Re-opening the question of Jewish Liberation

Jonah ben Avraham reviews Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, which he argues could not have come at a better time and that the book is likely to become the definitive text on fighting anti-Jewish oppression for the Left.

For the hefty majority of Tempest readers, the perpetual din of spurious antisemitism accusations leveled against fights for justice has been droning for our entire lives.

It has been twenty years since the creation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and fifty years since the invention by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of “the new antisemitism,” defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism expressed against the “collective Jew” on the world stage.

For more than a decade before that, the antisemitic right prosecuted an ideological, political, and paramilitary war on Jewish people while blaming Black folks, communists, and anyone outside of their own white supremacist orbit for the persistence of antisemitism.

In the context of such a tiresome, endless attack, it is no wonder that some on the Left have grown exhausted at the very notion of a struggle against anti-Jewish oppression. It is impossible to hear the word “antisemitism” without conjuring up decades of obfuscation and authors crying wolf, leading some Jewish radicals to reach for terms like “anti-Jewish racism” in an effort to normalize a conversation about Jewish struggles for liberation made topsy-turvy by decades of Jewish trauma being enlisted in the service of white supremacy and empire.

Even those for whom “there’s no doubt that antisemitism is a meaningful force in American politics” often maintain a bitter distrust of their Jewish comrades working to actually combat it, alleging an “obsession with Jewish victimhood” inherited from the Zionist right and dubbing theories of contemporary structural antisemitism as little more than “appropriated language from anti-colonial and Black liberation movements.”

It is fine to mention antisemitism; but to dwell on it, much less actually try to build a Jewish-led movement to dismantle it, is to risk uplifting the only game in town already mobilizing concerns about antisemitism toward a political program. As Em Cohen has put it, “there is no mechanism by which condemning antisemitism”—not even the antisemitism of “fascist white-supremacist antisemites”—“leads to less antisemitism in a hegemonically anti/philosemitic society.” Jews must therefore, in Cohen’s view “stop ‘condemning antisemitism’” altogether.

There is a fundamental problem with this line of thinking: For many Jews, even in the United States, antisemitism is not a hypothetical or rhetorical problem able to be sidelined in the name of a broader political strategy. It is a violent reality lived daily. And arguments to ignore one’s daily experience of oppression, either due to antisemitism’s standing alongside other forms of oppression, or else out of outright denial, necessarily fall flat among the growing number of Jews confronted in more frequent and more dangerous ways by U.S. civil society’s systemic anti-Jewish dimension.

The theoretical framework for such strategies of dealing with antisemitism (that is, not dealing with it—or at least not beyond an educational program here, an article there, and always seeking to redirect the conversation back toward the liberation of some other group) was laid out by Karen Brodkin in her popular 1998 book, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race In America. Apart from brief asides acknowledging that “Not all Jews made it,” the book paints an otherwise monolithic picture in which U.S.-American Jewry assimilated wholesale into the white, suburban middle class during the postwar era and left any socially or politically relevant markers of difference behind in the urban ghettos from which they came. “This is not to say that anti-Semitism disappeared after World War II,” Brodkin assures us, “only that it fell from fashion and was driven underground.”

This rendering of the majority trend in U.S.-Jewish history is not a natural rendering, however, but a constructed one. That is, the relocation of the center of Jewish life from urban ghettos to wealthy suburbs was accomplished not merely through the process of voluntary integration that Brodkin narrates, but just as importantly through a process of exclusion. Many Jews were purged from Jewish communal life following the alliance between ruling-class Jewish leaders and the antisemitic right led by Joseph McCarthy.

Some Jews either failed or never sought to join their co-religionists among the ranks of the middle class, and were simply priced out. Some were not white, and faced many more social, economic, and legal barriers to white flight than other Jews—not to mention the enormous barrier of racism inside Jewish institutions themselves. Some rejected the widespread revision of Jewish law to allow for less concentrated communities.

Each of these points of departure from the assimilationist trend in Jewish communal life impacted not just one generation of Jews, but successive generations, as younger Jews broke from the suburban institutions of their upbringing and rediscovered or recreated Jewish life in working-class neighborhoods, or else migrated, converted, or married their way into U.S.-American Jewish life. And each produced Jewish individuals and communities with profoundly different relationships to the matrix of race, class, and antisemitism from the one Brodkin describes.

As is the case with any oppressive system, it is impossible to develop an analysis of antisemitism without understanding the ways in which it interacts with other ideological and material systems in the lives of its subjects. The central observation from which Brodkin concludes that antisemitism has been largely mitigated in the United States is the observation that “Since [World War II], glass ceilings on Jewish mobility have become fewer and higher. Although they may still suppress the number of Jews and other Euro-ethnics in the upper class, it has been a long time since they could keep them out of even the highest reaches of the middle class.”

What about those Jews, though, for whom glass ceilings are a secondary or tertiary concern? It is telling that Brodkin’s inheritors often feel the need to adjust the work’s title when quoting it. If one clarifies that the book is about “how white Jews became white folks,” then one can skirt over the act of mass erasure on which the book’s thesis is premised: No Jews of color, no Haredim, and no poor or working-class Jewish radicals—that is, no Jews embodying any particular axis of vulnerability to antisemitism—survive Brodkin’s vibes-based revision of the postwar U.S. Jewish landscape.

A similar dynamic is at play when more contemporary Jewish writers contend that “It is evident that the antisemite’s ideology has not dominated white Jewish experience in 21st-century America.” Dispense with intersectional analysis, deal only with the most privileged—and therefore, most insulated—segments of an oppressed community, and it becomes pretty easy to claim that things aren’t really so bad after all.

If the only experience relevant to the discussion of antisemitism is that of the white, middle-class suburbanite or urban gentrifier, then the daily experiences of violence felt by Orthodox Jews, poor, working-class, and homeless Jews, Jews of color, Jews in prisons, Jewish immigrants, and Jews in any number of other circumstances that strip them of the insulation enjoyed by their white, well-to-do co-religionists can be safely sidelined as marginal, interpersonal, or otherwise irrelevant to the political strategy of the Jewish Left.

Faced with the challenge of wresting control of political narratives surrounding militant opposition to antisemitism away from the likes of the ADL and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, our Jewish leftists have been—with notable exceptions—content to cede the ground.

Those white Jewish communities for whom antisemitism has dominated day-to-day life have consequently proven fertile recruiting ground for the fascist, Jewish-identitarian right.

It is then we, the Jewish Left, who are to blame when our comrades conclude that antisemitism is nothing more than “semantic violence” or that fighting antisemitism represents not a radical, liberatory political project, but a tedious exercise in “memorizing or apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans.”

When the only script on offer for the dismantling of antisemitism is a manifestly racist one, with antiracist Jews having failed to articulate a radical vision of Jewish liberation since the incarceration and repression of the last great generation of identitarian Jewish radicals in the 1970s, there is simply no reason for left-wing social movements to take antisemitism seriously.

Increasingly, we are reaping what we have sown: high-profile cases of pro-Palestine activists launching headfirst into Holocaust denial and condemnations of Jewry. White nationalists and other antisemitic fascists recruiting millions of online followers through opportunistic sympathy with the Palestinians. The founding of a new American Communist Party with some two dozen chapters by charlatans rooting their opposition to “finance capital” in antisemitic conspiracy theories. And hundreds of bomb threats, assaults, shootings, and stabbings; firebombings and rocks thrown through windows of synagogues and kosher restaurants by people exclaiming “Free Palestine”; and often vociferously denying their own antisemitism in the aftermath. All this since October 2023.

These are the consequences of a Jewish far left that has predominantly engaged with the question of anti-Jewish oppression through minimization and relativization; which has indulged, in other words, in what Eric Ward has called the white, Jewish “fantasy” of a post-antisemitic world. Without a confident, Jewish-led effort to theorize antisemitism as part of the structures of racial capitalism against which movements of the Left take aim, and without an effort to actualize that analysis through street-level action and grassroots organizing, there has been no widespread inoculation against antisemitism among the Left.

Since October 2023, when popular anti-Jewish resentment has been at an all-time high, certain pockets of the Left have proven highly susceptible to the infiltration of antisemitic ideas and forms of action—and even to have been motivated by such ideas from the beginning, rather than grounded liberatory impulses.

If we are to stop the bleeding of left-wing ideologues and curious new recruits into red/brown alliances and novel national socialist formations, Jewish radicals must work hard to make up for this lack of inoculation. Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism could not have come at a better time.

Burley and Lorber’s book is likely to become the book on anti-Jewish oppression for the progressive left for years to come. It takes little for granted, walking readers through what antisemitism is, how it works, and how it manifests in all kinds of spaces, including specifically progressive ones, by way of historical, political, and journalistic discussion deeply enriched by anecdotes from both the authors and dozens of interviewees.

The book is not specifically about antisemitism on the Left. Importantly, the authors reject a liberal caricature of antisemitism as “politically indifferent,” saying, “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.”

Nevertheless, Safety Through Solidarity’s specific appeal to the Left is clear. We are told repeatedly that “Antisemitism doesn’t harm only Jews; it holds all of humanity back in our shared struggle to build a better world.” In addition, “When the Left doesn’t speak out on antisemitism … we hand the Right one of its strongest rhetorical weapons against our movements.” That “The Right aims [antisemitic] conspiracy theories as weapons against revolutionary movements, hoping to fracture the wider unity progressives need to build in order to win.”

It is not, in other words, primarily a book about how Jews impacted by antisemitism can struggle against it (though the final chapter provides some thoughts on the matter), nor the precise mechanisms through which antisemitism reproduces itself and impacts its Jewish victims (though the overall ideological architecture of antisemitism in the United States is an important focus). The book’s central appeal is to the Left: “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.”

Unlike prior attempts to intervene against the underdevelopment of the Left’s analysis of and response to antisemitism, Burley and Lorber’s contribution does not tar the vast and diverse array of forces making up the political Left with the brush of its most anti-social, incendiary voices on Twitter. Nor does it self-righteously condemn the far left as the new political home of Jew hatred. It is palpable that their appeal to educate and organize ourselves in defense of Jewish communities is rooted not in Judeo-pessimist grievance, but in a genuine, hopeful bid for solidarity—seeing in Jews’ sometimes fraught relationships with left-wing social movements evidence not of a uniquely anti-Jewish spirit in left-wing organizing, but the same kind of turbulence and friction many communities face upon entering into struggle across lines of difference.

“Solidarity is not easy,” they write. “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.”

There is a common misconception among white, middle-class Jewish liberals, for whom movement spaces drum up more identity-based discomfort than the world at large, that these difficulties associated with building solidarity across lines of difference represent a unique and onerous requirement placed specifically on Jews. Burley and Lorber’s recognition that this is not the case, but that solidarity is hard—and also the only chance we’ve got at getting free—is a refreshing normalization of the conversation about antisemitism and the place of Jews and Jewishness in movements for collective liberation.

Certainly the most devastating barrier to solidarity-building efforts between Jews and other constituencies of the exploited and oppressed is the extensive repressive violence exercised against many groups struggling for liberation, but specifically Palestinians, in the name of Jewish safety. Untold millions have been spent waging a propaganda war contending that the fight against antisemitism and the fortunes of Zionism are one and the same. When both Jewish and Christian hegemons unite to blame the Jews for the crimes of Zionist settler-colonialism, people listen. Unfair though it may be, this is one more node of anti-Jewish power that Jewish activists must build a strategy to undermine.

Burley and Lorber understand the strength of support for Zionism among Jewish communities as, at least in significant part, a manifestation of intergenerational trauma. They quote Dove Kent arguing that undermining this communal support means “We have got to engage with that fear” and critique the Left for a series of incidents in which “antisemitism and Jewish trauma [were] belittled, or seen as not real, in movement spaces.”

Several of these incidents represent the simple presence of unchecked antisemitism on the Left. In one particularly egregious case, one of Burley’s comrades told him, “The Holocaust is mostly an invention of Zionists to justify the creation of the State of Israel on top of Palestine.” Most incidents they describe were more subtle; cases where comrades in movement spaces held unchecked assumptions that “Because Jews are white and therefore in a place of privilege … it’s punching up even when [antisemitism] does exist, and therefore not worth taking seriously.” In multiple cases cited in the book, these beliefs led activists and organizations to be inattentive to antisemitic dynamics either in the organizing spaces themselves, or even among their political opponents.

Included among these cases of outright dismissal of antisemitism by left-wing activists, however, is the following assessment of the Left’s response to Operation: Al-Aqsa Flood:

All these trends were glaringly obvious in late 2023, when some on the Left minimized or even celebrated Hamas’s massacre and kidnapping of hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7, and even spun revisionist theories holding Israel primarily responsible for Israeli civilian death … This dismissive posture shocked and traumatized Jews, including many Jewish Leftists, who found themselves unable to trust that their comrades had their backs.

The authors also critique “activists [who] uncritically celebrated Hamas’s overall attack as ‘resistance,’ minimizing Israeli civilian victims into a homogenous category of ‘settlers,’ unworthy of solidarity or support.”

In a book remarkable for its general deftness in cutting through the obfuscations of both Zionist Judeo-pessimism and left-wing antisemitism denial, this condescending approach to the most important political question through which analyses of antisemitism (or lack thereof) are mobilized in U.S. politics is disappointing.

First, the state of Israel was absolutely “primarily responsible for Israeli civilian death” on October 7. The book condemns a student activist at NYU for saying that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” but it is the Zionist program of apartheid and ethnic cleansing which produced the unbearable conditions against which the people of Gaza rose up, making the state of Israel, at least in this broad sense, substantially culpable.

In the narrow sense to which the authors refer above, a Haaretz investigation released days after the publication of Safety Through Solidarity has revealed that the Israeli counteroffensive on October 7 was responsible for large numbers of Israeli civilian deaths. The report calls the Israeli response “a mass Hannibal,” referring to the controversial Israeli doctrine allowing for the preemptive killing of Israelis taken captive by enemy forces—a claim made by Palestinian journalists the same day as the attack and widely disregarded by Western media.

The report indicates widespread killing of Israeli civilians and captive soldiers by the Israeli Defense Forces on October 7, suggesting that the well-known killing of Efrat Katz by an Israeli attack helicopter and of 13 Israeli civilians by IDF tank fire in Kibbutz Be’eri might have been representative of the way that Israeli forces operated throughout the day. An unknown commander ordered the entire Gaza Division to ensure that “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” “at all costs,” knowingly issuing a potential death sentence to hundreds of Israeli captives and prisoners of war. IDF brass invoked the Hannibal Directive by name at the Erez border crossing, and knowingly employed it in at least two other cases: at the Re’im army base and the Nahal Oz outpost. The IDF knowingly launched tank and drone attacks on positions occupied by friendly soldiers and civilians. They launched blanket mortar and artillery attacks on areas near the Gaza border in which Israeli civilians and soldiers were known to be hiding, including areas “very close to [Israeli border] communities.” And while claims that the IDF was responsible for the majority of Israeli civilian casualties on October 7 may be exaggerated, they are also not out of the question; particularly in light of the fact that many of the reported civilian dead were in fact armed reservists active in the day’s fighting.

Certainly there is a degree of wishful thinking on both sides of this empirical question; but to dismiss the attention paid to Israeli culpability for civilian death as “revisionist theories” rooted in a devaluing of Jewish life, particularly as the scale of this attack is enlisted to promote a genocide responsible for tens if not hundreds of times more deaths, is unwarranted.

The central question posed by the book’s repeated interventions around October 7 is not empirical, however, but political. It is doubtless the case that in the aftermath of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, many Jewish activists felt that their comrades did not “ha[ve] their backs.” The question is: Are those feelings politically grounded? Was the identity-based discomfort that many Jews experienced in response to the activity of the Palestine solidarity movement after October 7 a reaction to antisemitism? Or the predictable, defensive reaction of people emotionally, relationally, and materially invested in a system of privilege shaken to its core by the violent process of decolonization?

For Burley and Lorber, Jews, like all oppressed people, have a right to comfort in their identities. Their critique of the Palestine solidarity movement extends beyond commentary on October 7 to include tearing down posters depicting Israeli hostages as well as protests and acts of vandalism targeting synagogues (overwhelmingly occasioned by those synagogues’ direct support for the genocide either through the display of pro-Zionist signs and flags or the hosting of events selling occupied Palestinian land). For the authors, to engage in such acts of protest while knowing that they will trigger identity-based discomfort for Jews betokens a selective disregard for the Jewish right to identitarian comfort which itself constitutes antisemitism. They write:

As long as Israel’s oppression continues to intensify, it would be unrealistic, even problematic, to demand historical empathy and compassion from Palestinians as a precondition for peace and justice, especially absent even the slightest parallel gesture from their oppressors. But for most non-Palestinians, a refusal to seriously grapple with Jewish attachment to Zionism represents a colossal blind spot, undermining the Left’s aspirations to meet marginalized communities where they are at.

I disagree. Meeting marginalized communities where they are at has never meant this kind of normalization of outwardly genocidal, racist politics; and it certainly cannot mean taking the comfort zone of comrades who hold familial and communal ties with a genocidal fascist ethnostate as the boundaries of acceptable resistance. For all the reasons that Burley and Lorber cite as meriting empathy with Jewish Zionism, sometimes Jewish anti-Zionists get things wrong. And when the destruction of anti-resistance propaganda or targeted protests outside of Jewish institutions elicit feelings of discomfort in Jewish anti-Zionists, it is not our non-Jewish comrades—whether Palestinian or not—who have grappling to do.

This is not a case for naivety to the reality of antisemitism in left-wing and Palestine-sympathetic spaces. There is no hard sociological or political line dividing the rebels spray-painting “Free Palestine” on a synagogue flying an Israeli flag from those spray-painting it on a synagogue that may or may not be a Zionist institution. Both or neither may be motivated by some mix of solidarity with Palestinians and anti-Jewish resentment, and this murkiness around the divide between anger at specific Jewish institutions’ genocidal politics and generalized anti-Jewish resentment allows the latter to fester. No doubt, there were many activists who chose to gloat over the killing of Israeli settlers or engage in the edgiest, most provocative forms of resistance possible not in spite of the antisemitism accusations which were sure to come, but because of them. This joy taken in triggering Jewish trauma evidences a real counterpole to the politics of collective liberation in the movement—one which demands a response.

This response, however, must grapple seriously with the fact that Jewish identity and the resources of Jewish communal institutions have been heavily weaponized by ruling-class actors against Palestinians to devastating political effect. We must consistently situate the fight against antisemitism as being aligned with our comrades’ most militant resistance against white supremacy and capitalism, as Lorber and Burley do at many other points throughout Safety Through Solidarity. And we simply cannot afford to participate in the moral panic around leftists’ celebrations on October 7, and thus contribute to the overall discursive terrain in which the fight against antisemitism confronts other fights against oppression as antagonists.

As Jewish Voice for Peace member Judith Butler argued last October, “It is more honest and historically correct to say that the uprising of October 7 was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an antisemitic attack … This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus.” Feelings about the human cost of such an uprising may legitimately vary (Butler themself called the operation “anguishing”). This uprising was certainly “brutal,” as Burley and Lorber describe it repeatedly throughout the book. But if building solidarity with Jews in the fight against antisemitism requires activists to join the chorus of voices condemning Palestinian resistance whenever desperate ghetto fighters neglect to make the distinction between civilian settler and enemy combatant, I fear that Jews will stand alone on the Left. There is no antisemitic kernel justifying the book’s comparison of Holocaust denial (as expressed by Burley’s comrade) and militant anti-Zionism (as expressed by Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, and other forces condemned by the book for supporting the Palestinian armed struggle). Fairly or unfairly, such sloppiness is bound to prevent serious engagement with Safety Through Solidarity by those corners of the Left that need it the most.

Burley and Lorber conclude by contrasting the isolationist, Judeo-pessimist, and racist approach of legacy Jewish institutions like the ADL and Secure Community Network toward combating antisemitism to a “safety through solidarity” model. They give a number of inspiring examples to guide anti-antisemitism organizing in the short term: partnerships between synagogues and local anti-racist and socialist organizations that recruit volunteers to protect synagogue services in lieu of police or armed private security; antifascist organizing to stop the antisemitic right from recruiting new antisemites and terrorizing Jewish communities; and organizing networks to respond to anti-Jewish violence with bystander intervention trainings, community building across lines of difference, and campaigns to redirect resources away from police and into services that address root causes of harm.

These projects are critical and provide organizers around the country with a place to start putting an anti-racist analysis of antisemitism into practice. They are also reactive projects, designed to address the most violent manifestations of antisemitism without necessarily addressing root causes.

The authors quote Leo Ferguson, director of special projects at New York City’s Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, talking about the organization’s political education programming around antisemitism:

Did people say antisemitic things [during question-and-answer sessions] in the trainings? Absolutely. And almost invariably they said them out of ignorance, not because they had any animosity towards Jews in any kind of coherent way … What I was seeing was the product of a lack of a progressive intersectional antisemitism analysis on the Left. I guarantee you that if we went back to 1975 or ’85 and had conversations in progressive spaces about the LGBT community, we’d be seeing the exact same kinds of things—people that weren’t hateful, but had a lot of yucky myths and things that they just didn’t understand, and hadn’t had a context and a liberatory framework in which to process them.

Developing the kind of analysis that Ferguson mentions here, the kind that is developed in Safety Through Solidarity, is certainly part of moving beyond reactive organizing. These efforts only scratch the surface, however, of the organizing potential for activists moved to action by their own experiences of antisemitism or acting in solidarity with their Jewish comrades.

What would it look like to pursue abolitionist organizing within a Jewish liberationist framework, knowing that incarcerated Jews are subject to systemic antisemitic violence from corrections officers and white supremacist gangs? What new alliances might be forged through deep organizing inside Orthodox Jewish communities if antifascists with a developed critique of antisemitism actually prioritized building relationships with and organizing some of the people most directly impacted by fascist violence?

At the anti-war encampments led by student activists last spring, antisemitism education and an analysis of Zionist repression as disproportionately targeting Jews flourished after Jewish anti-Zionists faced down riot police busting up their prayer services and fascist attackers shouting, “We’re here to finish what Hitler started.” This mode of anti-Zionist organizing in which Jews position ourselves not as saviors or guilty allies, but as militants with skin in the game and a battle to win against police forces increasingly infiltrated by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, must be a major component of a Jewish Left organized around safety through solidarity.

Safety Through Solidarity does not offer a blueprint for a contemporary, organic movement for Jewish liberation. But it does give activists the tools to re-engage the question of Jewish liberation from antisemitism as a core part of a broader struggle for collective liberation. If put into action, these ideas could help accelerate the training of a new generation of Jewish militants and non-Jewish comrades to dismantle the structures of antisemitism and Christian hegemony at their roots. And given the state of the world, that training is sorely needed.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”