If 2024 should be dubbed the Year of Global Antisemitism, can we expect 2025 to be any better? Most Jews, in Britain and elsewhere, will probably join me in fearing that it won’t. In which case, a new study of the unwelcome new surge in antisemitism is well-timed.
Its author, Shalom Lappin, is not an expert in the field but in artificial intelligence: he is professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London and previously held a similar position at King’s College London. So as a Jewish academic, he has been at the epicentre of some of the worst manifestations of antisemitism in the Western world, and is therefore well-qualified to opine on the subject. Any soldier in the trenches should be listened to on the subject of warfare.
This is, however, an academic study for an academic publishing house and lacks any hint of the author’s own personal experiences. But his criticism of the antisemitism of the academic left is trenchant and well-informed, despite (or perhaps because of) his own progressive political beliefs. Lappin completed his first manuscript before the attacks of October 7 and had to rewrite some sections to deal with them. But, as he points out in his preface, the aftermath of the Hamas outrage serves more to reinforce the arguments he had already set out, in particular the hypocrisy of the extreme left in excusing Hamas of any blame while condemning Israel and Jews worldwide for their reaction.
This brief book of fewer than 200 pages (excluding notes) contains no original insights but does provide a succinct summary of the main causes of antisemitism, past and present. Lappin cannot conceal his nostalgia for the postwar era of peace and prosperity in the West that he sees as breaking down with the 1973 oil crisis. This was followed by the rise of globalisation in the 1980s and the growth of both left and right-wing extremism as a reaction to its less attractive elements: greater income disparity and the paring down of the social programmes of the welfare state, though the latter proposition is debatable.
Both the left and the right have revived antisemitic tropes, Lappin instancing QAnon and other Trump-backing alt-right movements, although he fails to give Trump credit for his support for Israel and the Abraham Accords and clearly did not expect him to be re-elected, an event that came too late to be included in his book.
His analysis of the left’s renewed embrace of antisemitism, usually disguised as anti-Israel, is more nuanced and interesting. He reminds us of the post-war left’s opposition to Jewish emigration from Europe to Israel, exemplified by the Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, and how the radical left has since promoted Islamism as a substitute for the working-class as an agent of revolutionary change, a switch that baffles him as much as it does most right-thinking people.
Lappin’s examination of the postmodern left’s attack on Jews as “bearers of white privilege” who can therefore never be victims of discrimination is also excellent, tracing it back to the 19th-century left-wing criticism of Jews as agents of capitalism, among other things.
On Israel-Palestine, he dismisses the notion of a one-nation solution as hopelessly impractical given the reality on the ground. He also wonders why similar disputes in Cyprus, between Greeks and Turks; and India, between Hindus and Muslims, do not lead to criticism of people linked to those apparently intractable crises in the same way that Jews outside Israel are regularly demonised because of the existence and actions of Israel. It’s a good question, but no one on the left seems interested in discussing or answering it.
Lappin concludes with the pious hope that a progressive, egalitarian politics will re-emerge and remove the conditions in which the new antisemitism flourishes. While we wait for that happy day, the direct approach of organisations such as the UK’s Campaign Against Antisemitism bent on tackling this scourge head-on provides an attractive alternative.
The New Antisemitism: The Resurgence of an Ancient Hatred in the Modern World By Shalom Lappin Polity Press, £25
