The American Left’s Problem With Antisemitism

Yet, in the current moment, there are parts of the American and Anglophone left that are not rising to this challenge. While there has been strong and uncompromising opposition across most of the broad swath of the U.S. left to anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate and to restrictions on pro-Palestinian speech and protests, as there should be, this stance has not been accompanied by an equally universal, strong, and uncompromising opposition to antisemitism and attacks on pro-Israeli speech and protests. For some, illiberalism is viewed as a problem only when coming from the right. There is a failure to understand that freedom of expression for those with whom we strongly disagree is the price of that same freedom for our own views. Here I present in detail two illustrative and particularly stark examples.

First, consider the controversy stirred by Verso Books’ publication of the essay “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” by politics professor Jodi Dean of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, or HWS. In the name of “radical universal emancipation,” Dean enthusiastically embraced the antisemitic, theocratic, and neofascist Hamas, describing images from October 7 as “exhilarating” and “energiz[ing]” and declaring that these actions “create[d] a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair.” Wielding the cliché that “oppressed people fight back against their oppressors by every means necessary,” Dean indicated her support not only for the “anti-imperialist” violence of Hamas on October 7, with its brutal murders, sexual violence, and kidnappings, but also for the hijacking of civilian airplanes and attacks on civilians that had been carried out by other Palestinian organizations in the past. She pronounced Hamas, whose founding charter included lengthy antisemitic attacks on Jews, to be the leader of the “struggle for Palestinian liberation” and declared that it is the obligation of anti-imperialists in the United States and elsewhere to provide it with unconditional support. (In 2017, Hamas issued a new charter with softer and more oblique language, but its leaders insisted that it was a supplement to, not a substitute for, the original charter.)

Ringing, unqualified endorsements of Hamas and its criminal acts of October 7, especially when proffered by an academic political theorist like Dean, can only be read as a knowing acceptance of the well-known, central features of Hamas’s political ideology—its theocratic authoritarianism, its antisemitism, its misogyny, and its homophobia. There are reasonable debates over where to draw the line that demarcates justified criticism of Israel from discourse that has crossed over into antisemitism. But Dean’s essay is not a close call; you can’t celebrate Hamas and October 7 as instruments of radical universal emancipation, ignore the many manifest ways in which the group is deeply and violently oppressive, and then pretend that you have not made yourself wholly complicit in these forms of oppression, including antisemitism.