Review: That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic

 

This book was written by a Jewish communist named Steve Cohen in 1984, but I only learned of it recently. It’s a look at the history of anti-Semitism on the Left, especially the English Left, and why there’s been so much resistance to fully acknowledging and addressing it.

He sees this largely as having to do with a failure to understand the unique characteristics of modern anti-Semitism as a form of racism, which is not merely prejudice but a totalizing ideological world-view built around a conspiracy theory.

I must admit that before reading this I had no idea of how bad it has gotten in some cases. Not only major English socialist and labor organizations, but some of the great figures such as Marx and Lenin, have apparently been affected – although in Cohen’s view Trotsky was a notable exception.

Perhaps I’ve had less occasion to experience such things since my Jewish ancestry is only on one side and so is less noticeable, but I wonder if perhaps there’s been less of this here in the States than in Britain. I can only think of a few occasions on which I’ve noticed anti-Semitism at Left events, and it was coming from peripheral people, not leaders or organizers. For instance, during the Q & A after a 2004 screening of the film Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, someone asked a question about the influence of “Jewish lobbies,” and one of the co-chairs, at the time a comrade of mine in the socialist group Solidarity, interjected to point out that the problem isn’t “Jewish lobbies” but the Israel lobby (which by the way consists largely of evangelical Christians). In a couple other instances, I’ve intervened myself in response to problematic statements.

Cohen powerfully argues the importance of recognizing and consistently engaging with this problem, first of all simply as a matter of principle for socialists as humanists and working-class internationalists, but also because the failure to do so both discourages many Jewish people from identifying with socialism and cedes propaganda ground to Zionism. Before I read this book I was already pondering the failure to have public events responding specifically to recent incidents of anti-Semitism in Philadelphia, and after reading it I feel that I should do so myself if I hear about any more, even if it’s just me holding a vigil, simply to remind people how it’s done.

Thanks to my friend Nancy Lebovitz for bringing this book to my attention. Thanks also to my friends in Platypus Philadelphia for telling me about Moishe Postone’s essay, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” which offers a persuasive analysis of the origins and unique characteristics of anti-Semitism in terms of Marxian concepts, and may help explain why the Left hasn’t done a better job of combating it.