Articles

In a long autobiographical interview given to Mathias Greffrath in 1979, Günther Anders (Stern) indicated four major turning points that had marked his intellectual itinerary. First of all the Great War, which he had witnessed while still an adolescent and from which he learned what a massacre of millions of people was like: he would never forget the spectacle of mutilated soldiers and humiliation inflicted on civilians that he had witnessed in Alsace. Then Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933: the event that forced him into exile. Finally, two great, almost contemporary tragedies, consummated during the Second World War, which he learned about in the United States in 1945: the genocide of the Jews in Europe and the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[1] These events shaped his sensitivity, his vocation as a philosopher and intellectual, his thinking and perhaps even his style. The last one, the nuclear destruction of the Japanese cities, marked in his eyes the beginning of a new era, a sort of ‘zero hour’ (Stunde Null) for humanity, which discovered for the first time the concrete possibility of its own annihilation. From that moment on, Anders decided to devote the rest of his life to denouncing this terrible threat, conducting his battle like an isolated and unheard Cassandra, but always tenacious. A prophet of despair, Anders did not act as a representative of a community or a spokesman for a political movement, but only as a committed intellectual, an exile by necessity and a ‘citizen of the world’ by choice: first in Paris, then in New York, Los Angeles and finally Vienna, cities and countries that were never his true home. But ‘citizen of the world’ is not an entirely appropriate definition, one should probably speak of a ‘man without a world’ (Mensch ohne Welt), using the formula he himself had forged to indicate a tradition initiated by Kafka, Brecht, Döblin and Grosz, to which he implicitly subscribed.[2]

As this article is being written, the world is confronting a global pandemic that continues to wreak havoc daily. While unprecedented in several respects, the pandemic mirrors earlier crises under financialised capitalism, at least in its devastating impact upon the global working poor and the unemployed, racialised minorities, migrant workers, and other marginalised groups. The pandemic has also been accompanied by a spate of anti-Jewish and anti-Asian violence globally. To be sure, racist-based violence and hate crimes had a long and sordid history before the pandemic. In 2019, a German neo-fascist killed two people outside a Halle synagogue in a deliberate attempt to carry out a murderous rampage against Jews. A year earlier, another neo-fascist was responsible for killing 11 Jewish worshippers and injuring six others at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. In addition to these horrific acts of antisemitic violence, there has been a general spike in hate crimes against Jews across Europe and North America, which has given renewed force to contemporary discussions about antisemitism and the ‘Jewish Question’.[1] In the Marxist tradition, the debate about the Jewish Question originates in the nineteenth century, prompted as it was by Marx’s well-known critique of Bruno Bauer’s book, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question). The current iteration of this debate is complicated by a host of multi-layered and conflicting realities. These realities include the enduring legacies of the Holocaust, the Nakba, the consolidation of the Israeli state, the struggle of Palestinians for self-determination amidst a brutal occupation, as well as a global political context in which xenophobic nationalisms and neo-fascisms have resurfaced with a vengeance.

At the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th, a powerful wave of antisemitism ran throughout Europe, from Tzarist Russia to Republican France. Traditional religious anti-judaism combined here with new, more ‘modern’ manifestations, based on racial, ‘social’ or nationalist arguments. It took different forms: pogroms, mob riots, antisemitic discourses and publications, legal exclusion form territories or professions, antisemitic trials. It did not spare the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its Czech province, where antisemitism was to be found both among the Czech majority and the German-speaking minority. How did Franz Kafka, a Czech Jew of German culture, react to antisemitism?

While arguments about the ‘antisemitic’ character of Marx have been well rehearsed in the English-speaking world,[1][2]this debate has been particularly lively and revived in the French context since the Six-Day War and well into the Twenty-first Century. On each occasion, intellectuals dispute the correct interpretation of Marx’s 1844 article published in response to the theses of Bruno Bauer, hence the often-misreported title: Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question).[3]Among Jewish intellectuals, who are at the forefront of this debate, the relation to Marxism in toto is coupled with their specific positioning towards the State of Israel and Jewish identity.

“All I am saying is that before the Code Noir and King Leopold’s chicotte roused the outrage of the abolitionists and future antiimperialists, the bodies and souls of their victims must have registered, quite viscerally, the radical transgression of their idea of the human. All I am saying is that the slaves’ revulsion and recorded histories of revolt, from the slave ship and the middle passage to the plantation and Saint-Domingue in 1791, did not, pace Hegel’s preposterous claim, originate in the circumstance that ‘they have come in contact with European views about freedom’” (Ato Sekyi-Out, 2019, 31).

The question of antisemitism continues to trouble and disrupt pro-Palestinian activism. Today, the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, agreed in 2016 along with a list of examples of antisemitism that tie it to critique of Israel, is routinely used by Israel’s proponents as a tool to silence, shame, and outlaw protest and debate. As of October 2023, the definition has been adopted by 43 countries. The roots of this linking of antisemitism and anti-Zionism can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s, when much of the left globally adopted Palestine as a cause worthy of support. This article analyses the early debate about antisemitism, Israel and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Palestine Solidarity movements and among Palestinian groups. It shows that activists were aware of the need to address the issue sensitively, but at the same time found it essential to formulate a critique of Zionism being part of capitalist, racist and imperialist practices. By reading into early solidarity publications and drawing on memoirs and interviews with former militants, the article first outlines how the connection between the global New Left and Palestine was established.[1] The article focuses on Denmark’s Palestine Committee (founded in 1970) and smaller leftist groups and publications associated with it. On the Palestinian side, it draws on sources from al-Fateh, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the material they distributed globally. The aim is to understand the exchange of views between Palestinians and solidarity activists, and to compare the Left’s readings of the Jewish Question and the Question of Palestine. The article shows how a historical materialist understanding of Zionism became widely established through meetings, exchanges, and texts. The final part of the article traces the development of the debates in the latter part of the 1970s and illustrates how the solidarity offensive triggered a pro-Zionist backlash which, over time, set the tone for the accusations of antisemitism today.      

With the elevation of Islamophobia to an alarming degree in Europe and beyond, and the pressing problems of Muslim immigrants and second- and subsequent-generation descendants of immigrants coming to occupy a central subject of debate, critical scholars of racism have drawn politically-relevant parallelisms between the historical ‘Jewish question’ and today’s ‘Muslim question’. On the one hand, some Marxists rose to the challenge of rereading Marx’s 1843 polemic Zur Judenfrage in the contemporary context, while drawing strategic implications for the pressing issues of today’s political and social crisis around Muslims.[1] On the other hand, such parallelisms entailed emphases on the similarities, or enabled comparisons, between antisemitism, as the discursive background of the Jewish question, and Islamophobia, as that of the Muslim question.[2] Other parallels were drawn between the successive shifts of the racialised populations, from the Eastern European Jews to the Muslims, who immigrated to countries such as France, formed the lower strata of the working class, and became subject to derogatory labels such as the métèque.[3] Scholars working in both Marxist and progressive traditions formulated, in different ways, the idea that modern nation-state, with its rigorous secularist and universalist claims (particularly in the French case), is generating the mechanisms for the discrimination and misrecognition of its ethnic or religious minorities. These minorities are increasingly racialised and gendered, as in the case of Muslim women’s veiling practices, vis-à-vis a supposedly integrated, culturally harmonious, if not homogenous, majority.[4] Moreover, there are important and dangerous parallels between the Jewish question and the Muslim question in the form of a wide range of conspiracy theories that are embedded in the Islamophobic discourse – just as those that could be found in the antisemitic discourse.[5] Resonating some of the conspiratorial elements of the ‘redemptive antisemitism’ that laid the ideological basis of Nazism,[6] today’s Islamophobic discourse relies on such scaremongering theories as ‘Eurabia’ and ‘great replacement’, and it is obsessed with the ‘demographic change’ that is taking place in the heart of the Western civilisation.[7]            

As the Israeli state’s dispossession of the Palestinian people becomes more difficult to obscure by the day, the Left in one country is conspicuous in its absence from the global solidarity movement with the oppressed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. With some exceptions, the German Left largely avoids taking a stance on the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. In some cases, it has even joined the national pro-Israel chorus, stretching all the way to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. This attitude encompasses a diverse set of actors, from the leadership of Germany’s left reformist party, Die Linke (“The Left”), to squats such as the celebrated Rote Flora in Hamburg. This hostile attitude towards Palestinian liberation is often attributed to guilt for the Shoah and the corresponding semantic identification of Israel, Zionism, and Judaism in public discourse. A complementary explanation identifies the Antideutsche (the “anti-Germans”) as a factor in shaping the Left’s current approach to Israel. These started out as an ultra-left critique of Germany as a nation, following a wave of nationalist jingoism triggered by reunification. However, rather than criticising nationalism, today’s Antideutsche engage in an Ersatz nationalism around one particular state. Elements of this include flying the Israeli flag and wearing IDF shirts, hatred of Muslims as natural-born antisemites, not to mention a disturbing celebration of Israeli violence against Palestinians framed as “anti-fascism”.

Even after Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 US presidential election, the rise of the far right remains a defining feature of our time and a central challenge for the left. As analysts have pointed out, Trump’s losing vote total was the second-highest ever won by a US presidential candidate. Events since the election have confirmed his hold over the Republican Party and its transformation into a nationalist party of the far right. Even as Republicans continue to enjoy broad support from capital on such issues as tax cuts and social and environmental deregulation, multinational capital has lost the hegemonic influence over the Republican Party that it exercised over both major US parties from the 1980s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. [1]

Mr. Hoffman: Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room. You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh?

Since June 2013, when a mass movement took to the streets of Brazil, the country has undergone significant political polarisation. This movement has had an impact on the way Brazilian society and the Jewish community have related to the Palestine/Israel issue. On the left, a growing number of social movements and political parties, such as PSOL^[1], have committed to a stance of radical solidarity with Palestinians, adopting BDS as part of their platforms. On the right, Israel has come to play a central role in the political agendas of evangelical and neo-fascist groups that make up the base of the Jair Bolsonaro government, elected in 2018.

01 September 2023