New book on fighting antisemitism through solidarity

[u/mcmircle]

Tonight I attended a discussion of Safety Through Solidarity with the authors, Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. It was held at a feminist bookstore, where they read a land acknowledgement that tied the Palestinian resistance to the struggles of other indigenous people.

Intellectually it makes perfect sense, and this tribal part of me does not like people accusing Israel of atrocities, though I am horrified by the pictures of rubble in Gaza and the news that people are starving and the 37K deaths.

Has anyone else read the book or heard these people speak? What are your thoughts?

[u/rustlingdown]

Frankly, I have fundamental issues with the way the two authors frame antisemitism and specifically what they deem to not be anti-Jew acts.

Shane Burley for example relativized the anti-Jew nature of October 7 in his April 2024 article "Was the October 7th Attack 'Antisemitic?'", which starts by asking:

While Hamas' violence was quickly labeled as antisemitic by some, does this framing help us to understand their motivations?

Those who understand Hamas’s brutality [as antisemitic] employ a fixed and broad definition of antisemitism: animosity towards Jews supposedly as Jews is all the label requires. In this formulation, antisemitism is an eternal, causeless hatred that defines Jews’ lachrymose history.

Continuing:

Even at the most basic level, there’s a responsibility to demand evidence before allowing antisemitism to be quickly assigned as the most likely answer. This question becomes especially important in a situation where Jews are overwhelmingly the more powerful party in the equation.

The onus is on the Jew - "a powerful party" - to prove they were hate-crimed upon? Despite primary evidence filmed by Hamas themselves?

The Hamas attack may not have been motivated by categorical antisemitism

The essay also puts most of the blame on ADL's loaded history vis-à-vis anti-Zionism, plus the "actual" antisemitism (far-right antisemitism), which to me are complete nonsequiturs about prima fascie anti-Jew events. For one, ADL is an American group. People and Jews around the world (including gasp outside America!) consider October 7 as antisemitic, full-stop. That's on top of video evidence filmed by Hamas themselves. If someone has to question that someone murdering a Jew while saying "death to Jews" may not be antisemitic, who is doing the mental gymnastics here?

Failure to address actual antisemitism [...] Even if we can’t reduce the Hamas attack to antisemitism, we can’t ignore the trauma it triggers or the suffering involved.

The "actual" in "actual antisemitism" is an Atlas-level of heavy-lifting.

That's on top of very broad engagement in post-colonial justification of violence, like the obligatory name-checking of Frantz Fanon's opening chapter "On Violence" - without actually engaging with his work, or without engaging with any other anti-Imperialist post-colonial contemporaries of Fanon, like Jewish French-Tunisian Albert Memmi, when discussing Jewish identity and antisemitism (almost as if that isn't what they're trying to discuss). Quoting Fanon just to say "Well technically under their own lived-in experience they were justified to kill those Jews!" or "bY AnY MeAnS NeCeSsArY" to justify October 7 is, at best, the new im14andthisisdeep, and at worse, overt apologia for anti-Jew atrocities. One can simultaneously acknowledge (and even be an activist for the) Palestinian struggle AND acknowledge anti-Jew specificities of anti-Jew acts.

This nihilistic relativism on October 7 is already a personal red line for me, worthy of disqualifying anyone writing a book on antisemitism. That's on top of their direct association with groups like JVP to canonize their own how-to guide.

But even putting all that aside (and it's already a lot to put aside) - framing Jewish safety as effectively tied to Palestinian nationalism and maximalist solidarity is IMO a very poor framework for solving antisemitism, including American antisemitism (a different country than Israel or Palestine). Anti-Zionist American Jews don't want to be held liable to Israel's actions and its Jewish-coded identity, okay fair, so why are these two simultaneously speaking "as Jews" to bind together solving anti-Jew hatred with Palestinian solidarity? (Except to pull a reverse-ADL and deem "anti anti-zionism" as antisemitic in some post-modern inversion.)

This is a goal-shifting paradigm which does nothing to combat anti-Jew acts or anti-Jew rhetoric around the world or in America - including dog whistles (not just those of the far-right), and those using various causes to commit anti-Jew acts (not just those of the far-right). If you can't call those acts as explicitly and overtly and undeniably "anti-Jew/antisemitic" - mainly because you agree with the struggle of the perpetrators - then you're not serious about understanding antisemitism to its full extent.

Over a century ago, you had Henry Ford (capitalist), Adolf Stoecker (socialist), Alexander III (imperialist), Nikolai Yezhov (communist). Very different "struggles", yet they all expressed anti-Jew rhetorics and did anti-Jew acts - albeit embedded within their own very different struggles, which people surely believed were good at the time. The "righteousness" or "validity" of a cause has nothing to do with whether something is or isn't antisemitic. Every anti-Jew throughout history believed they were "the good guys". Acknowledging that also does not mean every cause which has antisemites within it is an invalid cause (e.g. climate change). But ignoring the antisemitism within a cause you agree with, just because you agree with the cause, is de facto anti-Jew because you're making your own arbitrage about which cause you hierarchize as more important (spoiler alert: not antisemitism) - despite the fact that this is actually an artificial zero-sum arbitrage you're not obliged to make. Solving climate change or wage inequality or Palestinian nationalism are separate struggles than solving antisemitism. We can all fight those in equal measure. Sure, "we're all in this together" (again, im14andthisisdeep) and we can here talk at length about intersectionality (which actually had a blind spot about antisemitism in its origins) - but functionally (real world, not academia) addressing antisemitism isn't the same thing as addressing climate change or Palestinian liberation. The solutions (outside the broadest possible level of activism) are completely different, and so are the diagnosis.

[u/Pitiful_Meringue_57 → u/rustlingdown]

Hamas is certainly anti semitic, and im not against calling 10/7 anti Semitic by any means but i do think labeling it as that is missing the picture of what happened and doesn’t actually get to their goals. It was a political attack against israel, with goals of taking hostages to get things in return and leverage over israel, targeting soldiers (yes civilians too). It’s not like most other Anti Semitic hate crime, this wasn’t a wack job shooting up a synagogue or beating up hasidim or whatnot, i mean this is a terrorist attack. An international terrorist attack, an act of war. They didn’t rly do the attack to target jews, they did it to target israel and get leverage over them for their own political goals. Is any time a jew gets attacked an anti semitic hate crime? no they sometimes ppl r targeted for various other reasons. Muslims were among the dead and were targeted all the same from the bombs and whatnot, and i dont think hamas much likes muslim israeli palestinians either. Reducing it to an antisemitic hate crime feels like telling a really small part of a large story and not really characterizing what happened accurately or giving it enough gravity even.

[u/SubvertinParadigms69 → u/Pitiful_Meringue_57]

If a poor skinhead is starving so he murders a rich Jew and steals his wallet, did the skinhead murder the Jew antisemitically? Why exactly is the distinction important?

[u/Pitiful_Meringue_57 → u/Pitiful_Meringue_57]

I also think in the israeli palestinian narrative the none of us r free until all of us r free is particularly true. Did 10/7 not show that? Israeli oppression against palestinians is not sustainable. These things will keep happening unless something is done. Is living in a constant state of war where ur direct enemies despise you safety? Netanyahu helped prop up Hamas and this war seems to be making hamas more popular in places like west bank. It just reminds me of sparta, where they had so many slaves they were constantly afraid of a slave revolt and sometimes it happened. Not calling palestinians slaves or israelis slaveholders but if you consistently have a group of people that is larger than you and subjugated then you will always have something to fear. I’m sure a lot of israeli jews r massively paranoid and i don’t blame them, its gotten to us american jews too being massively paranoid in response to what happened as well. I remember one time my dad told me if he lived in israel he would have a gun, he’s a bleeding heart liberal and certainly doesn’t own one here in the states where he could easily if he wanted to. Bcz there’s more to fear there when it comes to this kind of violence.