In 2017, the British Marxist scholars Robert Fine and Philip Spencer warned of “the return of the Jewish question.” A decade later, that warning looks remarkably prescient. Across the ideological spectrum, we are witnessing the resurgence of a political logic that casts Jewish collective existence as an obstacle to human emancipation.
On the far right, conspiratorial portrayals of Israel as a malign force in global politics, along with invocations of a shadowy, omnipotent “Jewish lobby,” recycle older suspicions in updated geopolitical language (a phenomenon discussed by David Azerrad in these pages). Meanwhile, left-wing opponents of Israel at times approach what Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer described as a vision of redemption through annihilation. Just weeks after the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, Manolo De Los Santos of The People’s Forum, a left-wing “movement incubator” in New York City, declared to a rapt audience: “When the State of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow that we can give to global capital and to imperialism in our lifetime.” The logic is eerily familiar: the elimination of Jewish collective existence is imagined as a purifying act in world history.
As at previous historical junctures, anti-Judaism functions today as a kind of political superglue, binding otherwise fragmented camps within the left and the right. More telling still, elements of the far left and the far right increasingly echo one another. As left-wing media personality Cenk Uygur recently told his right-wing nationalist “brother” Tucker Carlson: “I also want to break down the barriers of Republicans and Democrats, right-wing versus left-wing … I think it has been used to divide us.” Anti-Jewish tropes thus construct a bridge across ideological extremes.