Abstract
Despite being a rather slender volume, Robert Fine and Philip Spencer’s Antisemitism and the Left offers a relatively wide-ranging analysis of its subject. In its attempt to trace the role of the Jewish question within left-wing thought since the Enlightenment, this book ably demonstrates that antisemitism is an issue of deep significance not just in terms of the left’s opposition to racism but also in regard to its wider political project. Predictably, and not unreasonably in the current climate, the historical narrative Fine and Spencer provide is presented in the polemical context of explaining the enormous upsurge in left-wing anti-Zionism since the 1982 Lebanon War. Given the (often spectacularly reductive) state of the debate on Israel among contemporary left-wing activists, this latter element may well make Antisemitism and the Left more controversial than its preference for sober analysis actually justifies.
The book’s central thesis is established clearly at the beginning, with Fine and Spencer arguing that ‘The Jewish question is premised on tearing apart the universal, particular and singular aspects of the human condition and setting them in opposition to one another’ (p. 3). In other words, it is a threat – or, alternatively, a ‘temptation’ (p. 12) – that can disrupt the left’s ability to pursue radical social change. Chapters on Jewish emancipation and the enlightenment, and on Marx’s writings on the Jewish question, play an important grounding role here, but Antisemitism and the Left’s narrative really starts to kick into gear upon reaching 1930s Germany. Here, Fine and Spencer astutely observe that ‘Mainstream Marxism … was opposed to antisemitism and to antisemitic parties, but did not understand the central role played by antisemitism for the counter-revolution’, in part because of a common tendency ‘to think that there was a “Jewish question” for society to “solve”’ (p. 48). That even leading Frankfurt School intellectuals who were ‘targeted as Jews … initially preferred to downplay the question of antisemitism and think of themselves at risk predominantly because they were Marxists’ (p. 54) speaks volumes about the left’s inability to recognize the distinctiveness of Nazi antisemitism’s threat to progressive values on the eve of the Shoah.
Among the early Critical Theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer are here given particular prominence, as befits their significant role in gradually recognizing the complexity of antisemitism as a problem for the left. Special emphasis is placed on Adorno’s early recognition of ‘post-Holocaust antisemitism’, and its tendency to show ‘a reluctance to think about what was done to Jews or about the return of antisemitism’ (p. 61). This leads neatly into a chapter on Arendt. While critiquing her occasional tendency to assign Jews co-responsibility for the persistence of antisemitism, Fine and Spencer ultimately offer a fairly sympathetic treatment, with Arendt presented as having adopted a position of ‘moderation wrought out of a deep and bold sense of rebellion against every absolute’ (p. 87). Arendt’s views are not as explicitly connected to more general aspects of left politics as other thinkers here, however, which makes her ostensibly moderate position feel less important to the book’s wider narrative than it really is.
Fine and Spencer adeptly explain Habermas’ postnational project, and the importance of antisemitism as an inspiration behind its formulation. As the authors expertly demonstrate, however, Habermas’ very response to the horrors unleashed by the Jewish question has been central to its reintegration into the thought of the contemporary left. The question is now, they suggest, based on turning ‘the Jewish nation into the “other” of the postnational’ (p. 100). From here, the book turns its attention to a rather general discussion of contemporary left anti-Zionism, and the extent to which this represents a return of the Jewish question (and thus, in effect, of antisemitism) to mainstream political discourse. The problem here is that, having given a well measured overview of the Jewish question’s relationship with left-wing thought, this final chapter offers little in the way of engagement with contemporary thinkers. Instead it largely focuses on critiques of the various inappropriate and unhelpful analogies (such as that drawn with Apartheid) used by some anti-Zionists. Relevant though this may be, this does not help the final section of the book to convincingly tie together Antisemitism and the Left’s treatment of the relevant history with its polemical aspects. A more detailed analysis of (briefly mentioned) thinkers like Badiou or Butler, or a thorough discussion of leftist anti-colonial criticism of Israel, would have been more beneficial to asserting the book’s argument at this late juncture than the critiques of the British University and Colleges Union (UCU) and of the global media’s reaction to aspects of the Charlie Hebdo affair that are offered instead.
These concerns do not detract from the book as a whole. Fine and Spencer should be applauded for convincingly demonstrating, in such a short work, the need for the left to confront the Jewish question in order to pursue its political mission. There remains, however, a need for others to further clarify the place of today’s most prominent leftist critics of Israel in this history.