ABSTRACT
Taking the Labour Party's recent ‘Antisemitism Crisis’ as its point of departure, this chapter questions the methodological and substantive separation between antisemitism and society, which has gained predominance following the Shoah. I argue that this separation implies that while antisemitism remains a problem, whatever connections it may have had with the social realm and the social relations that comprise it have been lost. It is as a consequence of this development that understandings of antisemitism take on an idealist or mystificatory hue. In offering this critique, I seek to demystify antisemitism by relocating it within the confines and contradictions of modern and contemporary society by reconnecting it with the traditions of Critical Theory. In this context, I draw on the recent work of Robert Fine and Philip Spencer and their observations that at the heart of these contradictions lay what they refer to as the ‘equivocations of Enlightenment’. It is these unresolved equivocations, that of the dialectic of Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question, which go some way to accounting for the persistence of a socially generated antisemitism.
