Interrogating anti-Semitism with Deborah Lipstadt and Frank Furedi
In May this year, tombstones at the only functioning Jewish cemetery in Bordeaux, France, were smashed to pieces. Two days later, Germany’s commissioner on anti-Semitism warned the country’s Jewish population that ‘I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere all the time in Germany’. Within 48 hours, the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a formal investigation into long-simmering allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. That such events took place within just four days confirmed for many that anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head once again. A recent EU report found that 89 per cent of Jews living in member countries feel that anti-Semitism has increased in their country over the past decade, while 85 per cent believe it to be a serious problem. Indeed, that four-day flurry of incidents in May does not seem to have been anomalous. Anti-Semitism is rarely out of the news for long.
In 1996, world-eminent historian Deborah Lipstadt was infamously sued by David Irving for calling him a Holocaust denier. Her eventual victory four years later was heralded by one newspaper as having ‘done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations’. Concerned at the resurgence of anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic, Lipstadt has written a new book – Anti-Semitism: Here and Now – in the hope of answering some of the troubling questions about the resurgence of anti-Semitism.
One of the key questions addressed by Lipstadt is whether expressions of ‘the oldest hatred’ today reflect the same prejudice that has faced Jews since the middle ages and culminated in the Holocaust, or whether something new has emerged. For sociologist Frank Furedi, it is the rise of identity politics that has recast Jewishness as a ‘privileged’ identity, making it acceptable to rehearse those stereotypes, often with lines blurred between criticisms of Israel and prejudice towards Jews. ‘Identity politics works to devalue the moral status of Jew’, he writes.
While anti-Semitism has traditionally been associated with the political right and with national chauvinism, today it is often radical Islamists or even leftists, rather than nationalists, who are accused of prejudice against Jews. But can alleged anti-Semitism in the British Labour party (and especially among its radical left-wing members) really be in the tradition of the fascist Oswald Mosely? Or are Labour supporters right to suggest that legitimate criticisms of Zionism have been disingenuously ‘weaponised’ by the party’s opponents?
How best can we define anti-Semitism? As Israel descends into political and, some would say, moral crisis, is it possible to criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic? And most importantly, if anti-Semitism is on the rise, how can we best combat it?
