Colin Shindler: The non-Jewish Jews who became the scholars of an ideological dreamworld.

Colin Shindler author of recently published “Israel and the European Left”, writes in the Jewish Chronicle :

During Jewish Book Week in February 1958, the great Marxist historian, Isaac Deutscher, gave a talk entitled “The Non-Jewish Jew”. It was later published and became required reading for the student revolutionaries of the 1960s. Deutscher tried to explain why some Jews embraced the revolutionary imperative and relegated their Jewishness to a secondary level.

As an ilui (child prodigy) of the yeshiva of Chrzanow in Poland, Deutscher supplanted God with Lenin and Trotsky at an early age. Although he moved beyond the Jewish community, he never renounced his Jewishness. He believed that non-Jewish Jews symbolised “the highest ideals of mankind” and that Jewish revolutionaries carried “the message of universal human emancipation”. He regarded such figures as optimists. And yet his father, the author of a book in Hebrew on Spinoza, disappeared in the hell of Auschwitz.

Deutscher argued that such Jews existed on the borderlines of various civilisations, religions and cultures. And from there on the margins, they were able to clearly analyse societies and events – and guide humanity into more benevolent channels.

His revolutionary heroes included the Talmudic heretic, Elisha Ben Abuya who was the teacher and friend, according to the midrash, of Rabbi Meir Baal Hanas. While his actual misdemeanours were never revealed, Ben Abuya was at pains to warn his close friend, Rabbi Meir not to transgress the Sabbath when he was unwittingly in danger of doing so. Why did Elisha do this if he was the advocate of heresy? Why did Rabbi Meir maintain his friendship with Elisha when the entire Jewish community had boycotted him? Such questions perplexed Deutscher, who identified with Ben Abuya and regarded him as the model for contemporary revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Yet this story and its mystery did point to the convoluted issues that faced non-Jewish Jews who had travelled outside the community yet culturally remained within. Such issues of national identity and internationalism affected many Jews on the European Left who were often marooned between identities.

Read the full article here.

 

You can also watch Colin talking about his book

“Raise Your Banners” reply to the call to cancel the appearance of Gilad Atzmon at their festival.

Raise You Banners have issued a statement on the call to cancel the appearance of antisemite Gilad Atzmon at their festival.Their response shows that they first received complaints about Atzmon’s appearance over 6 months ago. Their response in April is below their current response.

In response to a request to withdraw performance of Gilad Atzmon, November 2011

With less than a week to go, Raise Your Banners 2011 organisers are gearing up to a very busy festival. In the past seven days we have had further expressions of concern about our inclusion of Gilad Atzmon to headline one of our seven concerts. Two blogs condemned the festival and its funders for hosting him because they accused Gilad Atzmon of anti-Semitism and holocaust-denial.

These recent claims followed publicity in two blogs on November 12th, and were followed on November 17th by a critical news item in the Jewish Chronicle. We have had eight expressions of concern, some asking us to rescind the invitation to Gilad Atzmon. To do so at this stage would have very bad financial implications for the festival now and in the future.

The committee already considered similar concerns in April, decided to continue its invitation to Gilad Atzmon, and issued a statement then. That statement is reproduced below.

Gilad Atzmon’s philosophical and political writings stir up keen arguments about identity politics within the socialist movement, as well as a strong reaction from their main target the Israeli government. As we explained in our earlier statement in April, we do not believe the claims of anti-Semitism are justified. All artists have signed contracts to adhere to our equal opportunities policy in which abusive or discriminatory behaviour or language are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. We are sure that our audience would not tolerate any such behaviour.

Raise your Banners 2011 enjoys a broad range of contributions. At its Jazz night Israeli Gilad Atzmon is joined by Palestinian Nizar al Issa, UK singer Sarah Gillespie as well as the Orient House Ensemble. We had hoped that Cuban Omar Puente would also be present. In our film room we are showing Holocaust: a music memorial from Auschwitz. John Hamilton will be leading a workshop Songs to Counter the Zionist Bullies with Strawberry Thieves choir. We did not accept Gilad’s offer to present a workshop of his philosophical writing.

Raise Your Banners is an internationalist celebration of the power of music and song. We hope to see you there.

Sam Jackson – Secretary of Raise Your Banners
Ludi Simpson, – Treasurer of Raise your Banners and organiser of the Jazz concert
18 November 2011

 

 

In response to a request to withdraw performance of Gilad Atzmon, April 2011

Raise your Banners 2011 is proud to present its festival of political song in Bradford once more. It is sixteen years since Sheffield Socialist Choir organised the first Raise your Banners in celebration of the great Wobblie union organiser and songster Joe Hill. Raise your Banners unites political choirs with soloists and bands, to celebrate committed and campaigning music that constantly renews the vision of equality for all the world’s peoples. Raise your Banners is music to celebrate ordinary people joining together to struggle for something they want, whether it is local childcare or opposition to the ravages of global capitalism. We seek the best artists who will celebrate popular struggles in their music and song, and aim for all to have a rollicking good time.

RyB 2011 is developing apace. For the Friday night we have planned two big events in parallel: a folk concert with John Tams, Barry Coope and Roy Bailey, and a jazz concert with Gilad Atzmon, Omar Puente, Nizar al Issar, and Sarah Gillespie. We have had opposition to our invitation to Gilad Atzmon to play, and requests that Raise your Banners revoke this invitation on the basis that Gilad Atzmon’s political and philosophical statements have been anti-semitic and have denied the murder of millions in Nazi concentration camps. Gilad Atzmon rejects this interpretation of his writings. The request has come principally from the Jewish Socialists’ Group and some individual supporters of Raise your Banners festival. We have discussed the matter with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and are satisfied that PSC have no boycott of Gilad Atzmon or events that he is involved in.

The organising committee have discussed this matter in detail, following distribution of the material sent by those objecting to Gilad Atzmon’s invitation to the festival, and a summary of the statements by Gilad Atzmon, with links provided so that people could make their own minds up. A full discussion as held at which all members of the organising committee were able to give their opinions and then respond to those made by others. A vote by members of the organising committee was inconclusive so the directors, as those with ultimate responsibility for the festival, then voted to continue with the invitation to Gilad Atzmon, with the provision that all performers’ contracts include adherence to RyB’s equal opportunities policies.

Raise your Banners festival directors are not arbiters of political disputes between those who consider themselves part of the progressive movements with which the festival identifies. We trust that all our supporters and all our performers will work to make the festival a musical celebration of struggles for equality and against discrimination of the poor and oppressed.

Sam Jackson – Secretary of Raise Your Banners April 2011

Update: Bob From Brockley has his say here.

Dafni Leef’s speech to Israelis in State Square

Yesterday over 400,000 Israelis massed in squares around the country, the most populous of Israel’s protests to date.

Dafni Leef founded the tent camp which began Israel’s summer of protest. Here is her speech to the Israelis massed at Tel Aviv’s State Square , translated in a hurry but very eloquently by Robbie Gringas. From it,

“We have begun a new discourse, a discourse of hope, of sharing, of solidarity and responsibility. I want to ask the Prime Minister, to ask all the politicians: Look at what happened here, at what is happening here – is this what you want to defeat? Is this something you are able to defeat? You are the People’s representatives. Listen to the People. This protest, that gave so much hope to many people – do you want to break this hope? Is that what you want? To melt down the hope? You will never succeed!

And after we jumped all the hurdles and all the spin didn’t succeed, what did they have left? To attack me. This thing started with one person who did something. I set up my tent on Rothschild out of a personal feeling of to be or not to be. A person very close to my heart, Alex, put an end to his life. He was a poet. He wrote that even if you have a heart of gold, you will not manage to change the world. Two months before all this started up, he couldn’t be here any longer, and he chose not to be.

How can a person like that, a dreamer and an idealist, feel that he no longer has a place in this world? If he has no place in this world then I suppose I have no place here either. And my heart hurt. My heart was broken. What kind of a world is it that has no room for dreamers, idealists, poets? What kind of world cuts them out? A world of poverty. Because all of us are dreamers and we all have the right to dream. To be poor isn’t only not managing to make it to the end of the financial month or to be homeless. To be poor is to be troubled by these things, fundamentally, to such an extent that you are not able to dream, to think, to learn, to hug your children.

So I started this thing. But just because I started it doesn’t mean it’s mine only. It’s not just my story, it’s the story of many people who stood up and started walking, stood up and began to do something. We all decided to be. We decided to be here. Here we are.”

Read it all.

HT Ma’ayan

Entebbe- 35 years ago this week – Alan Johnson

Thirty-five years ago this week, German leftists Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann hijacked Air France Flight 139 along with their comrades Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arjam. They demanded the release of Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof terrorists, flew the plane to Entebbe in Uganda, separated the Jews from the non-Jews, and prepared to execute them.

How did a young, idealistic, anti-Nazi, a member of the far-left Revolutionary Cells (RZ) come to his end acting like a Nazi, selecting Jews for death?

Read Alan Johnson on where anti-Zionism on the left comes from.

Left behind – David Greenberg

In Slate, Rutgers professor of History David Greenberg reflects on Yale’s closure of YIISA, its establishment of YPSA, and how his political left ceded concern about antisemitism to the conservatives.

He ends with a not very optimistic assessment of general historical awareness of antisemitism which had served to chill anti-Jewish sentiment in recent decades, and a call for attention to how a commitment to concern about antisemitism can be renewed among progressives.

(Caution, the 247 comments to the piece get off to a bad start – not sure if they improve.)

Hat tip: @EquusontheBuses

Addendum: in the comments below Ignoblus links to an response by Phoebe who is “neck deep in 1840s France”, a piece about the historically populist appeal of  economic antisemitism in the ‘first world’ – a world which today is experiencing fresh schism between marginalised and privileged.

Stormfront and Stop the War Coalition members promote same campus event

A Greens Engage correspondent alerted us to this.

Under Avraham Burg’s “anti-Semitic rug”

Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg has written an article of a Eurocentric bent to the effect that antisemitism shouldn’t any longer be thought of as racism against Jews but as a bad-faith accusation made by Israel’s advocates against honest critics of Israel. He argues that for Jews to give any particular attention to antisemitism is both right wing and falls short of the kind of Jewishness to which he aspires.

Saul responds:

“In Israel, the notion of antisemitism has been utilised by the right – it is reactionary use of antisemitism; see the film “Defamation”.

The trouble is that many progressives in Israel – Burg included (recall he wrote on Israel needing to overcome the Holocaust) – are simply arguing the opposite: “If the right say x, we say not x.”

They lack any critical understanding both of the (contemporary) concept of antisemitism and its use outside Israel.

What would be interesting would be to follow the journey this article makes; that is, see who outside Israel quotes it and uses it.

What frustrates me more than anything, though, is the claim that those of us who raise the issue of antisemitism are nothing more than apologists for Israel or non-critics of the Israeli right. Like large parts of the global left, much of the Israeli left has got that wrong. They seem to think that criticism of Israel and the claim to antisemitism are two sides of the same coin, rather than two phenomena linked together through the situation in Israel.

Burg writes

‘There is an internal Jewish essence that is not dependent on external circumstances. It is buried deep below layers of historical trauma. But its heart still beats; in the form of humanism, responsibility for the peace of the world, universalism without boundaries. Israel’s establishment ought to enable the realization of this potential. For example, the state of those who were ostracized can do everything in its power to assist the present-day ostracized who have taken their place. It can be a partner in the creation of a world coalition against hatred. Precisely because of its memories.‘

Arendt traces the history of this sentiment and, rather astutely, calls it racist.

For myself, I think it is deeply Christian. A reworking of redemption through suffering. And, the fact that Jews/Israel have not been redeemed is once again fuelling the idea of a great Jewish refusal. So far, they have had two chances at redemption: Jesus and the Holocaust. They have refused to accept it twice. Jews are truly irredeemable, hence their call to universalism over all particularism other than the particularism of suffering, which they are selfishly clinging onto whilst everyone else has moved on. Once again, the Jews are an anachronism (as was said of post-Christ Judaism).

Yuck!”

How antisemitism entered the zeitgeist

Writes David Baddiel. On the Daily Telegraph blog. It’s a bad state of affairs when the Daily Telegraph becomes a purveyor of fine thinking about a form of hatred the left forgot.

“The truth is complex. One way into it is to ask: how is anti-Semitism different from other types of racial hatred? The answer, I think, can be found in the language. To return to the high priest of drunken Jew-hatred, Mel G (I know this makes him sound like a Spice Girl: it’s intentional). Mel said, in his rant of 2008: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” This is key: Jews are the only race whose negative image as projected by racists is high-status. It’s the same with Julian Assange’s (alleged) notion that a cabal of powerful Jewish journalists are behind the smearing of WikiLeaks; it’s even somewhere in Charlie Sheen’s renaming of the producer of his former sitcom Chuck Lorre as “Chaim Levine”, carrying with it as it does two suggestions: one, that Jews are the controlling forces behind the US media, and two, that they have disguised this fact about themselves and need to be outed.

Although they can also be called dirty, or cheating, or all the other unlovely adjectives that racists also apply to black people or Asians, it is only Jews who get this extra, subtle spin, that they are secretly in charge, secretly pulling the strings (of course it is only Jews who are not immediately recognisable as different, either – which is how we manage, I presume, to crawl under the wire and get weaving with all this secret stuff).”

And then there’s The Y Word.

Read it all.

UCU Elections 2011, by noon on Friday 4th March

Here is the UCU Independent Broad Left slate, where you can find information about candidates who will work for a more inclusive University and College Union.

Make sure your ballot papers are received by noon on Friday 4th March – and note that the pre-paid envelope is 2nd class postage.

The poverty of “anti-imperialism” and today’s left

Sean Matgamna’s Trotskyist critique of the empty “anti-imperialism” which is pushed as orthodoxy by many on today’s left.