Antisemitism reading group Part 3

Core Resources

Nadine Talks: How do we tackle the various forms of antisemitism in contemporary society? - Journalist Nadine Batchelor-Hunt interviews trainee-rabbi Lev Taylor and activist Chardine Taylor Stone. They cover a lot of ground. Highly recommended! (55mins audio)

James Baldwin: Negroes Are Antisemitic Because They’re Anti-White - Famous essay exploring racism and relations between black and Jewish people in America. (20mins read)

Treyf Podcast: Jews for Black Lives with Shoshana Brown - While the Institutional Jewish Community condemned the Movement for Black Lives, JFREJ held weekly 'Jews for Black Lives' actions across New York City. Shoshana Brown, an organizer with JFREJ's Jews of Color Caucus, talks about these actions as well as the fraught media discourse surrounding the Movement for Black Lives platform. (37mins audio)

Additional Resources

Judith Butler: BDS and Antisemitism - Judith Butler breaks down the arguments that BDS is antisemitic. (21mins video)

Alexander Abbasi: Semites End The World - In this chapter from Jewish Voice for Peace’s book On Antisemitism, Abbasi builds on Frantz Fanon and others’ decolonial concepts to propose an alliance between the world’s oppressed peoples (who he collectively terms “Semites”). (25min read)

Joni Alizah Cohen: The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project - Explains far-right transmisogyny using the Marxist framework developed by Moishe Postone to explain Nazi antisemitism. Put simply, Jews come to personify the abstract side of the value form (e.g. finance) as opposed to the concrete side (e.g. modern industry), so Nazis could oppose one while upholding the other: a flawed anti-capitalism. Similarly, transwomen personify the abstract side of the sex/gender feminine form: they are women in gender (an abstract social construct) but not in sex (the concrete biological underpinning of abstract gender). (30min read).