Overcoming Divisions in Anti-Racism
Things I’ve been reading this week:
This piece by David Feldman, the organiser of the conference in which the paper I share below was delivered, has written a very interesting essay on disconnections which have emerged between anti-racism and antisemitism since the 1960s.
I found this dialogue between Orla Guralnik (the therapist from the Netflix show Couples Therapy) and Christine, a former participant on the show, rich and fascinating. Guralnik grew up in Israel and Christine is Palestinian and they have a full and frank dialogue on all aspects of the conflict.
This long article on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new engagement with Israel-Palestine after taking a trip there in the summer of 2023 is a must read.
This (again long) New Yorker profile of Jewish Currents magazine is a great read, and can usefully be paired with this New Left Review interview with Currents editor Arielle Angel (although both the New Yorker and the NLR bring their own agendas to the pieces in quite unhelpful ways)
I’m really enjoying this book, a new history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation Research Center in Beirut.
This was a paper I delivered on September 18th at the one day conference ‘Anti-racism and anti-antisemitism’ which took place at Birkbeck, organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
There is a tendency today to do anti-racism in siloes. The bodies which deal with antisemitism have little to say about anti-racism more generally and bodies who work on anti-racism do scarce work on antisemitism. There is a distinct lack of organisations who do both simultaneously, and this results in an atmosphere of suspicion, competition and sometimes hostility between two worlds which, on the face of things, ought to be allies.
This separation has major ramifications at governmental level, particularly under recent Conservative administrations. Broader anti-racist campaigning, particularly when centred around anti-Black racism, or Afriphobia, is treated with little concealed hostility, depicted critically as ‘woke’ and presented as a threat to the memory of Britain’s glorious national and imperial past. Anti-antisemitism campaigning, on the other hand is welcomed, and the issue treated as a national priority. Jewish safety has become treated as integral to the well-being of the British state and used to justify restrictions on popular protest.
This bifurcation has led to politicians with a history of racism styling themselves as warriors against antisemitism. To give just one example, one of the stranger attendees at the 2018 Enough is Enough protest, against antisemitism in the Labour party, was Norman Tebbitt, the creator of the ‘Cricket Test’ – where he asked the descendants of South Asian or Caribbean migrants – ‘which side do you cheer for’?
Continue reading