ABSTRACT
In 2016, the writer Norman Finkelstein injected a crude claim into the debate about antisemitism in the UK Labour Party: ‘the brouhaha is a calculated hoax – dare it be said, plot?’ This chapter argues that this kind of denialism, conspiracism and victim-blaming is central to contemporary left antisemitism. Finkelstein’s reduction of the notion of a new antisemitism to a fraud, a ‘variant’ of Jews playing the ‘Holocaust card’, is critiqued at three levels: his account of the agencies that supposedly promote the fraud, of the motivations of the fraudsters, and of the components that make up the fraud. Reviewing an earlier excoriating criticism of Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry by the Italian Marxist Enzo Traverso, Johnson argues that Finkelstein’s intervention has been crudely reductionist, substituting conspiracism for a careful reconstruction of the dynamics of either collective memory or the protean hatred that is antisemitism.
