My PhD supervisor @adam_tooze belongs among varied intellectuals (Therborn, David Scott, Chakrabarty, Hall etc) seeking social theory after the collapse of dialectical History. I've long thought this is underplayed in his books, which are presented as narrative histories... /1 When I first read the 'Crashed' manuscript, for example, I said "I don't get what relationship you're tracing between economy and politics." Once he explained the Latourian logic, the refusal of those two conceptual bundles, the book made sense to me; but it didn't before.

A thought experiment: if after Nat Turner's slave uprising - which killed whites indiscriminately - black people elsewhere carried images of Nat Turner and were then rounded up by states funding the slave trade, should leftists take to pulpits to condemn those protestors?🧵

https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1758132541624840630

I have done things with Novara - and hope to again - but I think this is deeply misguided. A few words on why and then back to PhD writing (not extended arguments, sorry!) We should start with the question: why were these three women targeted?

On Sunday there will be a "March Against Antisemitism" in London. A short thread: Sunday's march comes a day after a march for Palestinian freedom. I'll be speaking there, on Saturday. In a different world, I'd love to march on Sunday too - I am a proud Jew who hates racism - but its organisers have framed it as a hostile response to support for Palestine.

There has been a hit piece on me in the Jewish News, which is fine; they're continuing a venerable tradition of worrying about leftwing Jews! But I wanted to respond to two claims. First, they focus on my tweet from the morning of October 7, immediately after seeing Gaza's prison walls breached by the prisoners. I wrote: "Shabbat Shalom and may ever coloniser fall everywhere." What did that mean?

My Jewish family fled Ukrainians. Today's Ukrainians shouldn't be punished for those histories. Nor should today's Russians. This nationalist, ahistorical idiocy from a minister is telling... 1/5 thejc.com/news/news/my-j… This reflects a longstanding pattern honed in the Middle East and imported to France in the 1990s, then Britain and the USA too - where Jews are cast as a vulnerable minority protected by the West, which put us in gas chambers, to cast its war on the savages as enlightened. 2/5

Leftists should always buy their beigels in Brick Lane from Beigel Shop (the yellow one) not Beigel Bake (the white one) and I can explain why. The Shop has been there for over a century and is now manifestly less popular. The Bake opened in 1974 (after the height of Yiddishland, the Brick Lane Shtetl) and pulls in the crowds. Leftism means love - though it can be critical - for pasts others abandon.

Keir Starmer's reference to "anti-Zionist antisemitism" as denying me a "self-determination" achieved by ethnically cleansing others, in a speech to a settler Ambassador who believes in racial purity, was not just wrong. It was deeply, deeply racist. Colonial thinking lives. This doesn't seem to have worked.

When the state and media spent five years panicking about antisemitism while a few denied it, celebs like @Baddiel, and sadly even @BoardofDeputies told us "no other minority" would be treated like that. Today's report confirms how accidentally right they were. 1/4 This imbalance, where the state and rightwing press feed and dismiss colonial racisms while proclaiming their desperate concern for Jews, fuels antisemitic explanations ("Jewish-controlled media"). The truth is that power needs and uses different bigotries in different ways. 2/4

You can have one but you can't have both Several people ask "why not?"

https://twitter.com/BarnabyRaine/status/1274309607289167872

Conservative MPs have published anti-Semitic imagery drawn from Nazi propaganda: "cultural Marxist... bourgeois liberals" and a "clique of powerful" overlords are stabbing Britain in the back. The Daily Telegraph printed it. Why does nobody care? My first ever thread! Anti-Semitism is usually imagined today as radical for its nominal anti-elitism (it "punches up") so that declared anti-anti-Semitism allows moderates to understand as progressive their fears about radicals from Corbyn to BLM. The truth about anti-Semitism is slightly different: