Sue Lukes reviews Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, by Rachel Shabi, published by Oneworld Publications.
As I started to write this, the regular march for Palestine was barred from going past the BBC allegedly because it was on a Saturday and there are synagogues nearby. Joseph Finlay disentangles a range of themes from that in his excellent Torat Albion post, calling out both the spurious claims of risks to Jews and the thoughtless adaptation to hegemonic “cultural Christianity” involved in insisting on Saturday marches. And it illustrates all too well why Rachel Shabi’s Off-White should be widely read and discussed on the British left.
We have seen Rachel defending Jeremy Corbyn when few other journalists did, as one of the few left progressive journalists commenting in print and broadcast media, and as a clear and principled voice on Israel/ Palestine. Off-White is meticulously researched, thoughtful and well written, ranges across history, and situates antisemitism within a thorough understanding of “race”, the “bullshit science” associated with it and racism. It seeks to show us how we got into this mess, in which people who should know better speak and write as though racism is a zero-sum (On this, she quotes Alana Lentin and points out that, unfortunately, there is plenty to go round), in which antisemitism has become a tripwire over which the left stumbles, and so a wedge issue to divide the progressive left.
This is not a new problem: antisemitism gave us the first racist UK immigration law, the Aliens Act 1905, and we should not shy away from or be surprised by the fact that the then editor of the Clarion, a socialist newspaper, echoed politicians of the far right in describing the east end of London as a “foreign country” because of the Jewish settlement there. Jews were the aliens the Act sought to exclude. And its not an old problem either. As I finished writing this, an old acquaintance posted on Facebook about how “Momentum colluded with the Zionist Labour puppet-masters”.
In between, Rachel did the excellent podcast discussing the book with Bryn Griffiths, in which she pointed out how we in the UK need to learn more about racism, and, as she says, the book gives us the origin story of antisemitism and how it relates to other forms of racism. There, she explains the importance of England in this history, how purity rules and expulsions directed against “Muslims, Jews, heretics and witches” introduced racism and sexism to the New World, how Jews are characterised as Asiatic, oriental, scheming, rootless, parasitic, disloyal and greedy, but also white-passing and so hiding, and somehow responsible for both capitalism and socialism.
And now, of course, performative anti-antisemitism creates even more absurdities. As Shabi says in the podcast, it seems you can be as antisemitic as you like as long as you champion Israel. In the book she cites the “apex” as Rudy Giuliani saying about George Soros (the billionaire philanthropist known for funding human rights defenders, “a walking antisemitism bingo card”): “He’s not really Jewish, I am more Jewish than he is.” All this, while holocaust revisionism is regularly aired, and people dispute whether Trump supporters are giving Nazi salutes.
There are real insights scattered generously throughout the book. She has lucid explanations of how Jews are racialised “to be scapegoats”, while Blacks are racialised to be slaves or servants, and so Jews may be conditionally white, but “everything was just fine right up until the moment it suddenly was not”, “things can turn any time”, Jews have no “secure or stable attachment to privilege”. And the other face of that: Dubois looking at the Warsaw ghetto, saying race is “not solely a matter of colour… hard thing for me to learn.”
She is particularly good on the regular invocations of “Judaeo-Christian heritage”. Her Iraqi heritage fuels her appreciation of a much more authentic and longstanding Judeo-Islamic tradition, not just that of Al-Andalus. She enjoys the bewilderment of journalists who go to Israel to find most people there do not look like Barbra Streisand, but focuses on the real point: Christians have been trying to kill us for centuries, so stop pretending Judaeo-Christianity is a thing: if you mean “not Muslim” just say it.
Alongside this, she also provides an expert guide to Christian Zionism, that poisonous mix of Islamophobia, end-times craziness, vicious settler support and huge political influence that vastly outnumbers and outpowers Jewish Zionism, while entirely instrumentalising Jews and frequently characterising them as arrogant, stupid or destined for hell.
There is so much insight and information in the book, I am cursing the absence of an index. And I have some quibbles. She slides too easily over questions of class, and I would have appreciated maybe a little more on the role of Jews in building trade unions and other class movements in the UK and elsewhere – surely one of the reasons Henry Ford paid to print copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? She is eloquent about Jews in the US civil rights movement and quotes one interviewee’s perception that by positioning ourselves solely as allies we erased the ways white supremacy targets us as Jews. But some of the feelings of “not belonging”, she describes British and US Jews as having are also those described by most migrants and their children, and surely must be products of xenophobia as well as antisemitism?
But nowhere does she pretend it is easy or simple. And she shines in the here and now. “A situation that sees one relatively secure minority express fears of having to pack their bags while at exactly the same moment a structurally vulnerable minority really is forced to pack up and leave feels almost impossible to address within one progressive camp” (the former referring to media reports of some Jewish feelings during the Corbyn years, the latter to the over 160 people deported or detained as part of the ‘Windrush scandal’). But address it she does, acknowledging that “we need time and space and generosity to talk about different types of racism.”
She expertly fillets some flashpoints: the problems over the Women’s March in the US, the contrast between memorials to slavery and the Holocaust, the difficulties of fighting antisemitism when that is seen as “congruent with supporting an illiberal and racist state” but also the descriptions of Israel as evil or diseased, rather than simply holding it to account as a country that describes itself as a democracy. How to respond to the way that a “country that invented… repulsive anti-Jewish laws now projected its past onto Palestinian campaigners.. .trying to get Israel to conform to international law.”
So Off-White is a tremendous contribution to our anti-racist struggles and our understanding: of our histories, of why it all feels so complex and messy and maybe some ways out of it all. As Rachel Shabi says: “It’s not as if our current approach is creating informed and resilient coalitions.” So, “we need to show up as white and non-white and hold that contradiction and create cognitive, political and emotional space for it.”
Sue Lukes was an Islington Labour Councillor from 2018 to 2022 and is a writer and consultant on migration issues.
