danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
The BoD are conservative because they’re a long established religious body, not because they’re Jewish. rummo is mapping class onto Jewishness, and then not seeing (I hope) where s/he (he I think: please tell us your pronouns rummo) is applying antisemitic tropes, and hoping that qualifiers like “most” is a way out of this. It isn’t, and not just because the judgement is difficult to justify statistically. Although that is of course a line of questioning, and one you were keen to pursue. My interest lay elsewhere.
The Board of Deputies are conservative and reactionary. This isn’t controversial. They apply double standards. Also not controversial. But when you start putting that together with whether they are acting in the class interests of Jews in Britain, then one has to start being very careful about what it is one is implying.
Jewishness is not exactly the same as being a practitioner of Judaism. And antisemitism does not restrict itself to religious Jews. Once we start trying to move from a specific to a generalisation about a “race”, then we start having to look at what it is that’s being said.
The fact that there are conservative Jews does not mean there is not a antisemitism problem on the left. The fact that there is a conservative Jewish body turning a blind eye to antisemitism on the right does not mean there is no antisemitism on the left. Nor in fact does it necessarily mean the antisemitism on the left is being exaggerated. It only means a blind eye is being turned to certain other antisemitism.
Nor does this mean that Jews as a bloc are acting in a composite Jewish/class interest. There is a body that the establishment is happy to use as “spokespeople” for a “racial” group, and that has an effect of pushing in a reactionary direction. This process can be seen duplicating itself across many groups, creating the impression of a growing ghettoisation of society into ever more reactionary “communities”. The trouble is that this is a self-fulfilling process. It is “Racecraft”. The sign that racism is at work. It entrenches racism in society, and leads us ever further into the pseudoscientific biologicalisation of politics.
So let’s start where we have some agency. Does the left have an antisemitism problem? Yes it does. Does it help Jewish people to feel comfortable with left politics if we say “no, actually”, or “what about”, or “I’ve never seen it”, or “not all lefties”. Not a good look, is it?
Corbyn’s handling of his party’s problem was inept, and allowed his enemies to zone in on his weakness, like a king and a rook chasing a lone king into smaller and smaller squares until checkmate was eventually possible, because Corbyn limited his own moves, lost his high value pieces and couldn’t command the centre of the board (sorry, I’m taking this too far but I’ve just finished the Queen’s Gambit).
This was in large measure because Corbyn has himself too long moved in a milieu where antisemitism has seeped into the discourse, and he has himself absorbed some of it. The prism through which he is looking is already skewed. He doesn’t notice tropes in murals and so on.
Left electoral politics has the ever present problem of what the establishment will allow. As an extra parliamentary communist I get impatient with the Labour left running itself into checkmate and then, when analysing old games, refusing to learn the lessons of its mistakes.
