ABSTRACT
Two analysts of left antisemitism, both with histories on the radical left, discuss the other, better tradition of left-wing opposition to left antisemitism. They explore the roots of left antisemitism in the equivocations of Enlightenment universalism, when antisemitic tropes were rearticulated within a universalist frame of reference, setting up a supposed ‘Jewish Question’ which has persisted in various forms to this day for a significant section of the left. Competing views about the relationship of Marx’s 1843 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ to left antisemitism are set out. A left-wing tradition of opposition to antisemitism on the left is excavated and critically assessed, taking in Friedrich Engels, Eleanor Marx, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, as well as two exemplary contemporary writers, Moishe Postone and Norman Geras, who explore contemporary left antisemitism as a ‘fetishised form of oppositional consciousness’, and as something shaped by the post-9/11 ‘reductions of the left’, respectively. The radical left’s relation to the Holocaust is considered in two aspects: its practical failings before, during and after the Shoah and its theoretical failings since. It is argued that a distinguishing feature of the other, better left-wing tradition is a willingness to allow the Holocaust to disrupt left dogmas about Jewish assimilation, Jewish peoplehood, and the Jewish State.
