Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism
288
Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism
288Paperback
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Overview
Antisemitism is on the rise today. From synagogue shootings by white nationalists, to right-wing politicians and media figures pushing George Soros conspiracy theories, it’s clear that exclusionary nationalist movements are growing. By spreading division and fear, they put Jews, along with other marginalized groups and multiracial democracy itself, at risk.
And since the outbreak of war in Gaza, debates around antisemitism have become more polarized and high-stakes than ever. How can we stand in solidarity with Palestinian civilians seeking justice, while also avoiding antisemitism — and resisting those who seek to conflate the two? How do we forge the coalitions across communities that we need, in order to overcome the politics of division and fear?
Using personal stories, historical deep-dives, front-line reporting, and interviews with leading change-makers, Burley and Lorber help us break the current impasse to understand how antisemitism works, what’s missing in contemporary debates, and how to build true safety through solidarity, for Jews and all people.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781685890919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Melville House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/04/2024 |
| Series: | Activist Citizens' Library |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 234,428 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.01(w) x 7.98(h) x 1.04(d) |
About the Author
Shane Burley is known for his work on the far-right and left-wing social movements. He is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017) and Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021), and editor of the anthology ¡No pasarán!: Readings on Antifascism (AK Press, 2022). His work has been featured in places like NBC News, Al Jazeera, The Baffler, Jacobin, The Daily Beast, Truthout, In These Times, Roar Magazine, Jewish Currents, and others. He provides expert analysis and commentary on these issues for places like PBS, The Guardian, and The Oregonian, and has published extensive academic work, particularly on antisemitism.
Read an Excerpt
It was one of the first nights of Hanukkah: a festival celebrating the Jewish people’s right to maintain their traditions despite persecution. There was excitement everywhere as hundreds of people packed into the auditorium of a new Jewish Community Center in Virginia, the result of years of organizing and fundraising. Centers like these are core to any Jewish community: they bring together Jews beyond differences in religious observance (or lack of observance entirely), and are part of the vibrant web of American Jewish civic organizations that began, over a century ago, as a way to provide support to Jews excluded from state services.
But then a member of the board walked onstage and announced that the program that evening was being canceled. They had received a bomb threat.
The building was quickly evacuated. Dove Kent, then ten years old, dashed over to her mom, who whispered that since the building had been open, there had been a bomb threat every single day. This time, however, with hundreds there for one of the region’s largest Jewish events, the safety of the entire community was at stake.
Dove didn’t grow up around a lot of Jews. There were eleven Jewish students in her Virginia high school, and she had to insist to her skeptical teachers that Yom Kippur was the holiest day of the year, not just an excuse to duck her math exam.
That night, Dove joined the remaining attendees as they chanted that they would not be afraid.
“But they were clearly terrified and shaking,” she told us, “and it was definitely a formative experience for me to see the adults in my community so powerless and frightened . . . That was a really major moment that made me both feel committed, then and through my life, to my fellow Jews . . . But also in that moment, it was not specific to Jewish [people] . . . Why should someone with a bomb threat be able to just terrorize a community like this? No one should be experiencing this.” That bomb threat wasn’t the end of it: weeks later, swastikas were found scrawled on the side of the building. This harrowing December night sent Dove on her path to become a progressive community organizer, a leader of progressive Jewish organizations, and an active participant in Jewish communal life, uniting her desire for equality and justice with Jewish peoplehood. She inherited a long tradition of Jewish activism from ancestors who fought against antisemitism and for a better world for all, because those two fights are inextricably bound.
Antisemitism is on the rise today, alongside so many other forms of oppression. But the tangled mess of accusations and defenses we hear on the news every day make it seem more challenging than ever to understand and confront.
Dove’s inheritance is one we all share. In spite of a political culture that tries to divide us, Jews and other marginalized groups are realizing that when we rely on each other, we become stronger than the forces arrayed against us. Our book tells the story of the movements coming together to build safety through solidarity.
Crisis is the new normal. As economic and ecological catastrophe deepens, we are seeing a mass realignment—a select few are consolidating untold wealth and power, while the rest of us face permanent precarity, immiseration, or worse. The political center is collapsing, and radical instability demands radical responses. Fast-growing movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, worker unionization, and the empowerment of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people are challenging injustice. But the far-right is growing at alarming rates, too, offering its own potent and electrifying story of white Christian dispossession and revolt.
People are scared, and looking for reasons why the world suddenly feels confusing and disempowering. A static society requires little explanation, but a world that is shedding its skin? That requires dramatic answers that move past our established narratives. “The old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” wrote Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in 1930 from within a fascist prison: words that, nearly a century later, feel more prescient than ever.
Fascists march in the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us” and open fire at synagogues. Pundits spin conspiracy theories about George Soros, “globalists,” and “elite cabals” on Fox News. Newspaper headlines continuously scream about antisemitism not only from Donald Trump but from Jeremy Corbyn, Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar: the list is endless. We hear that antisemitism is growing from all sides.
How can we make sense of this?
Antisemitism has not “reappeared” because in truth, it never left us—the “crisis” is simply more visible in political life as exclusionary movements create a new populist narrative that provides alienated people someone to blame. Progressive movements have stood up against other forms of oppression, tracing the historic roots, and contemporary fruits, of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, queerphobia, and many other ills plaguing our world. But we lack a similar framework for understanding what antisemitism is, and how to fight it.
This book is one attempt to put the fight against antisemitism back on the progressive agenda, where it belongs.
In the United States and around the world, progressive Jews and our allies are building safety through solidarity: committing to fight antisemitism alongside all other forms of oppression, as we strengthen each other against the rising tide of white Christian nationalism, which threatens us all. We offer a justice-driven analysis of antisemitism, and a window into the social movements committed to taking it on and building a better world.
Antisemitism is an enduring thought form that distracts from structures of oppression and displaces attention onto a traditional bogeyman. It is particularly corrosive because it can hook into the most vulnerable and angry experiences, like losing a job or home, channeling resentment in a way that not only disempowers the survivor, but aims a weapon at another.
Like all forms of oppression, antisemitism is ingrained in our society. Anybody is liable to reproduce it, intentionally or even unconsciously, regardless of where they think their politics lie, simply by living in a world structured by white Christian supremacy.
But antisemitism is also not politically indifferent, as some would claim. In the battle of freedom, justice, and liberation, it “knows” which side it’s on. Its foundational home is on the political Right, which remains the most direct threat to Jews and all marginalized people. Wherever it is mobilized, antisemitism serves the forces of division, repression, and Othering that foster inequality. It is part of the infrastructure of oppression, playing a vital role, alongside capitalism, white supremacy, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and Islamophobia, in reinforcing injustice.
Antisemitism doesn’t only harm Jews; it holds all of humanity back in our shared struggle to build a better world. Antisemitism is not the exclusive province of the Right. At times it can also be a “go-to” narrative for some marginalized communities and ostensibly liberatory movements seeking a simplified explanation for structures of racism, inequality, and empire. In this way, it protects the powerful by telling the dis- empowered an inaccurate story about how to free themselves.
As the State of Israel deepens its brutal oppression of Palestinians, it’s more important than ever to distinguish between principled criticism of that oppression on the one hand and antisemitism on the other. Contrary to what the Right insists, it is not inherently antisemitic to criticize Israel’s unjust policies and the ideology of Zionism fueling those policies, or to support tactics like boycott, divestment, and sanctions that seek to hold Israel accountable. We see fighting antisemitism, and fighting for freedom, equality, and justice for Palestinians, as part of the same struggle for a better world.
This became all the more urgent as our book was completed in late 2023, when a surprise attack, and brutal massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, by the militant Palestinian group Hamas was met with a massive Israeli bombardment, and displacement of nearly two million Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, dizzying and unprecedented in its violence and scope. Faced with a radically uncertain future, as both peoples bury their dead and the prospect of a protracted war looms on the horizon, the dire need for a truly just peace—one that interrupts the root causes underlying the cycles of violence, and reimagines a shared polity of full freedom and flourishing for all who live across the land—is clearer than ever. And faced with a rise in heinous antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry in the United States and around the world, the need to build safety through solidarity is more dire than ever.
Too often, the fight against antisemitism is siloed from every other pressing political issue. Our book charts a new path: re-grounding that fight within the mass social movements fighting for justice for all people. Today, the loudest voices insist that Christian Zionists are the Jews’ best friends; “radical” Muslims, people of color, and Leftists are our worst enemies; and only Israeli nationalism, and collusion with whiteness and state repression in the United States, will keep Jews safe. But the Jewish Left has another answer: safety through solidarity.
This means that forming alliances across differences, building bridges not walls, and striving alongside others for a future free from inequality, exploitation, and oppression in all its forms is the best strategy to fight antisemitism.
So who are we to make these claims?
As Jews and as Leftists, we have long been committed to this issue. For three years, Ben worked as a campus organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace, a Palestine solidarity organization. At universities across the country, he saw students and professors boldly stand for Palestinian justice and freedom and get smeared as antisemites, often with severe consequences. He saw Jews of all ages struggle for a Judaism beyond nationalism and build new rituals, communities, and identities celebrating that vision. He also saw the Left itself struggle to take antisemitism seriously, and shy away from rigorously confronting the ways it could show up in our own organizing. Now he works at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank that monitors the far-right, where he researches antisemitic and white nationalist movements and helps activists understand and counter their reach.
Shane has long worked at the intersections of these issues. In college he formed a Palestine solidarity group, holding Israeli Apartheid Week and building campaigns in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on his campus. For years he has worked as an organizer and journalist, documenting the rise of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and the antifascist movements that fight back, in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. These experiences have clashed profoundly—the centrality of antisemitism in motivating an insurgent far-right and conspiratorial worldview on one side, and the claims of antisemitism, often spurious, thrown directly at Jewish advocates for justice in Palestine on the other.
For us, the fight against antisemitism is clear. As Jews, our personal connection is undeniable: the fight for safety, acceptance, and liberation is our own. In our work researching and reporting on the far-right, Ben has faced torrents of antisemitic harassment from white nationalists online, and threats to his safety offline. Shane has faced threats as well—from stray texts from Proud Boys to emails from neo-Nazis and in-per- son confrontations with armed far-right vigilantes at protests.
As Leftists, we see the role that antisemitism has played in breaking apart movements to win true liberation. We have both experienced moments when antisemitism in Left spaces went unchallenged, and the call to take it seriously was met with dismissive silence. Like many others, we watched as controversies over antisemitism sent movements like the Women’s March in the United States and the Jeremy Corbyn candidacy in the United Kingdom, under attack from the Right and unprepared to navigate the issue in their own ranks, into a tailspin. This is a blind spot the Left can’t afford to ignore.
Safety through solidarity means we cannot truly end antisemitism by building higher walls, fortifying nation-states, hiring more police or militarized security at synagogues, or going along with politics that scapegoat activists of color and divide communities. It means we must fight antisemitism at its root by building powerful mass movements to transform society’s underlying inequality, exploitation, and alienation. It means we must fight for a more just, more connected world where people no longer need to turn to conspiracy theories, scapegoating, or demonization to make sense of the fundamental brokenness they see all around them. It means we must recognize the intersectional links between antisemitism and capitalism, anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and other structures of oppression, and build relationships of co-resistance between Jews and other marginalized groups.
Antisemitism is not an “eternal hatred” plaguing humanity since time immemorial. It is not a virus, a plague, or some other “natural” phenomenon. It is not merely a private prejudice of the heart, not merely a symptom of “extremism” at the fringes, disconnected from broader political structures of the world we live in. Rather, antisemitism is a political project that reinforces structural inequalities in our white, Christian hegemonic society and protects the most powerful.
We can defeat antisemitism, but it will require all of us. Too often Jews are tasked with leading this work within progressive movements, but antisemitism is fundamentally a problem of the non-Jewish world, and we need more non-Jewish accomplices in this struggle if we hope to win.
Time and again, the activists we interviewed told us that building genuine, deep relationships across communities is key to the approach to fighting antisemitism we explore in this book. “Solidarity is not easy,” Dove Kent told an audience of Jewish activists in 2018. “It is difficult, it is trying, it is facing disappointments in each other over and over again—and reaching for each other over and over again. It’s not walking away.”
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