This is a conversation with Daniel Randall. He’s a London-based railway worker and workplace representative for the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers and a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

We spoke about antisemitism on the Left as Daniel has an upcoming book on this very topic.

Topics Discussed:

• What is left antisemitism?
• The ‘socialism of fools’
• The difference between antisemitism and other forms of hatred
• The impact of Moishe Postone in our understanding of this topic
• Antisemitism as conspiracy theory in and of itself
• How it impacts discourse on Israel-Palestine
• The specific legacy of Stalinism on anti-Zionism
• Anti-Zionism without Anti-Semitism
• ‘Anti-Zionist Zionism’
• Isaac Deutscher’s lifeboat metaphor for Israel in the 1940s
• Understanding how one can be both a refugee and a settler
• What’s wrong with saying ‘the Zionist entity’
• Edward Said’s view on this
• The example of Hindutva
• The example of Lebanon
• The pseudo-emancipatory character of antisemitism
• Intersection between anti-semitism and islamophobia (‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory)
• How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism (reference to the essay by Erik Ward)
• What happened in the UK Labor Party
• Navigating sensitive discourses surrounding Israel-Palestine
• On anti-nationalism

Recommended Resource

Recommended Books

Daniel’s

• That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic: Antiracist Analysis of Left Antisemitism Paperback by Steve Cohen
• Confronting Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century edited by Shane Burley
• Confronting antisemitism on the Left: arguments for socialists by Daniel Randall (forthcoming)

Mine:

• The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar
• The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg
• The Holocaust, rebirth, and the Nakba : memory and contemporary Israeli-Arab relations by Yair Auron
• Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine by Lital Levy

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Music by Tarabeat.