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When I’ve written/spoken about left antisemitism, I’ve taken care not to collapse it into a general category of “racism”. It doesn’t function in the same way, and I, as a white Jew in Britain, simply don’t (currently) face the systemic oppression that people of colour face.
The primary danger of left antisemitism is not that a bunch of ex-Healyites are about to launch a pogrom, it’s that the conspiracy-theorist ideology represented by left antisemitism will poison the left, and render it utterly ineffectual as a movement for emancipatory change.
Having said this, given the current balance of forces in the world, it’s actually not at all inconceivable that a species of “left”, or at least would-be “counter-hegemonic”, antisemitism (to use Postone’s term) could pose a physical threat to Jews.
Are there people out there, on “the left”, in broad terms, who think that by attacking a synagogue or Jewish community centre they are striking a blow against the power of millionaire Zionists and for the Palestinians? Yes, there probably are.
It’s always important to keep things in proportion and soberly assess the balance of forces at a given moment, but the fact that a threat is primarily “ideological” rather than physical does not mean we can be complacent about it...
...including about the fact that an ideological threat can become a physical threat very easily.
