Introduction

This chapter is the editor's introduction to the multi-authored book, The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign into the Mainstream. Written by scholars who had been active in the movement against the boycott and the antisemitism associated with it, this book intertwines a diversity of disciplinary approaches with the hard lessons that these writers were taught by confronting the kind of antisemitism that is adapted to anti-racist spaces. They experienced being constructed as alien in spaces where they had felt at home. This is what antisemitism does to Jews and their allies. It begins with some discussion of two prefaces, by Robert Fine and Norman Geras, who were both with us in the fight against the boycott, but who have since died. Izabella Tabarovsky and Philip Spencer offer pre-histories, showing how the left was ready to tolerate antisemitism in 2001. David Hirsh and Hilary Miller, and David Seymour, offer ways of understanding antizionism and its relationship with antisemitism, while Karin Stögner focuses on the subordination of feminism, and John Strawson on the harms done to Palestine, by antizionism. Sarah Annes Brown and Mira Vogel focus on aspects of teaching about antisemitism. Matthew Bolton's chapter is an account of the academic who can’t bring himself to discuss any topic but Palestine, and who understands the other academic who finds this eccentric, to be a German exponent of the indulgence towards his country's spoilt child, Israel. Finally, there is Anthony Julius’ analysis of liberal Zionism, which is contextualised with a discussion of the antizionism that, uninvited, conditions such an examination.