionism that they understand to be true: the one that would have existed until 1967, before the ‘deviation’ caused by the Zionist right. This discourse of ‘deviation’ is also observed in the critique of the actions of the Zionist far-right against the liberal consensus in the Brazilian Jewish community.^[41]

The intellectuals of Left Zionism wish to redefine this individual suffering as an identity with a privileged perspective that allows for a better understanding of the reality, by standing on two sides: the left and Zionism. They aim to make their political proposal of ‘two states for two peoples’ the rational one because it is founded on a privileged experience of suffering that seeks moderation. While the extreme right defends an apartheid state, resulting from its ambitions to annex the West Bank, the project of a democratic bi-national state is gaining ground on the left.^[42]

In the words of IBI's executive coordinator, Rafael Kruchin:

... on the left and on the right in Brazil, there is a clear dichotomy that opposes those who fight against ‘barbarism’ and those who fight against ‘colonialism’ … Each side of this binary reality sees and proclaims itself as the locus of excellence and clarity, and does not seem, at the present moment, willing to rethink its categories of classification … It is necessary to start talking about concrete alternatives to the present conjuncture and, who knows, about the possible solution of two states.^[43]

Therefore, ‘Imaginary Israel’ serves as a theory of liberal Zionism to resume the two states project and re-establish a progressive-liberal hegemony in the Brazilian Jewish community through the strategy of dialogue. This framework seems critical, but it is founded on a false polarisation that equates left and right in a ‘horseshoe theory’.

In this paradigm, the political spectrum would be in the shape of a horseshoe that would result in the extreme left being closer to the extreme right than to the centre-left. Therefore, left and right would not have qualitative or teleological differences.

According to Sabrina Fernandes, the “horseshoe theory” can only be observed in an environment of great depoliticisation such as that of Brazil since June 2013.^[44] The idea of a plurality against ‘binarisms’ advocated by the Zionist Left’s ‘Imaginary Israel’ paradigm enforces a depoliticisation that demobilises the structural antagonisms resulting from the settler colonial reality at the root of the inequalities of power and the conditions of oppression and exploitation between Jews and Palestinians. Consequently, it constructs a representation in which the conflict ceases to be a settler colonial one and instead becomes one between liberals and extremists. ‘Imaginary Israel’ is an ideology that justifies the role of left Zionists as gatekeepers of the Jewish community and the moderate Left against increasingly ‘extremist’ positions on the radical left. In this false representation of reality, left Zionists are equal in victimhood to Palestinians.

For example, in an article on Jewish fundamentalism, Gherman and Grin state that extremists form ‘violent gangs that fight Palestinians and progressive Jews with equal violence’.^[45] As if to imply that progressive Jews are put through equal suffering, following massacres such as the one in Hebron in 1994, as the Palestinians who are submitted to the systematic theft of homes and land, among other acts of violence committed by extremist settlers that end up benefiting the settler population as a whole. 

This distortion of reality is based on fallacies that benefit a right-wing liberal project by limiting the possibility of conciliation exclusively to liberals inscribed within a neoliberal order in Brazil.^[46] This can be seen in the claim that Zionist settler colonialism is the fruit of the left's fundamentalist imagination and that the BDS movement benefits from the anti-Semitism of the radical left. Another form of depoliticisation occurs through the discourse strategy, which is presented as the rational and technocratic solution according to neoliberal procedures of conflict resolution and supposedly rises above the ideology of the 'pro-Palestinian' left and the 'pro-Israel’ right.

In this way, the "Imaginary Israel" theory reproduces the old strategy of ‘complexity’ that has historically kept international leftists in fear of being accused of anti-Semitism when criticising Zionism and its colonial praxis^[47] — a recurrent practice, as observed in the case of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.^[48] Consequently, the settler colonial and racist aspects of Zionism are obscured. Radical forms of criticism by anti-Zionists are portrayed as ‘irrational’, forcing the left to adopt more moderate positions.

The plurality trap: gatekeeping the Brazilian Left

The 2010s have seen the rising impact of new organisations linked to left-wing Zionism on the Brazilian left, thus steering it away from joining the BDS campaign or opposing Bolsonarism in the Jewish community. On some occasions, articulation occurred with non-Zionist Jewish groups that consent to the hegemony of Liberal Zionism, such as ASA in Rio de Janeiro and Casa do Povo in São Paulo.^[49]

The main area of activity was the radical left party PSOL, created in 2005 as a socialist alternative to the PT, a party that became more suited to neoliberal hegemony.^[50] Several left-wing Zionists joined the PSOL in Rio de Janeiro in the 2010s, such as Guilherme Cohen, leader of Jews for Democracy, trained in the Zionist youth movement and former advisor to former MP Jean Wyllys, an important leader of the LGBTQ cause and ardent opponent of Bolsonaro.

Marcossi notes that the recruitment of allies on the Brazilian left seeks to reinforce belief in Left Zionism among those liberal Jews in crisis. Faced with the suffering they bear, they tend to move towards the anti-Zionist left or the Bolsonarist right. The Israeli Zionist left, Meretz in particular, often sends emissaries to impart the teachings of the ‘motherland’ to those whose beliefs are in doubt so as to prevent their departure.

In the 2016 Rio de Janeiro mayoral election, which pitted evangelical Marcelo Crivella against Marcelo Freixo, from PSOL, the left-wing politician was accused of anti-Semitism because sectors of his party claimed that Israel promoted the genocide of Palestinians. With the support of the Zionist left, Freixo sought to distinguish himself from the anti-Zionist wing and adopted the traditional Zionist Left stance of differentiating the State of Israel from the Netanyahu government: ‘Being against a government is not being against a country.’^[51]

It’s important to highlight that PSOL is a party of tendencies without centralism, and that Wyllys and Freixo were independent politicians. The tendencies can have a specific ideology, such as Trotskyism or Ecosocialism, or a more general approach to socialism. As a result, there are divergences between positions taken by some internal tendencies and independent MPs and the official statements adopted by the party’s International Relations Sector on matters such as Palestine/Israel, Venezuela, and Syria. Consequently, PSOL is seen as Zionist and Pro-Palestine at the same time.[52] This kind of contradiction is not seen in minor parties of the radical left that adopt a centralist organization, such as PCB, a Marxist-Leninist party, or PSTU[53], a Trotskyist party. PSTU is particularly involved in the solidarity with the Palestinian cause and rejects any rapprochement with the Zionist left.  

There are also collaborations between different groups for initiatives such as trips to Palestine/Israel for important figures from the Brazilian left. Wyllys went to Palestine/Israel in 2015 on a trip organised by Gherman, Cohen and other members of Progressive Jews, PSOL, CONIB^[54] and the Brazilian Embassy in Israel. According to the politician, the goal was ‘to make the connection between the Zionist left and the Palestinian left and advance the debate about the Occupation within the left’.^[55]

Wyllys' itinerary followed the script of Left Zionism: meetings with figures such as David Grossmann and Nitzan Horowitz; visits to the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Combatants for Peace, to Yad Vashem and to the Zikim kibbutz, connected to Hashomer Hatzair and built over the Palestinian village of Hirybia;^[56] and a lecture on ‘peace’ at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In an orientalist vein, Wyllys wrote about the trip: ‘the rights secured by the Israeli LGBT movement are a beacon in a region dominated by fundamentalism, totalitarianism, misogyny and homophobia’.^[57]

According to Wyllys, during his trip, he learned that ‘Zionism is not a synonym for Jew’; that ‘anti-Zionism is used to disguise anti-Semitism’; that ‘there are Zionists who are against the occupation of Palestinian territories, … and in favour of the two-state solution’.^[58] Marcossi claims that the politician ‘has come to 'see' through the eyes of his 'hosts', adopting the same hope as them, the same repudiation of the BDS movement ... and the same method, dialogue’.^[59]

The case of Jean Wyllys is an example of a successful venture by the Zionist left to ‘teach’ Brazilian society, through the recruitment of non-Jewish intellectuals, how to contest the hegemony at its side. In the view of a militant of Brazilian Left Zionism:

(Wyllys) declared positions that are very close to ours, practically similar. If not for the difference in positionality, which is neither Jewish nor Zionist, but only for the understanding of reality, (it is) very close.^[60]

This effort was also aimed at other public figures in an attempt to normalise the left Zionist discourse in the country, such as Gregório Duvivier, an influential comedian with great public influence who is also affiliated with the PSOL;^[61] Paulo Abrão, a human rights activist responsible for organising ‘meetings and dialogues between Palestinians and Israelis’ for peace through the Ministry of Justice;^[62] and Djamila Ribeiro, an important intellectual of the Black Movement, who was brought closer to the Zionist Left after understanding as a form of racism the criticism that Roger Waters and others in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, including black activists, had levelled against the Brazilian black musician Milton Nascimento for performing in Israel.^[63]

Gherman, Wyllys and Ribeiro share a common understanding of anti-Zionist criticism as a form of intolerance against their individual identities, subscribing to a political strategy close to that of the Brazilian moderate left which is based on a pragmatic adaptation to the dominant neoliberal order. From this perspective, the liberating utopia of decolonisation and the BDS movement are portrayed as oppressive because they confront Israeli ‘plurality’ and exclude their supposedly ‘real’ partners: the Zionist Left.

In this way, the Zionist Left rejects the real Palestinian – the one who claims a settler colonial perspective and adheres to a strategy of anti-colonial refusal against the normalization of Israeli colonial racism – in exchange for an imaginary Zionism grounded in misrepresentations of reality that disguise settler colonialism. Much like Finkielkraut does in relation to Europeans, left Zionists assume a stance that poses as universal and sees anti-colonialism not as humanism, but as prejudice and moral relativism.

Zionist settler colonialism and counterrevolutionary praxis

Judith Butler, in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, notes that any project of Jewish coexistence in Palestine must begin with a double movement, at once reclaiming and negating the Jewish ethical tradition. Butler points to cohabitation with the non-Jew as the central ethical substance of diasporic Jewry, representing a commitment of the secular, socialist and religious Jewish traditions to equality and justice. These Jewish resources are what enable the construction of cohabitation in Palestine as well as ‘the criticism of state violence, the colonial subjugation of populations, expulsion and dispossession’.^[64]

At the same time, Butler posits that it is crucial to reject this Jewish tradition as exclusively Jewish and Jewish ethical values as exceptional. This movement aims to prevent the construction of a privileged Jewish position to understand and act upon reality, even an anti-Zionist one. That is, the Jewish critique of Zionism must question the Jewish framework towards more fundamental and universal democratic values so as to overcome the Jewishness originally claimed as the exclusive framework for thinking about ethics and politics.^[65] 

All criticism of Zionism and Israel by the Zionist left contributes to sustain a privileged position of thinking and acting upon the issue of cohabitation between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine and in Brazil and therefore, fails to depart from the framework of Jewishness.^[66] By ignoring settler colonialism as a structural dimension in Palestine/Israel, left Zionist intellectuals have disregarded how it structures their own consciousness, identity and action. As Fanon has noted, it is the colonial structure that produces the colonial agents, not their individual practices.^[67]

Patrick Wolfe claimed the centrality of the binary cleavage between settler and native as the structural dialectical relationship from which it is possible to understand all the other multiple ramifications in a settler colonial situation such as Palestine/Israel.^[68] For indigenous peoples, which is true of Palestinians, positing the colonial relationship in binary terms as settler and native, oppressor and oppressed, still makes sense^[69] and is not in the least imaginary: it is how the ordering of populations in that territory was originally produced by the racist imperatives of the Zionist settlers and which continues to ground their material relations.

Identity is not something constructed from discourses and imaginations, but from material processes.^[70] Israeli settler colonialism created Palestinian indigeneity, which has recently re-emerged within the debates on Palestine and has become an important aspect of political mobilization – both national and global, constituting connections with other indigenous peoples’ struggles against settler colonialism.[71] However, interaction with the indigenous Palestinian population does not seem to have consequences for the nature and identity of liberal Zionists.

As Gabriel Piterberg notes, ‘what 'we’ have done is actually who 'we’ are’.^[72] Liberal Zionists, however, have grounded themselves in idealistic and particularistic interpretations of the material historical process, as in the case of the kibbutzim. By portraying it as a Zionist socialist utopian movement, they ignore the central role it played in securing the forcible colonisation of Palestinian land and building a settler society on the ruins of the indigenous one.^[73]

Historically, the radical left has fought against social forms that relied on nationalism to carry out oppressive practices such as colonialism, even those that claimed to be socialist. The rupture with the Second International at the beginning of the twentieth century resulted from disagreements that opposed communist and anti-colonial revolutionaries against European social democracy, which supported colonialism as a necessary step to achieve socialism in the peripheries.^[74]

This has been the central element in the historical position of anti-Zionists: the rejection of Zionism as the solution to the Jewish question. Colonialism has been a plural phenomenon in its methods and ideologies, but which are structurally based on the same racist logic of plunder, exploitation and dehumanisation, even when it declares its ‘humanitarian intent to promote the realisation of perpetual peace’.^[75] The plurality of Zionists who have had an impact on the material reality in Palestine represents the plurality that colonialism in general, and Zionist settler colonialism in particular, can assume.

Developed as a nationalist project for the "normalization" of Diaspora Jews around the time of their settlement in Palestine and the construction of a sovereign Jewish state in the territory, Zionism was never a movement aimed at the emancipation of anyone other than Jews themselves. Instead of rejecting the national paradigm at the root of their own exclusion in the quest for internationalist emancipation, as communist Jews did, Zionists reclaimed the very weapons of oppression that begat modern anti-Semitism for their national liberation outside of Europe. The subjugation of an indigenous people conferred upon Zionists recognition as equals by their former oppressors, the Europeans.^[76] Thus, Zionists merely reversed the game of exploitation of man by man.

The positivist interpretation of socialism was central to building the soft and paternalist strand of Zionist colonialism, as noted in the work of Borockov, a Marxist Zionist intellectual influential in leading socialist Zionist movements responsible for the establishment of Israel. Although Borockov identified somewhat with his Marxist anti-Zionist peers in the early twentieth century, such as Vladimir Medem and the Bund, socialist Zionists have always sought to distinguish themselves from Herzl's bourgeois and liberal Zionism on the one hand and from the anti-Zionism of the Bund and the Bolsheviks on the other.^[77]

Despite their differences, Zionists agreed on a territorialist solution to the Jewish question and on the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine based on the destruction of the native society. Borokhov saw the evolution of the productive forces toward a socialism led by the Jewish settlers as beneficial to the native society.^[78] Under a Marxist slant, Borockov reproduced the settler colonial ‘civilising’ discourse that was very much present in Herzl's work.

The population of Eretz Israel will adopt the new economic and cultural model of the country. The indigenous people will assimilate economically and culturally to those who will have assumed leadership of the development of the productive forces.^[79]

Borokhov's socialist Zionism supported inter-class Jewish solidarity above the international solidarity of the proletariat. As a result, the workers' movement became the spearhead of Zionist settler colonialism.

The Histadrut, the Zionist workers' union, was instrumental in building an exclusive settler economy separated from the native one by expelling Palestinians from the land and the labour market and laying the foundations for a Jewish state founded on the continuous exclusion and segregation of the indigenous population.^[80] The Histadrut went so far as to prevent class solidarity between Jewish and Palestinian workers under the auspices of the anti-Zionist Communist Party of Palestine.^[81]

Today, despite a weakening of the Zionist Left, the colonial structuring of solidarity was maintained. The focus of actions has remained on the class struggle among the settler community, as revealed in the 2011 demonstrations by liberal Israelis, to the detriment of solidarity with the Palestinians.^[82] Meanwhile, new softer and harsher forms of government have alternated in dispossessing the Palestinians, both heavily based on neoliberal relations since Oslo.^[83]

Various leftist movements around the world have adapted to new forms of (neo)liberal colonialism, such as the construction of the Belo Monte dam in Brazil by the PT government, which expropriated indigenous populations.^[84] Other forms include multicultural projects of socioeconomic inclusion and recognition that did not alter the racial structure of societies.^[85]

The Brazilian Zionist Left reproduces the colonial paternalism of Israeli liberals as the benevolent bearers of what would be the best alternative for the Palestinians. They defend an imaginary Zionism, which, in the end, is a fraud that serves as a ruse to combat the anti-Zionism of real Palestinians and Jews to ensure the perpetuation of the hegemony of liberal Zionism.

As such, they are part of what that Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes called a prolonged counter-revolution: a permanent effort by the Brazilian dependent bourgeoisie to mitigate the contradictions stemming from inequality and exclusion that are capable of becoming a revolutionary political force.^[86] Although an alignment between the Zionist elites and dependent bourgeoisie in Brazil is quite evident under Bolsonaro’s presidency, their association in the elimination of the Anti-Zionist Communist Left have facilitated the country’s subjection to US imperialism and proximity with Israeli interests since the 1930s. As will be demonstrated below, Zionist leaders did not extend ethnic-religious solidarity to those communist anti-Zionist Jews who were persecuted by the Brazilian State at different moments in history.

The Zionist Left acts elusively within the field of hegemony to co-opt and empty out the political content of the opposing project and thus contribute to the defence of Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian land. This type of action, which Gramsci called transformism,^[87] seeks to construct opponents, in other words, Palestinians, according to colonial perspectives.

Instead of anti-colonial revolutionaries who resort to anti-colonial rejection as a form of liberation from the place where colonial racism initially put them, the “Imaginary Israel” paradigm of the Zionist Left reduces Palestinians to (neo)liberal, rational and moderate human rights activists who maintain peaceful dialogue with their Israeli counterparts.^[88] This kind of reasoning, characteristic of neoliberal human rights^[89], reproduces colonial racism by keeping Palestinians confined to a place established by Zionists.

This counter-revolutionary praxis of the Zionist Left harks back to a historical position of European leftists who rejected the anti-colonial violence of the colonised and supported liberation in the colony merely as a by-product of revolution in the metropolis. In a 1957 article, Fanon condemns the French left for failing to understand how class struggle takes the form of national liberation in the colonial situation. For the Martinican intellectual, this lack of understanding of colonialism is what led the French to reduce the opposite of colonialism to ‘the individual scale of less racist, more open, more liberal behaviour’ and to criticise the ‘excesses’ of anti-colonial violence.^[90]

The pseudo-justification for this attitude is that in order to have an influence on French public opinion, certain facts must be condemned, the unexpected excrescences must be rejected, the ‘excesses’ must be disavowed. In these moments of crisis, of face-to-face opposition, the FLN is being asked to direct its violence and to make it selective.^[91]

Thus, Butler posits as grounds for cohabitation between Jews and Palestinians, rather than an 'easy multiculturalism … that the vast and violent hegemonic structure of political Zionism must cede its hold on those lands and populations”.^[92] Because of their settler colonial rationale, Zionist movements act to eliminate rejectionist anti-Zionist forms in order to maintain exclusivity over Jewish identity and Palestinian land. This is not to say that Zionists act with the same violence against Palestinians and other anti-Zionists, including Jews, but it is important to emphasise that these praxis are interconnected. As Butler notes,

though one needs to contest the hegemonic control Zionism exercises over Jewishness, one needs, equally, to contest the colonial subjugation Zionism has implied for the Palestinian people.^[93]

The movement for Palestinian national liberation is the one that currently represents, from the particular, universal emancipation, transcending its existence as part of the anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore, ethical Jewishness demands anti-Zionist practice and radical solidarity with the BDS anti-colonial rejection.

Anti-Zionist Jews and counter-revolution in Brazil

During the formation of the Brazilian Jewish community in the 1920s, politics was an important identity marker among Jews beyond their region of origin, ethnicity and religiosity.^[94] Despite a shared sense of fraternity and connections among them, Zionists and anti-Zionists constituted groups with antagonistic political projects and entities. While Zionists mobilized in favour of the Jewish colonization of Palestine and of lobbying the national elites, anti-Zionists favoured an integrationist and internationalist praxis aimed at the assimilation of Jews in Brazil and at their involvement in the workers’ movements.^[95]

Socialist Zionists position themselves between Zionist elites and the communist anti-Zionist movements. The socialist Zionists took part both in communist Jewish bodies, such as the BIBSA^[96], founded in 1915 by Bund and Marxist-Leninist militants,^[97] and in the Brazilian Zionist movement itself, disputing its direction.^[98] The anti-Zionist Jewish movement was present in Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Niteroi, and São Paulo.^[99]

In Rio de Janeiro, various organisations of communist Jews were established, such as BIBSA, the Abeter Kich popular kitchen, BRAZCOR^[100] and the Morris Wintschevsky Brazilian Workers' Centre. Jewish communitarian life had important interactions with other racially oppressed populations, such as Afro-Brazilians, and communist movements, especially the PCB. The PCB reorganisation conference in 1925 took place at the BIBSA building during the Carnival holiday to escape police surveillance.^[101]

This proximity resulted in the creation of the Jewish Sector in the PCB, linked to BIBSA. Its main function was to provide financial support and protection to communist Jews persecuted by the state. The Jewish Sector stressed the particularity of Jews in the Brazilian left, albeit as part of the internationalist struggle. There were also several communist Jews involved in the "general struggles" of the PCB, who played an important role in the failed communist uprising of 1935.^[102]

Divergences between Zionists and anti-Zionists grew around disputes in the educational field because of the absence of a strong social base for anti-Semitism in Brazil.^[103] Black and indigenous populations already functioned as the Other in Brazilian structural racism. Brazilian religious syncretism tolerated Judaism and Jewish immigrants were included in a state project to promote the whitening of Brazilian society in the early twentieth century. Therefore, Jews were not coerced to identify with the ‘homeland’ or with the Jewish community.^[104]

The linguistic dispute between Yiddish and Hebrew was the vehicle for conflict between Zionist and anti-Zionist political projects. The WZO conference of 1922 determined that Zionists should promote the hegemony of Hebrew in Jewish education to achieve hegemony over Jewish identity and its political action.^[105] In 1925, the JCA^[106], involved in the Jewish settlement in southern Brazil, came to support Hebrew teaching and Zionism.^[107] This resulted in a fracturing of the communal solidarity.

In 1928, faced with disputes over the direction and ideology of BIBSA, the communists expelled the Zionists.^[108] As a result, the Sholem Aleichem School, linked to BIBSA and the PCB, began to teach primarily in Yiddish and based on a materialist perspective.^[109]

According to a police report on the actions of Socialist Zionism and its leader, Aron Bergman, in fighting anti-Zionism:

... as for the Polaé Sion Socialist Party in Brazil, it was a socialist branch of the Zionist doctrine with the objective of helping workers in Palestine, limiting its activities in Brazil to a financial campaign Kapai Palestine Arbeiter Fond … It is worth noting, however, that this society was guided by an ideology antagonistic to communism. Aron Bergman … declaring himself a social democrat, having headed in 1929 a public demonstration against adherents of communism who, at the time, were meeting in Scholom Alechem.^[110] 

Despite this setback in the dispute with the communists and the rise of anti-Semitism in Brazil, the 1930s witnessed a consolidation of Zionism.^[111] The Estado Novo, which began in 1937, had a Nazi at the head of its political police and part of its social base formed by the Brazilian Integralist Movement, the largest fascist group outside Europe. In 1938, the dictatorship ordered the dissolution of all Zionist centres, and made it difficult for Jewish immigrants to enter the country.^[112]

However, there was no climate of fear and persecution against Jewish immigrants. Zionists easily adapted to the restrictions imposed by the government, adopting Brazilian names and promoting activities that eluded surveillance. Between 1933 and 1945, 24,000 Jews entered Brazil, which meant an increase of almost a third in the overall Jewish population.^[113]

The Estado Novo's main concern was the construction of an authentically Brazilian identity and the preservation of the ‘Brazilian family tradition’. Anti-Jewish hatred was an ideology restricted to small parts of the government and integralism.^[114] The dictatorship was mainly conservative, xenophobic and anti-communist. As a result, communist Jews were the most persecuted. That is, anti-Communism was a greater threat to Jews than anti-Semitism.^[115]

Communist Jews were arrested, tortured, murdered and deported. Olga Benário Prestes was deported to Europe and murdered in an extermination camp. The police closed BRAZCOR and raided BIBSA. The government mainly worked to stop the immigration of communist Jews, while tolerating that of Zionists.^[116] Presented as a nationalism with ambitions to colonise another country, Zionism was not perceived as a threat by the Estado Novo.^[117]

There were acts of Jewish solidarity during this period. However, Zionist groups tried to differentiate themselves from anti-Zionists and would lobby Brazilian elites to position themselves as the true representatives of the Jewish community.^[118] While building support from Brazil for the Jewish state in Palestine, Zionists sought to weaken anti-Zionist alternatives in the social base.

For example, Horácio Lafer, a prominent businessman and Zionist leader, refused to express his solidarity with persecuted communist Jews when questioned by the police. The Sholem Aleichem school suffered a police raid following the complaints of Zionist parents and at the I.L. Peretz School, Zionists tried to take over, resulting in confrontation and police intervention.^[119]

Indeed, Zionist elites started building their hegemony in the Jewish community and in Brazilian society during the repression of communist Jews. As a result, the Brazilian State lobbied and supported the partition plan for Palestine, which created the State of Israel in the UN General Assembly of 1947, presided by the Brazilian diplomat Oswaldo Aranha.

Violence and consent under Liberal Zionist Hegemony

Greater solidarity among Brazilian Jews only resumed when anti-Zionist groups, weakened by state violence, consented to the Zionist project in Palestine after the recognition of Israel by the USSR. Although they did not see Israel as the solution to the Jewish question, communists began to raise money to support the settlement and the Haganah.^[120] In the midst of a Zionist surge in the country, many anti-Zionists joined the ranks of Socialist Zionism, and communist organisations became more diffuse.

Amid the formation of the Zionist progressive-liberal hegemony, communists adopted a position better defined as non-Zionist than anti-Zionist. They stopped confronting the Zionist project, understood as unavoidable. For Jacob Gorender, an important PCB member:

Once the State of Israel became a reality and was recognised by the Soviet Union from the start, I never questioned Israel's right to exist as a state. But I have never considered the State of Israel to be the solution to the so-called Jewish question.^[121]

Though politically weakened, non-Zionist Jews still represented an important part of the community. They sought to compete for representation in Jewish entities to avoid unconditional support for Israel. At the same time, they organized new Jewish institutions to preserve Yiddish culture and mobilize new generations in national and internationalist struggles. The greatest example was the Casa do Povo^[122], founded in 1946 in São Paulo as a space for Jewish anti-fascist struggle.

The institution was an important cultural and political centre that also included another Sholem Aleichem School, a newspaper in Yiddish, a youth club and a theatre. The school became a highly regarded educational project, housing children of Jewish and non-Jewish workers, including members of the clandestine struggle against the military dictatorship (1964-1985).^[123]

In the beginning, Casa do Povo was composed of both communists and socialist Zionists. Internally, communists sought to maintain control of the institute to preserve it as non-Zionist; externally, they competed with other left-wing Zionist organizations for the hearts and minds of the Jewish community.

When the USSR took a belligerent stance towards Israel and in support of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, confrontation between communist and Zionist Jews increased in Brazil. Moments of international crisis were opportunities to contest the direction of Jewish organisations. In one such episode, the Zionists took over Casa do Povo under the leadership of Iankel Len.^[124]

Later, the communists succeeded in regaining control of the institution, which became directly linked to the Jewish Sector of the PCB. The head of the Jewish Sector was also director of Casa do Povo.^[125] This link was fundamental for the activities of communist Jews to continue after the military coup of 1964. Confrontation grew after 1967 when the Jewish Sector publicly accused Israel of acting in an imperialist manner leaving it isolated from the rest of the community and representative bodies, which cut off all political and financial support.

Although socialist Zionists also participated in campaigns against the dictatorship, a large part of them chose to emigrate to Israel during this period.^[126] Non-Zionist communists remained in the resistance and once again suffered greater persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder by the regime. Once more, Jewish communists could not count on the support of representative entities in their community as these preferred to maintain good relations with the dictatorship. Left Zionist militants were protected by agreements between Zionist institutions and the military regime.[127] State anti-Communism, supported by the bourgeoise, in the context of the Cold War remained a greater threat to Jews than any form of anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Sector and the PCB took a hard blow in 1975, when the dictatorship targeted ten PCB party leaders for assassination and persecuted dozens of militants, among them ten teachers from the Sholem Aleichem School. Jewish journalist Vladimir Herzog was murdered as a result of being tortured during the persecution of communist Jews. His death was an important turning point that led to popular mobilisation and contributed to the eventual decline of the dictatorship. It was also a moment that attracted solidarity from liberal Zionists, such as Rabbi Henry Sobel. However, it did not put an end to hostilities with organised non-Zionist Jews.

Faced with the persecution of the dictatorship, isolation imposed by Zionist institutions and the socio-economic rise of Jews who, being well integrated into Brazilian whiteness, left their neighbourhoods of origin for upper scale areas, the non-Zionist communist movement lost its social base.^[128] As a result, the Sholem Aleichem school closed in 1979. A group of communist Jews under the leadership of Max Altman, who presided over the Casa do Povo between 1965 and 1979, understood that the non-Zionist Jewish cycle had reached its end.^[129] It is fair to say that these events were in the interest both of the military regime and the Zionist elites.    

In 1982, during a large demonstration against the massacre of Sabra and Shatila at Casa do Povo, oppositionists set fire to Altman's car amid clashes that took over the streets.^[130] Faced with the Zionist siege of Casa do Povo, the communists left the institution, which in turn endorsed a progressive-liberal Zionist hegemony during the Brazilian democratisation process in the 1980s. The institution eventually lost relevance, deteriorated, and ended up closing its doors. Although it reopened in 2011, present day Casa do Povo is made up of docile non-Zionist Jewish institutions that consent to Israeli settler colonial sovereignty over Palestinian territory.

Therefore, it is possible to see how the liberal Zionist hegemony was built and maintained through violent action against the anti-Zionist alternatives that confronted Zionism – from above, by the anti-communist state, and from below by the Zionist movements, including those on the left, through the denunciation, isolation, expulsion and deconversion of communist Jews. That is, a hegemony, as Gramsci understood it, secured in the last instance by coercion when cultural disputes proved insufficient.

It is important to note how the decline of the non-Zionist Jewish movement coincided with the consolidation of the Brazilian Palestinian movement. In 1980 FEPAL^[131] is created as the official representation of Palestinians to the PLO. Soon after, the Palestinian movement becomes the main target of Zionists, including progressive ones. Rabbi Sobel declared in 1985 that a meeting of Palestinian youth that took place that year was for "training terrorists".^[132]

The resurgence of anti-Zionist movements

The class conciliation and pragmatism that characterised foreign policy under the New Republic (1988-2016), particularly the period when the PT was in power between 2003 and 2016, ensured the hegemony of liberal Zionism until the early 2010s. However, the persistence of grassroots mobilisations by Palestinians and radical left movements during the 1990s and 2000s allowed Brazilians to respond to the Palestinians' call for solidarity and BDS in 2005.

In 2007, leftist activists and members of the Palestinian movement who were part of the radical left opposition to the Lula government formed Mopat.^[133] The first campaign by the BDS Brazil movement was against the Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur^[134] and Israel signed in the same year.^[135] Simultaneously, there was a strengthening of Fepal, an organisation that is closer to the moderate left and the PT administration. In 2010, Brazil recognizes the Palestinian state. 

In 2011, the World Social Forum-Palestine held in Brazil allowed for the transnational meeting of activists in defence of Palestine and served as an opportunity for the creation of new movements in the country, such as the FFIPP-Brazil.^[136] This organisation, whose scope in Brazilian society extends beyond ethnic-national identity, has served as an incubator for a new generation of anti-Zionist Jews.

This group promoted an important demonstration in front of the Israeli Consulate in São Paulo against the 2014 Gaza Strip massacre, which marked the return of anti-Zionist Jews to the political scene of the Brazilian left.^[137] Organised as a result of the international radicalisation of the Palestinian struggle after the Second Intifada, this new generation of anti-Zionist Jews is a true representation of Brazilian radicalisation after June 2013, as opposed to the counter-revolutionary Zionist left that emerges against Bolsonaro in 2017.

However, the active gatekeeping of the Zionist Left, in alignment with the bourgeoise’s interests in maintaining closer ties with Israel for military-security technology and agriculture trade purposes, has prevented more Jews and Leftist organizations from joining the ranks of the new anti-Zionist pro-Palestine movements.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen how the Zionist left combats the radicalism of the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians and also of Jews and non-Jews on the left. The result is the confinement of the opposition to a docile anti-anti-Zionism that is submitted to the hegemony of liberal Zionist colonialism.

The discursive frauds of the Zionist left find support among liberal Jews and Brazilian left-liberals used to conciliation with the national bourgeoisie and conservatism in foreign policy. In this way, left Zionists ally themselves with the interests of the dependent bourgeoisie and act as gatekeepers, preventing Jews and other militants of the moderate Brazilian left from assuming a more radical anti-Zionist position.

The ‘deconversion’ and exclusion of left Zionists that we are witnessing in the Jewish-Zionist community constitutes the reproduction of the old hegemonic logic of the Zionist movement in Brazil that used to be directed only toward anti-Zionist Jews. Faced with the new configurations of anti-communism under the rise of the new right in 2010, the Zionist left begins to receive the same treatment as the anti-Zionists it helps exclude.

Moreover, Zionists lose sight of the real new anti-Semitism because of the exclusion from their analysis of the dynamics of colonialism and racism. Israelis’ alliance with imperialism and resulting positioning as defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization has rendered Jewish identity racially privileged. The contemporary Brazilian right continues to confine the Jew to a fixed identity, though no longer a negative one. The essentialist positive spin that instrumentalises Jews for the anti-communist and Islamophobic political project of the extreme right serves only to invert the polarity of the racialisation of the Jews but does not break with anti-Semitism.

Therefore, the Zionist Left does not work to dismantle anti-Semitism but mainly to preserve soft colonialism in Palestine and Brazil. Recognizing the centrality of colonialism against Palestinians in the formation of contemporary Jewish identity is an important step in the decolonization of both Palestine and Jewishness.

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[1] Socialism and Liberty Party.

[2]  Quilombolas are black populations descended from former slaves who obtained their freedom and settled in territories throughout the country to form autonomous and self-managed communities called quilombos. The same legal framework that preserves indigenous reserves protects Quilombola territories.

[3] Veja 2017.

[4] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[5] Gherman 2017.

[6] Ibid

[7] Honig-Parnass 2011; Finkelstein 2012; Kelemen 2012.

[8] Englert 2018.

[9] Balthaser 2020, pp. 462–462.

[10] Neto 2008.

[11] Iokoi 2004; Lowy 2017; Clemesha 1998.

[12] Gherman 2018.

[13] World Zionist Organization.

[14] Bartel 2015.

[15] Ibid

[16] Grin 2017; Grin (ed.) 2008.

[17] Estado Novo, New State, was a dictatorship, which ruled Brazil between 1937 and 1945.

[18] Grin (ed.) 2008.

[19] Grin 2017.

[20] Brazilian Communist Party.

[21] Gherman 2018.

[22] Iokoi 2004.

[23] Workers Party.

[24] Gherman 2018.

[25] Moraes 2014.

[26] Huberman and Hartmann 2017.

[27] Gherman 2018, pp. 9–12.

[28] ibid., p. 12.

[29] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Carvalho 2021.

[33] Finkielkraut 1997.

[34] Gherman 2017.

[35] ibid.

[36] Brazil-Israel Institute.

[37] Gherman and Thomaz 2018.

[38] Firs 2021.

[39] Marcossi 2018.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Grin, Gherman, and Caraciki 2019.

[42] Halper 2021.

[43] Kruchin 2018.

[44] Fernandes 2019.

[45] Gherman and Grin 2016, p. 48.

[46] Fernandes 2019.

[47] Losurdo 2020.

[48] Nevel 2020.

[49] Amigos Brasileiros do Paz Agora 2011.

[50] Morais and Saad-Filho 2005.

[51] R7 2016.

[52]Fernandes 2019.

[53]United Socialist Workers’ Party.

[54] Israelite Confederation of Brazil.

[55] Wyllys 2015.

[56] Marcossi 2018.

[57] Wyllys 2015, p. 47.

[58] ibid., p. 46.

[59] Marcossi 2018, p. 176.

[60] Quoted in ibid., p. 175.

[61] Huberman and Hartmann 2017.

[62] Justice Ministery 2015.

[63] IBI 2019.

[64] Butler 2012, p. 1.

[65] ibid., p. 2.

[66] It is revealing how Zionist left repeatedly demands the end of the occupation as a way to save Israel and not bring freedom to the Palestinians , very well expressed in the movement Save Israel, Stop the Occupation, of important penetration in the Brazilian Zionist left.  

[67] Fanon 1994.

[68] Wolfe 2013.

[69] Barakat 2018.

[70] Hall 2011.

[71] Amara and Hawari 2019.

[72] Piterberg 2008, p. xvi.

[73] Shafir 1996.

[74] This position, it is important to emphasize, derives from the contradictory reflections of Marx himself concerning colonialism in countries such as India and has been criticized by Edward Said, among others. However, this support for colonialism would later be revised by Marx and Engels, as demonstrated by Kevin Anderson in ‘Marx at the Margins’ 2016.

[75] Losurdo 2020.

[76] Massad 2006.

[77] Traverso 2018.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Borokhov 1920, p. 271 quoted Traverso 2018, p. 125.

[80] Englert 2020; Lockman 1996.

[81] Lockman 1996.

[82] Englert 2020.

[83] Haddad 2016.

[84] Jaichand and Sampaio 2013.

[85] Coulthard 2014.

[86] Fernandes 2020.

[87] Coutinho 2012.

[88] Haddad 2016.

[89] Whyte 2019.

[90] Fanon 1994, p. 83.

[91] ibid., pp. 80–81.

[92] Butler 2012, p. 4.

[93] ibid.

[94] Neto 2008.

[95] Iokoi 2004; Bartel 2015.

[96] Sholem Aleichem Library.

[97] Kuperman 2003.

[98] Bartel 2015.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Jewish Red Help.

[101] Kuperman 2003.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Sorj, Sorj, and Bonder 2010.