Description
Today’s antisemitism is difficult to recognize because it does not come dressed in a Nazi uniform and it does not openly proclaim its hatred or fear of Jews. This book looks at the kind of antisemitism which is tolerated or which goes unacknowledged in apparently democratic spaces: trade unions, churches, left-wing and liberal politics, social gatherings of the chattering classes and the seminars and journals of radical intellectuals. It analyses how criticism of Israel can mushroom into antisemitism and it looks at struggles over how antisemitism is defined. It focuses on ways in which those who raise the issue of antisemitism are often accused of doing so in bad faith in an attempt to silence or smear. Hostility to Israel has become a signifier of identity, connected to opposition to imperialism, neo-liberalism and global capitalism; the ‘community of the good’ takes on toxic ways of imagining most living Jewish people.
Table of Contents
1. Ken Livingstone and the Livingstone Formulation 2. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn and how tolerance of antisemitism came to function as a marker of belonging 3. The crescendo of antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party and the Chakrabarti Inquiry 4. The campaign for an academic boycott of Israel 5. Struggles over defining antisemitism 6. Ronnie Fraser v UCU: taking the union to court for antisemitism 7. Antizionism: discourse and its actualization 7. Jewish antizionism: being drawn towards the logic of antisemitism 8. Sociological method and antisemitism
