Category: Anti-Semitism/Jews

Some Good News–Support for Palestinians is Growing

It may be hard to believe, but against the background of daily killings of Palestinians and statements of blanket support for Israel by Imperial Leader Biden, there is some good news. Many Israelis are courageously denouncing Israeli apartheid and support for Palestinians has been growing fast around the world and in some unusual places.

Israel’s Racism and the Misuse of Antisemitism

Israel’s official discourse vehemently denies its “deeply ingrained institutionalized” anti-Arab racism and the settler-colonial nature of its state, although it is as blatant as could be and was even acknowledged by Zionism’s prominent historical figures.

No Joint Struggle With Settler Colonialism

The Israeli working class is a settler-colonial, active collaborator with Israeli capitalism in the continued ethnic cleansing and occupation project of Israeli apartheid.

Isn’t it Time for the Truth about Feivel Polkes and His Haganah Chiefs?

It’s time that the Zionists and the Israeli state (whose military developed from the Haganah) explain in full this incident, something that to all appearances looks like collaboration with German Nazis.

QAnon and On and On

Let me venture a prediction about next week that also applies to the months and years to follow: At no point will Donald J. Trump order the arrest of an elitist network of cannibalistic pedophile Satanists. Not one!

When NYC Jewish Organizations Enthusiastically Supported Boycotts

The Jewish establishment has condemned the NYC Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for asking candidates if they would forgo plans to take trips to Israel as an act of solidarity with Palestinians. Of course it’s a croc. It’s also hypocrisy.

A Zionist State at Any Cost

The foundation of Israel is tied up with David Ben-Gurion, its first prime minister. Through examining his life, we see how Israel’s creation was from its beginnings doomed to create an apartheid-like state maintained by an oppressor nation.

Enough!

Somewhere,
somewhere perhaps
in the desert of Iraq,
or perhaps in Palestine
or the Afghan hills,
amidst the cacophony of shells,
the reek of boiled-off flesh,
somewhere,
a voice awakens,
Read more ›

Open Letter to Costas Lapavitsas and Grace Blakeley

Stories have a life of their own. Merriam-Webster describes a meme as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture”. It doesn’t matter who the carrier of the meme is or the way that they pass it on: all that matters is that the story is reproduced and given new life with each telling.

Defend Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib!

The vicious, dirty – and bipartisan – smear campaign against the first two Muslim women in the U.S. Congress, Ilhan Omar (MN) and Rashida Tlaib (MI), is just beginning. No one should imagine that Rep. Omar’s dignified apology for her tweets about . . .

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letter

Bizarre Assertions

I read New Politics because it provides an in depth socialist perspective on politics available nowhere else, but some of your contributors make bizarre assertions.

Trump Administration Declares Me an Anti-Semite

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I was born a Jew, had a bris and Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school afternoons and Sundays from the age of 7 to 13. I went to schul with my grandfather on holidays and in 1967 I volunteered to defend Israel in the Six-Day War. But I never got to go to Israel then and since the early 1970s, I have refused to visit because of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

An Israeli twist on homophobia and racism

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At the mass rally held by the LGBT movement at Rabin Square on July 22, 2018, protesters not only demanded to be accepted as different, but also called for full equality. They cried out against the injustice caused by a government that excludes homosexual men from having children through a surrogate mother.

The Jewish Role in the Industrial Workers of the World

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The most radical and militant union in American history was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), colloquially known as the Wobblies. Its active years were from 1905 to 1919, or at best until mid-1920 when it led its last major struggles—a maritime workers strike in California and a miners strike in Colorado. Fierce government repression during and after World War I, along with vigilante violence and internal divisions, dealt the IWW blows from which it never recovered. The mass industrial union movement during the New Deal passed it by. Yet, the IWW continues to exist on a small scale to this day.

Labour, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

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Last April a row engulfed Ken Livingstone, former Labour mayor of London, and Naz Shah, Labour MP for Bradford West, following remarks they made about Israel and Zionism. They were suspended from the Labour Party, with Naz Shah having the parliamentary whip withdrawn. Shah has been reinstated, and though Livingstone has demanded that he too be reinstated, a decision has yet to be made by Labour’s National Constitutional Committee.

New Jersey anti-BDS bill is an affront to the first amendment and basic human rights

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On May 9, 2016, the New Jersey State Senate approved by a vote of 39-0 S1923, a bill prohibiting the investment of state pension and annuity funds in companies that boycott Israel or Israeli businesses. One of the bill's sponsors was liberal stalwart and Democratic Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg. Among the co-sponsors were Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney and Republican Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. There is a similar bill in the Assembly, A925, still in committee. [Update: The bill was released by the Assembly committee on May 19, 2016.] Both bills are an affront to basic principles of human rights that many NJ liberals seem to support everywhere else in the world except when it comes to Israel-Palestine.  And both bills are an affront as well to the First Amendment.

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The Frankfurt School and the Jews

ImageJacobs’ The Frankfurt School is an outstanding piece of scholarship.

review

A Broken Romance? 
Israel and American Jews

Norman Finkelstein has made his career taking the nasty assignments. It’s been dirty work, but presumably someone had to do it: plowing through the works of Joan Peters, Daniel Goldhagen, Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and a small army of official and unofficial Israeli state propagandists.

Supporting the Struggle Against Apartheid Then and Now

The discussion of a socialist strategy towards Palestine never recedes from global pertinence and urgency. The basic terms of the Palestinian tragedy established in 1948 remain a festering wound—unaddressed, malignant and oozing in blood and rot. With it the Israeli garrison state continues to descend, and rightfully so, into isolation and disrepute in the court of civilized opinion.

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Bolshevism in Yiddish

For most Jews in the United States, the legacy of the Soviet Union is linked to anti-Semitism. This is understandable, given not only the targeting of Jewish writers, doctors, and others by Stalin’s terror but also the quotas and petty persecution of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Some people remember that the Russian Revolution freed Jews from the pogroms and segregation of czarism. But few have any conception of the extraordinary flourishing of Yiddish-language culture under the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. 

Deutscher and the Jews

On the Non-Jewish Jew—An Analysis and Personal Reflection

Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the “The Non-Jewish Jew”1 has been adopted by many secular leftist Jewish intellectuals as a badge of identity. Defined by a universal and humanist outlook that is rooted in Jewish thought, his is a construct that draws inspiration from Jewish thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx,2 Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky whom he sees as revolutionaries of modern thought who went beyond the boundaries of their Jewish background.

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