Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Israeli History, this book presents the reflections of historians from Israel, Europe, Canada and the United States concerning the similarities and differences between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism primarily in Europe and the Middle East.
Spanning the past century, the essays explore the continuum of critique from early challenges to Zionism and they offer criteria to ascertain when criticism with particular policies has and has not coalesced into an “ism” of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Including studies of England, France, Germany, Poland, the United States, Iran and Israel, the volume also examines the elements of continuity and break in European traditions of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism when they diffused to the Arab and Islamic.
Continue Reading »
Utopia or Auschwitz?: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust
By Hans Kundnani
The left-wing students who demonstrated in the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 differed from their international counterparts in one crucial way. These young Germans, who would become known as the 1968 generation, or the Achtundsechziger, were raised knowing their parents were responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. Consequently, this generation dreamed of making a better world, but they also felt compelled to save Germany from itself. For them, it was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz.
Continue Reading »
Documentary film online…
From the description:
“The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists” traces the history of a Yiddish anarchist newspaper publishing its final issue. The story is mostly told by the newspaper’s now elderly, but decidedly unbowed staff. This is the story of one of the largest radical movements among Jewish immigrant workers in the 19th and 20th centuries and the conditions that led them to band together.
These elderly anarchists reflect on their lives spent fighting for a less centralized government, workers’ rights and above all, justice for all. In doing so, strong social bonds were formed while authorities, including managers, police and the government, put psychological and physical pressure on them.
From anarchistnews.org
“Mere hours after the National Socialist Movement marched through downtown Jefferson City, Missouri angry working class people trashed windows and the ATMs of the First National and UMB Banks in Columbia, some 30 miles north. Unlike the Fascists that marched, we understand who the real enemy of working class people is and always has been. The rich bankers are not of any one religious, ethnic, or racial background. Even If one were to make such a generalization, they surely would come to the conclusion that whites that proclaim themselves Christian are in the majority of those exploiting us, not Jews, blacks, or immigrants.”
– communiqué from Missouri, November 2008
The communiqué above agrees that the fascists are right to blame the “bankers” but wrong to call the bankers Jews. This misses the point entirely and reproduces the half-way critique of capital that only focuses on finance, with all its propensity for resentment and personification. Coupling this mystification with anti-racist slogans does not erase this propensity. Instead of merely changing the answer to the question “who controls the world?” we ought to reply by asserting that this is the wrong question.
By personifying the class enemy as the archaic image of the rich banker (or more abstractly, as “international banking interests”), anarchists end up accepting the anti-capitalist thesis of National Socialism: that productive society is dominated by “parasitic” finance capital. Anarchists add only a nominal denouncement of its racist or anti-semitic conclusions.
Given all this, why, exactly, do anarchists focus on banks?
Continue Reading »
Under the rubric of antizionism, the blogger at “zionists out of the peace movement” (http://zionistsout.blogspot.com/) tells us that “While [American Jews] may not be full blown Zionists themselves, they give prime consideration not to questions of right or wrong but to the well-being of Jews.” The blogger tells us that it is not just the zionist Jews who are wicked and cruel, but also the anti-zionist ones. I suggested the blogger therefore correct the title of his/her site to “Jews Out…” rather than “Zionists Out,” but there’s a clear purpose and market for PC antisemitism.
Here’s the comment trail on the article “Quotable: 99% of American Jewry,” (http://zionistsout.blogspot.com/2009/04/quotable-99-percent-of-american-jewry.html): Continue Reading »
From Slackbastard
In the late 1990s, Horst Mahler, a former leader of the Red Army Faction and scion of the radical left, announced his affinity for the extreme right and joined the NPD—Germany’s principal far right party. Later distancing himself from party politics, he founded the Deutsches Kolleg, a far right think tank that promotes German nationalism. Although ostensibly now a rightist, Mahler has synthesized much of his original left-wing ideology into a far right Weltanschauung that features nationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, with a strident critique of capitalism. As such, it has the potential to appeal to some segments of the contemporary anti-globalization movement, the international extreme right, and even Islamists.
Continue reading here…
Ann Althouse thinks so:
The most striking thing in [Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story] was the religion. I think Moore is seriously motivated by Christianity. He says he is (and has been since he was a boy). And he presented various priests, Biblical quotations, and movie footage from “Jesus of Nazareth” to make the argument that Christianity requires socialism. With this theme, I found it unsettling that in attacking the banking system, Moore presented quite a parade of Jewish names and faces. He never says the word “Jewish,” but I think the anti-Semitic theme is there. We receive long lectures about how capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity, followed a heavy-handed array of — it’s up to you to see that they are — Jewish villains.
Am I wrong to see Moore as an anti-Semite? I don’t know, but the movie worked as anti-Semitic propaganda. I had to struggle to fight off the idea the movie seemed to want to plant in my head.
Myself, I think this is a bit of a stretch, although I haven’t seen the film yet. But I think there are two serious points here worth making.
1. It doesn’t actually matter whether Michael Moore “is” an antisemite. What matters is whether it does something antisemitic. That is, if, as Althouse suggests, the movie “worked as anti-Semitic propaganda”, then that’s what matters. There are, to be sure, plenty of ideologically motivated, deeply antisemitic people. But lots of decent, anti-racist people also find themselves saying or doing antisemitic things without realising it. Combating antisemitism is not about rooting out the antisemitic people; it is about coming to a reckoning with how antisemitic discourses and actions work practically, and disseminating that knowledge. Combating antisemitism should not be a liberal moralistic, guilt-tripping exercise; it should be an exercise in understanding.
2. What Althouse is pointing to in the post is something like what many on the German left call structural antisemitism (see here, here). That is, a structure of thinking that is inherently antisemitic, even if it does not explicitly name Jews. This structure of thinking is often associated, as Moishe Postone’s work shows, with certain partial forms of anti-capitalism: forms of anti-capitalism which attempt to personalise capitalism in evil individuals (bloated plutocrats, Jewish bankers, parasitical locust-like financiers) rather than understanding it as a web of social relations. Such partial forms of capitalism also tend to focus on the evil of finance capital, and tend to valorise productive capital. Michael Moore, with his roots in the rust belt radicalism of Flynt, Michigan, as portrayed in Roger and Me, is deeply involved in this kind of productivist socialism.
Hat tip AGT/Jogo.
Poumista has a great list of links to obituaries to Marek Edelman, who we mourned here, leaving me with nothing left to say. Except what an extraordinary man to be mourned by Trotskyists, Zionists and the US State Department! Here are some of the links: Moshe Arens, Nick Lowles, History is Made at Night, Tim Collard, MJ Rosenberg, the Tomb, Charlie Pottins, ZWord, Jew on this, Rislu, Third Estate, Anne Frank’s Drumkit, Socialist Unity, David Rosenberg… and the US State Department.
History is Made at Night has also posted this in homage: This mandolin kills fascists. This inspired a further post, with a breakbeat version of a Yiddish partisan song by Berlin’s Ruin Gebirk. For more on the song, see here/here.
Steve Cohen, who we mourned here, is commemorated in the latest (now not so recent) edition of New Interventions, the latest (hot off the press) Jewish Socialist, and the last but one (not sure when) Shift magazine. New Interventions, which seems to have no real web presence, so get it from Housmans, publishes a fascinating piece by Steve about the history of antisemitism and anti-alienism in the British labour movement. Jewish Socialist carries a nice appreciation from his comrade Dave Landau, of No One is Illegal – it’s also print-only, so go buy. Shift has two pieces: an obituary, taken from Indymedia London (read the original here: it has a link to me and a reading list), and Steve’s response to the Lebanon war, “Writing as a Jewish traitor“, which we published part of here.
Cross-posted from BfB.
Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday at the age of 90.
Here is the obituary from the Associated Press about Edelman’s life. For a more in-depth look, I highly recommend the *significantly better*, though somewhat longer, description posted below.
Additionally, here is a link to video interviews with Edelman about his life, and a link to Edelman’s text “The Ghetto Fights”.
The following description is from Diapositive:
Marek Edelman
Marek Edelman was a physician, Bund activist and deputy commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization. After the death of M. Anielewicz, he was the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. He was also an opposition activist during the communist period. In 1998, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, as well as the St. George Medal and honorary doctorates from Yale University and the Universite Libre in Brussels.Born in 1921 in Homel (Belarus), he soon moved with his parents to Warsaw. His father died when he was very young, followed by his mother when he was just thirteen. She had been a Bund activist and in the Jewish socialist worker’s party-both organizations that influenced Edelman’s civic views.
Continue Reading »
From New Politics:
A Debate about Iran and the Left
Tom Harrison August 27, 2009
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Q&A on Iran” has elicited an extremely critical response from Edward Herman and David Peterson, posted on MRzine. To summarize, Herman and Peterson accuse the Campaign of aiding and abetting (unwittingly, they allow) U.S. imperialism and its aggressive designs on Iran. They reject, for the most part, allegations of election fraud by the Ahmadinejad regime and dismiss the idea of solidarity with the Iranian pro-democracy movement. Their position appears to be that the U.S. left should extend active solidarity only to oppositional currents in countries within the U.S. sphere of influence.
The authors of the Q&A — Stephen Shalom, Thomas Harrison, Joanne Landy and Jesse Lemisch — have answered their charges point by point, reasserted our opposition to any kind of intervention, including sanctions, against Iran by the U.S. and Israel, and argued for the critical importance of defending, strenuously, all genuinely democratic, independent people’s movements wherever they arise, regardless of whether the governments they oppose are targets of U.S. destabilization. And we insist that the post-election protests in Iran are just such a movement – spontaneous, autonomous, progressive and in no way a tool of Washington.
Our answer to Herman and Peterson’s initial attack provoked a second response from them, and a second reply from us, on the Campaign’s website.
Under the heading, “Iran: The Election and Beyond,” click on “Related Materials, Announcements and Links“.
Our response is the first item on the list.
Within that document is a link to our first reply to Herman and Peterson, which was posted on Znet.
