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This article is a preview from the Spring 2020 edition of New Humanist

How to Fight Anti-Semitism (Allen Lane) by Bari Weiss

Inevitably, given antisemitism’s inexorable rise up the list of most discussed political topics, 2019 saw the publication of a number of books that both responded to and fed the controversy. But it has taken until early 2020 for the most controversial work of the lot – Bari Weiss’s How to Fight Anti-Semitism – to be published in the UK, following its US publication in autumn 2019.

Weiss, a New York Times columnist, attracts enormous opprobrium from the US left. She is a liberal Zionist and a prominent opponent of antisemitism on the left, particularly on US campuses. Weiss has repeatedly weighed in on controversies that have swirled round the darlings of the US left, including Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, pointing to what she sees as their use of antisemitic tropes.

That her critique of the left goes along with a vehement critique of the right cuts no ice with her accusers. She is not a Trump supporter and is aware of the danger from white supremacist violence. Indeed, How to Fight Anti-Semitism was inspired by her shock at the 2018 far-right terrorist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh – the synagogue she grew up in.

It is precisely her “all sides” critique that infuriates Weiss’s detractors. She describes far-right antisemitism, left antisemitism and Muslim antisemitism as part of a single “three-headed dragon” and devotes more or less equal space to each “head”. Weiss is absolutely correct to argue that we have to pay attention to the antisemitisms that are politically “inconvenient” to us. Yet her tendency towards broad generalisation, which can work in a column, grates over the length of a book. To treat all antisemitisms as manifestations of the same hate is to fail to acknowledge the need to develop varied responses.

You don’t have to be an anti-Zionist, for example, to recognise that there are as many different ideologies that reject Zionism as there are those that affirm it. And even if you see all anti-Zionisms as antisemitic – which Weiss appears to – then at the very least you need to recognise that they might stem from different political commitments.

How to Fight Anti-Semitism therefore inhabits a kind of political flatland. Above all, what is missing from this arid steppe is an appreciation of the contours of power. While Weiss recognises that different antisemitisms impact Jews in different ways, she has a very limited desire to engage with contextual questions of structure and inequality.

In many Muslim countries, for example, antisemitism tied to state power has resulted in the expulsion or flight of all or most Jews. In the west, where Muslims are a minority who are themselves subject to racism (as Weiss acknowledges), their agency to structurally oppress Jews is limited, even if Muslims can and have assaulted, harassed and killed Jews. Similarly, in the US, the agency of the antisemitic right has been greatly boosted now that sympathisers are in government. And however much antisemitism might be a real issue among US leftists, their agency to impact the lives of Jews is limited to specific contexts such as university campuses.

For Weiss, as for many of us Jews today, structural forms of antisemitism are an increasingly distant memory. With some significant exceptions, the days of systematic exclusion of Jews from economic prosperity are long gone. While Weiss rightly castigates those on the left who construct “hierarchies” of racism, there is no getting away from the inconvenient fact that minorities inhabit different structural positions. To fight the antisemitism of some European Muslims or some African-Americans without taking account of these disparities is not just tone-deaf to power, it is also ineffective.

Ultimately, How to Fight Anti-Semitism is an expression of the kind of liberalism that cannot or will not deal with the fact of structural power. Antisemitism and racism are treated as free-floating and ugly “viruses”. Weiss offers no way of addressing the excruciatingly difficult challenges that arise when minorities have divergent interests and divergent levels of access to capital and power.

Weiss ends her book with suggestions for fighting antisemitism, which ultimately boil down to speaking loudly and clearly. If only this were enough! In a divided and bewildering world, where oppressed and oppressor can sometimes be the same person, How To Fight Anti-Semitism does not, ultimately, offer a convincing way forwards.