choi game slot doi thuong

I don’t like Holocaust Memorial Day

I am conflicted and ambivalent about HMD

I don’t want to hear speeches by Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn.? I don’t want to hear about how Vladimir Putin is using the event as an opportunity to fight with the President of Poland.

I don’t want to see Prince Charles in a Kippa.

I don’t want to see footballers putting out videos on facebook.

But why not?

Leaders should remember.

Footballers can educate. In fact the footballers video was very good.

Prince Charles should wear a kippa.

I’m ambivalent.

When a? Berlin rabbi was asked about what sort of memorial the German state should build, he replied: “That is a matter for Germany. We know how to remember our dead.”

I am afraid on HMD, because I know that every year there are people who will mobilize the memory of the Holocaust against living Jews.

I am afraid on HMD that people who feel competitive with Jews about the Holocaust will themselves initiate competition with Jews about the Holocaust, by accusing Jews of being competitive about the Holocaust.

Sometimes the Holocaust is taught only as a universal lesson for mankind as a whole.

But Auschwitz was not a learning experience.

And still, it is true that the Holocaust taught us one reason why we should oppose racism; it showed us one possible manifestation or endpoint of antisemitism. And antisemitism is a racism, it is like other racisms. In some ways.

But I’m afraid that sometimes the specificities of the Holocaust are completely lost, as this complex set of events is hollowed out and simplified to find a single lesson for us all.

The Holocaust was also an event in Jewish history. It wasn’t about mankind, it was about Jews.

Oh, do I sound competitive, already? Am I doing what I just accused others of doing?

I don’t like HMD.

The attempted, significantly successful, annihilation of the world’s Jews was about Jews.

Of course others too were targeted too.

Roma, LGBTQ people, and other ‘enemies of the people’ were herded into the gas and into the pits too.

But it was the antisemitic notion of ‘The Jews’ which was key to Nazism.

The eradication of ‘The Jews’ was of pre-eminent importance to the Nazi project. It was the Nazis who put the Jews first. It was the Nazis who were obsessed by Jews.

So universal lessons about racism? Yes.

Jewish lessons about Jewish self-defence and self-preservation? Yes too.

But also non-Jewish lessons about the centrality of the specific phenomenon of antisemitism.? Yes.

Antisemitism isn’t only a danger to Jews. Antisemitism is the form of appearance of anti-democratic politics.

Antisemitism is a way of giving emotional content to the abstract idea of ‘enemies of the people’.

The cosmopolitans, the metropolitans, the elites, the establishment, the media, liberals, finance capital, the people of nowhere (as opposed to the people of somewhere), the people who engineer the weakening of our society for their own gain, the cultural Marxists, the Zionist imperialists, the people who betray our values, the people who betray the common good for their selfish interest, the people who pretend to be in favour of liberty and justice but who in reality work for their own communal enrichment.

These are all tempting populist narratives; they are all familiar in our time.

What happened to non-Jewish Germans who stood up against antisemitism in the early days of Nazism?

They were often told that the days of the Jews being special were over.

They were told that they would be better off looking after the German working class, than the over-achieving, metropolitans from the big cities, who have had it too good for too long.

And I was afraid to stand up and say any of this, here at Goldsmiths.

I had resolved to tell only personal and family stories.

I was going to tell you about my mum, who escaped from Germany as an 8 year old girl, with her mum and dad, and her sister; I was going to tell you how she never considered herself to be a victim but only to be lucky; and how that itself was a kind of denial that structured my own childhood; a childhood designed with great care and effort to be safe and privileged. And which of course, created this ambivalent me.

I was going to tell you about how my mum’s grandad’s shop in the Bavarian town of Eichstadt was picketed by National Socialists with the slogan: “Don’t buy from the Jews”.

I was going to tell you how Jews respond to being boycotted.

I was going to tell you about Fela, Fishel and Rushka, three of my mum’s cousins, who, out of an extended family of hundreds, survived the concentration camps.

I was going to tell you how Fishel, profoundly alone in the ruins of Europe, having survived the concentration camp system or four years, received a letter, through the Red Cross, from my grandad in Golders Green, telling him that two of his sisters were still alive.

I was going to tell you how Fishel, as he told me this story in Haifa, welled up with tears as he quoted my Grandad in that letter: “You are not alone. You do not need to worry about anything more. I will look after you now”.

I was going to tell you how when I picked up Fishel at Brussels Airport in 2001 to come to my wedding, the first thing he saw as we drove out of the car park was a Swastika = Star of David, painted on the wall. And he knew they meant him.

I was going to tell you about How Fishel’s wife told me about her brother, who fled East from Poland to Russia; and how he survived the whole war in the Russian army; and how, when he found a boat to Palestine, they asked him what he could do. And he said he couldn’t do anything, he was a soldier. And within two weeks of landing in Palestine, he was dead, strafed by a British Imperial Spitfire.

I was going to tell you what winning looks like.

For Fishel, for Fela and for Rushka, and for my mum too, it meant dying in your 80s or 90s, in a warm bed, surrounded by children and grandchildren who loved you, in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Netanya or Barnet.

And how I could go on. I could tell more stories, make more uncomfortable claims and analogies, I could row back from them, I could ram them home.

My PhD was about crimes against humanity, I didn’t even know that I was working through my own story by researching genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia.? And by working out how it would never happen again but how it happens again.

I got used to thinking about this stuff analytically and without great sadness.

But of course every now and then one is overwhelmed by emotion.

This HMD was worth it for me because I saw one photograph on facebook.

It was a mother and a father and a boy. The mother and the boy were beaming, smiling brightly. The father looked a bit like my grandfather.

And my “friend” on facebook, somebody I don’t know, wrote that their dad came to England on the kindertransport and his parents, who he left behind, were murdered.

I could now tell you how ambivalent I am about kindertransport. It was British immigration laws, not the Nazis, that prevented the parents from coming. The parents said goodbye and put their children on the train.

But I won’t.? I’ll just tell you what I wrote on facebook:

“I’m usually unmoveable. But this moved me lots. It always surprises me when that happens.

There was no need to murder these people. They look nice.”

There was an interview with David Hirsh published in Le Figaro about Labour antisemtiism in the UK. For the published version, in French, follow this web link. Here is the original in English, before it was tidied up and translated into French:

1.???????Do you agree with rabbi Ephraim Mirvis saying Jews are justifiably anxious about the prospect of Labour forming the next government ?

Yes, Jews are anxious. Yes, their anxiety is justifiable.

2.???????Where does this antisemitism come from ?

Left antisemitism has a long history, going back to people like Bruno Bauer, critiqued by Marx, who argued that Jews should not be emancipated in the state until they had emancipated themselves from their religion. August Bebel had to oppose the ‘socialism of fools’ – conspiracy fantasy which pictures the oppressors as Jewish. Much of the left at the time of Dreyfus was ambivalent, thinking this was a fight within ‘the elite’. The Stalinists made use of Jew-hatred, identifying Jews with capitalism and imperialism and they pushed hard this story that Israel is an imperialist and apartheid state.

Today’s left antisemitism begins as furious and focused hostility to Israel, it supports the exclusion of Israelis from the life of humanity, it defines its own identity in relation to the Israeli enemy and it tolerates all kinds of antisemitic discourse and bullying which it attracts.

Yesterday we saw the huge swirl of hostility not around Israel but around the Chief Rabbi, who is accused first of trying dishonestly to help Israel with his fake accusation of antisemitism and then is quickly also accused of being right wing and supporting the rich in trying to prevent a Labour government.

Corbyn himself, and the faction which raised him to power, and swept into the Labour Party to support him, has a long history of jumping to the defence of antisemites against Jews.

3.???????Is Jeremy Corbyn’s defense convincing ? Did the party take appropriate measures to fight antisemitism in its ranks ?

Corbyn lies. First, he says that he is doing everything he can to rid the party of antisemitism, but this has been shown to be false. The Chief called it ‘mendacious speech’.? The truth is the opposite. As demonstrated by John Ware in his Panorama documentary, Corbyn, his office, and his supporters have deliberately slowed the disciplinary system, have helped out their allies.

Corbyn also lies when he says he would like to meet the Chief Rabbi and find out why he’s so upset. The truth is that Corbyn and his people have had a number of meetings with the leadership of the Jewish community – Jewish Leadership Council, CST, BoD… he doesn’t listen and he doesn’t reassure.

[note. I have since been told that there was in fact only one formal meeting of this kind. But the point holds I think. Corbyn has had every opportunity to understand the grievances and the Party has had every opportunity to engage with various institutions and individuals in the Jewish community. – DH]

Corbyn himself has a long history of supporting antisemitism against Jews: he has said Hamas and Hezbollah are dedicated to fighting for peace and justice; he has presented English language propaganda for Press TV; he said the antisemitic mural should not be taken down; he defended Steven Sizer, saying he was a good critic of Israel etc etc.

There are thousands of examples, carefully documented, of Labour antisemitism. LAAS, CAA, JLM have submitted them to the EHRC.? Look at the submissions to Chakrabarti.

There is political antisemitism at the top; it creates institutional antisemitism; that licenses people to bully and harass.

4.???????Do you observe such a phenomenon in other left parties in Europe or in the USA ?

Yes. But it has not yet tainted the whole party in other democratic countries.

[Second Email]

This piece, by David Hirsh, first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

David Hirsh

In politics, being popular is good but populism is something different, and it threatens our democracy. Left and right wing populism have a lot in common and they are both part of the same danger. Extremist ideas like racism, xenophobia and antisemitism have returned to the mainstream.

Populism splits everything into good and bad: ‘the people’ and ‘enemies of the people’. ‘The people’ is an idea, the opposite of the material diversity of flesh and blood human beings.

Politics is about representing people, with different tastes, opinions, values and dreams; people from different classes, genders and origins; with different interests, talents, and problems. Democracy as a whole, including Parliament, the rule of law, civil society organisations, international co-operation, democratic freedoms and cultures, is how we negotiate our differences and find ways of living together.

Our democracy is not perfect, but it is a huge achievement nevertheless and we should build on it, not devalue it.

But ‘the people’, as conceived by populism, has one interest, one appetite and one resentful fury. Because ‘the people’ is really an abstract idea, it cannot articulate anything; it needs a leader to understand its eternal soul and to speak with its voice.

Populism begins with the feeling that nothing that exists now is of any value and it is driven by sentimental nostalgia for a past which never really existed.

The populisms of the left and of the right agree that the real enemy is the ‘liberal establishment’ which is portrayed as only cunning and selfish. It is accused of pretending that society is based on freedom and democracy but secretly running everything according to its own secret self-interest.

News, according to the populists, is lies, concocted so that we will vote how ‘the establishment’ wants us to. Politics, for the populists, is a racket, in which a ‘political class’ only pretends to look out for the good of the country.

Populism treats science and expertise as mortally corrupted by power. Even the principle of human equality, the populists think, is sneakily transformed by those with power into a way of keeping us unequal.

The referendum of 2016 made one day holy. An election gives representation even to the losers but a referendum sets up a new timeless truth and it prevents ongoing debate. The demagogues took ownership of the referendum result and they appropriated the right to interpret what it meant.

Populism is utopian. Johnson does not promise to make Britain a little better but to make it the best country in the world. Corbyn does not promise to make Britain a little fairer but to abolish injustice. Populism has contempt for the rational policies that might improve things. Instead, it thunders that it will rip everything down rebuild a new world out of the ashes.

It is easier to destroy than to create. Populism will never deliver what it promises. That is why the idea of the ‘enemy of the people’ is so important. Failure will be blamed on the cosmopolitans, the liberal elite, the people of nowhere, the people ‘without roots in the community’, the people with no culture, those who are only interested in money and in ‘the one per cent’.

Antisemitism has evolved through many distinct species to become a ready-made emotional framework for imagining all of these enemies in one potent vision of evil.

We have seen antisemitism emerge into the mainstream left. In its appearance as ‘criticism of Israel’ it is still plausibly, to some, deniable; yet antisemitism is ‘educating’ a whole layer of left activists that ‘Zionism’ and ‘right wing Jews’ stand between ‘us’ and socialism.

Right populism is also structurally similar to antisemitism and it is creating fertile conditions for the emergence of its own antisemitic movement. Brexit can only be ‘betrayed’ since any Brexit which may be delivered would fall short of the fantasy.

It will lead to crisis, people losing their jobs and to a new and deeper ‘austerity’. Right populists will look for somebody to blame. They will find ‘enemies of the people’ and some of them will picture the enemy with a big nose and a grasping cunning.

Both of the big parties have been killed, hollowed out, and animated by hostile populist factions. This is not a crisis of the left or the right but of both. There could be no Corbyn without Brexit and there could be no Johnson without Corbyn.

Voters will think of supporting one populist leader for fear of the other but the price of that would be to strengthen the populist culture as a whole.

The alternative is to vote for anti-populist candidates, to maximise opposition to populism in Parliament, and to build a movement tough enough and smart enough to defend liberal democracy.

This piece, by David Hirsh, first appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

* This article, by Robert Ogman, was first published in German in Jungle World 44/2019.

Robert Ogman

Just days before the deadly attack outside the Halle synagogue, bracketed between the Jewish New Year celebration Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement Yom Kippur, a friend of mine wrote to me what’s become a popular motto to summarize Jewish holidays: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!” The self-parodying motto, widely known in Jewish communities, refers to the triad of historical experience and social practice: doom, salvation, and affirmation of life. It recalls succinctly and humorously the permanent state of threat, the miracle of survival, and the necessity of rejoice. No holiday better encapsulates this triad as Pesach, when the story of slavery under the Pharaoh and exodus from Egypt is retold, and liberation is rejoiced over a large feast and four glasses of wine.

Yet just days later, when a heavily-armed neo-Nazi attacked a Halle synagogue on Yom Kippur, we were quickly reminded that the motto does not refer to closed historical events of the past which we have left behind. Wie Brecht schon sagte, “Der Scho? ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das kroch.” When in today’s ‘post-national’ Germany, 25% of the population can imagine that something like the Holocaust could repeat itself here, then we – the main Feindbild – know that the triad danger-resilience-and affirmation of life refers equally to our current reality which we have to navigate in our own times. From this, there appears no simple and final redemption – not liberal cosmopolitanism, socialist internationalism, or even Jewish self-determination.

Yes, the Jews may have given the world the bible, broke out of the cyclical view of time, affirmed self- and societal development rather than obeying and mimicking nature – ideas taken up successively by all the monotheistic religions and secular culture alike – but for these gifts, the world has filled its libraries with lies against them.

Society permanently updates its assault with new rationalizations: first the Jews were the Christ killers, then the poisoners of wells, next the bringers of the bubonic plague and black death, afterward the destroyers of society with money and abstract value, then the undertakers of traditional culture with the assertion of universal equality, then blamed for colonialism and “the Middle East conflict”. A broken record always adapted to the times. In the fantasy world of the murderer in a Pittsburgh synagogue one year ago, south American migrants are not fleeing poverty, war, and oppression to seek better lives in the U.S., but instead are simply pawns manipulated by Jewish conspirators to demographically and culturally undermine the white Christian majority in the U.S. for their own interests. This ideology was mimicked in the manifesto of the Halle attacker Stephan B. According to his warped mind, the Syrian and Afghani exodus from their war-torn countries is not the flight of real people seeking security and better lives. No, instead these individuals lack agency and are mere “golems” – just dust brought to life by Jewish mystics through alchemical transformation, and brought to Europe with the devious aim of displacing German Christians and installing Jewish domination. For this reason he decided against attacking a Mosque, and sought instead to “cut off the head” of the supposed “plot”, and attack Jews.

So after we prayed, each in our own religious or secular ways, that the terror in Halle would end quickly and without any deaths or injuries, we screamed out in fury at the fascist danger. We criticized the ideology of that supposed lone wolf Stephan B., and the thousands of armed neo-Nazis throughout German society, which has infiltrated the police and security forces. We raged against the cuts to anti-racism education programs and right-wing extremism prevention projects. We criticized the intellectual instigators, the far-Right “Alternative for Germany” party, which have been called the “political wing of right-wing terrorism”. And we damned the authorities for minimizing our security concerns.

But yet, as loud as the “Never Again!” proclamations were in the media, social media, and at public vigils, so extremely silent were the people around me. So few were the phone calls or messages from friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or self-described “comrades” in the days after the attack. So easy it was to post something stupid banner on Facebook – so difficult they must have found it to reach out and ask, “how are you holding up?” How formally correct, and how socially and emotionally removed at the same time! This too is this state of Germany amid the “outrage” after Halle.

At our vigils we mourned the senseless loss of life, and we said the mourner’s kaddish for Jana L. and Kevin S. during services. Political commentators quarreled about whether the attack was of an antisemitic character, or directed instead against “society as a whole”. What a stupid exercise. I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s prescient observation that totalitarianism makes all human life superfluous, and at the same time, that it has deep, critical differentiations which cannot be smoothed over – a contradictory truth we should try to keep in mind. The two unique individuals who did not belong to the Jewish community, but were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, were reduced by the fascist mind to nothing but superfluous matter, disposable objects in the mission to rid the world of Jews.

And while mourning the senseless loss of life, we also marveled at the narrow avoidance of a massacre – yes this contradiction could not cover up the miracle of survival. Yes, they tried to kill us (again) … and yet we survived! A remnant always does. We marveled at the wonder of a simple wooden door to stop evil, to stop a massacre in the unprotected Halle synagogue.

On the way to the hospital to be treated for shock – death narrowly escaped – the congregations’ survivors danced, and sang out “The Jewish people live on!” Upon nightfall, they congregated in the hospital cafeteria, completed the holiday prayers, blew the Shofar (the ram’s horn) signaling the end of Yom Kippur. They broke their Yom Kippur fast and drank beer.

The struggle against antisemitism is simply the fight against the reduction of life to mere matter, to an impoverished conception of ‘nature’, ‘race’, blood, labor, and force. And so this very cause must too defend the autonomy of life over all external causes. Hence after doom and salvation, we affirm life. We reject the objectivization and projections by anti-Semites, and also those by well-meaning ‘antifascists’ alike, and assert ourselves as subjects within history, through the renewal of our traditions. This is why it made sense, following the “Tree of Life” synagoge shooting in the United States, to call “all out for Shabbat!” For it is this creative interruption of time and space – the disruption of everyday life and labor, the halt to practices that change the world (through utilization and instrumentalization), and instead the uncompromising and simple affirmation of life – which may be a necessary part of the efforts to repair the world, of Tikkun Olam, or if secular terms are preferred, to “make it whole”, in the words of Ernst Bloch. That a similar call was not made in Germany may say much about the different political cultures in these two countries, but it doesn’t call for simple mimicry. There is much to be changed, but there is also much to be disrupted and affirmed – so we proclaim and sanctify life, for to live is our struggle, so let’s eat!

* This article, by Robert Ogman,g was first published in German in Jungle World 44/2019.

David Hirsh will be speaking on antisemitism, Brexit and populism.
Follow the links for details; more details will appear here when we have them.

October
31? choi game slot doi thuong

November
1? Kassel
2? Düsseldorf
3? Münster
4? Darmstadt
5? Tübingen
6? Konstanz
7? Bamberg
8? Munich
9? Passau

Follow this link for David Hirsh’s Goldsmiths homepage

Follow this link for ‘Contemporary Left Antisemitism’

From the Guardian:

Pete Willsman, an ally of Jeremy Corbyn, … said the Jewish state was behind some of the antisemitism allegations – which he described as “total lies” – that have engulfed the party.

In a recording first disclosed?by the radio station LBC, Willsman said: “It’s almost certain who is behind all this antisemitism against Jeremy: almost certainly, it was the Israeli embassy.

“They caught somebody in the Labour party who it turns out is an agent in the embassy.”

Last year 68 rabbis from different religious and political traditions made a joint statement that they were worried about Labour’s antisemitism problem. Willsman responded furiously, in a speech to Labour’s National Executive Committee, in front of the leaders of the Party, including Jeremy Corbyn.

He demanded that the rabbis provide evidence, implying that there was no evidence of Labour antisemitism, and saying that he had never seen any. He then said that some of the people in the Jewish community who are concerned about antisemitism in Labour are ‘Trump fanatics’. And then he said: ‘I am not going to be lectured to by Trump fanatics making up duff information without any evidence at all.’

When Willsman slips these three claims slip into each other, you are left with the allegation that people within the Labour Party who are worried about antisemitism have no evidence, because there is no antisemitism, and they are only saying there is because they’re Trump fanatics.

This is classic Livingstone Formulation. People, mainly Jews, raise the issue of antisemitism as a dirty and dishonest way of trying to silence criticism of Israel and trying to smear the left because it criticises Israel.

That is how Labour Jews get drummed out of the Party, politically and then physically; they are accused of being hostile to the left and agents of the right and of Israel.

On 4 September 2018, when Willsman returned to Labour HQ from his token suspension, he was cheered into the building.

The source of his latest claims, that Labour people who worry about antisemitism are in fact doing the bidding of the Israeli embassy is an Al Jazeera documentary which was? called ‘The Lobby’.

This was my own account, written in January 2017, of being secretly spied on by the people making that Al Jazeera film.

The film is being relied on right across the Labour party today as justification for what Willsman said. It is being referred to in every Labour forum.

The Al Jazeera spy introduced himself to me as “Robin Harrow”. I met him in the House of Commons as I was leaving the Labour Friends of Israel event at which I had spoken, following the release of the Chakrabarti Inquiry, and on the same day as Jeremy Corbyn’s appearance at the Select Committee inquiry into antisemitism.

I was with my wife, who speaks German and who knows Germany. He said he had studied at the Freie Universitat Berlin. She asked if he’d known a friend of hers who had taken Jewish Studies there. He didn’t think so.

I sent him links to my work to read. He wrote back later saying he was particularly impressed by the “Livingstone Concept”. He wrote that it was an “eye opener”.

He asked if we could have dinner or lunch. I told him that I would be away most of the summer. He came back to me in September and asked for a meeting. I invited him to Goldsmiths. He said he wanted to talk about setting up a youth wing of Labour Friends of Israel.

In December, a friend of mine who works in one of the institutions of the Jewish community emailed me to tell me that “Harrow” was a spy. Initially I didn’t even remember who he was. I looked on my calendar and my email and vaguely remembered.

I hadn’t been alert, I hadn’t been suspicious. It isn’t unusual that somebody wants to meet me to talk about my work on antisemitism and its relationship to hostility to Israel.

I couldn’t remember what I had said to him. I remember asking him if he had come from an ‘anti-Deutsch’ political tradition – quite a few people I know who are serious about opposing contemporary antisemitism are German and come, broadly, from that kind of politics.

When I was told he was a spy, I couldn’t remember what I had said to him. I was anxious. When I write, I am careful to express myself precisely and unambiguously. When I am chatting with somebody I trust, over coffee, I’m likely to slip into shorthand, which is possible because there are shared understandings and shared meanings. I was trying to remember if I had been showing off, making bad jokes or using shorthand; if I had said anything which would look stupid or bad from the outside if it was taken out of context. I still don’t know. I’m glad I didn’t appear in the film. I was nervous about what might emerge. As it turned out, nearly everybody who was portrayed in the film had not done or said anything wrong at all. But there was still an attempt to make them look menacing.

He asked me about the connections between lobbying groups and Israel. I think, from memory, that I told him that Israel isn’t very good at fighting antisemitism in the diaspora; that it doesn’t prioritize it, that it isn’t good at understanding it and that what it does is largely counter productive; and that it ought to do much more to fight antisemitism and it ought to do it much better. Fighting antisemitism is one of the purposes for which Israel exists.

I think I told him that his project of setting up a youth LFI was a hugely difficult project – that we are anyway always accused of ‘lobbying for Israel’ – and that that accusation itself often constituted an antisemitic allegation of conspiracy. I told him that it would be difficult to attract young people to such a project.

I think I probably told him to find out if there was a danger of conflict between LFI and the Jewish Labour Movement – that he should talk to both. In any case, this would not have helped Al Jazeera to portray all the organisations as a single lobby organised by a foreign power.

I was interested in him, and how he had come to want to engage in this kind of politics. I told him about my mum, who had been born in Germany and had to leave in 1938. He told me about his English dad and his German mum – and how they had met, I can’t remember where, somewhere outside Germany.

So, I was left with fear. Perhaps I had said something stupid, something indiscreet, something which would make me look bad; perhaps it could cause me trouble in my job or perhaps it could harm my reputation. I don’t mean to suggest that I say or think something different in private from what I say in public. I don’t. But I think one may express oneself differently according to what one’s audience knows and understands.

The fear still lingers. Probably, I didn’t say anything stupid; because I’m not stupid; but I doubt myself. Compare with Donald Trump, who insisted that it is impossible for Putin to have anything compromising on him because he has never said or done anything compromising. My own response is to fear, and to doubt myself and to be anxious.

I am also angry. This man who posed as somebody who had read, understood and liked my work, this man who said he wanted to learn from me, at my university, was actually an antisemite who was hoping to portray me in an antisemitic way as part of an antisemtic project. Of course it is likely that he doesn’t understand himself as an antisemite at all. He understands himself as a hero of the Palestinian revolution. Or whatever. But he had read my work. He should know better.

He wanted to smoke after we had coffee, so we went to sit outside, at the front of the main building at Goldsmiths. Some of the covert photography in the film was done with a long lens from afar in public places. So this little antisemitic spy, or his collaborators, or his handlers, probably had a camera crew across the road or in a car with a lens pointed at me.

In the end, this guy was a very small guy and this project was a very small and ineffective project – and they did not get anything from me at all – so far as I know. Good. But the feeling of being lied to by an antisemite over coffee lingers.

And that he was German grates a little too. Perhaps it shouldn’t. But my family and my wife’s family – and pretty well every Jewish person I know’s family – has been profoundly impacted by German antisemites. As I said, a large proportion of the people who oppose contemporary antisemitsm are German – but this guy didn’t oppose it, he was part of it.

David Hirsh

This piece, by David Hirsh, is from Jewish News.

Politics in our time is about defending democracy against an arrayed series of related attacks that we might call ‘populist’. Each populism is at heart an irrational conspiracy fantasy. Each insists that democracy is fake and each populism blames some group of our fellow citizens for all our troubles, demonising them as ‘enemy of the people’.

It is not accidental that antisemitism is making a comeback as populism elbows its way back into mainstream politics. This fact is hugely consequential, not only for Jews but for anybody who wants to participate in the defence of democratic life.

Similarly, anti-Zionism constructs the ‘Israel’ that it positions it as being central to, or symbolic of, they key evils on the planet.

If that is right, then it follows that the defence against populism will also have to be a defence against antisemitism. Antisemitism is not a parochial issue about one small group of people. Opposing antisemitism is not to take one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict, a local conflict far away which we could choose to stay out of.

Antisemitism is the form of appearance of antidemocratic politics, not far away but here, not only concerning Jews but concerning us all.

Let me be clearer about what I mean by ‘populism’. The Corbyn, Trump and Brexit movements have quite a lot in common. There are many similar movements around the world: AfD in Germany, the Front National in France, the ruling parties in Italy, Austria, Turkey, Brazil, Russia, Hungary and Poland.

These are not yet totalitarian movements but they share a number of the characteristics by which philosopher Hannah Arendt defined twentieth century totalitarianism. They are proto-totalitarian movements; precursors to totalitarianism; movements which prepare the culture for the real thing. Jihadi Islamist movements fit in here too.

These movements are contemptuous of what exists and they see nothing of value in the democratic state as it is. There is no critique of Westminster, Brussels or Washington politics, no constructive thinking about how to improve life, only the promise to tear it all down and start again from zero.

Populism hates the democratic balance between liberty and community. It builds an atmosphere of fervour in which individuals rationalise their own happiness as the price payable for eventual Utopia. Populism does not struggle for specific improvements; it is only interested in the sunlit uplands of tomorrow.

Populist movements harness the politics of resentment to the advancement of those who assume the right to speak for ‘the people’. Anybody in the way is treated as ‘enemy of the people’. They build personality cults around leaders who act as empty ciphers into which every individual can pour their own dreams. The leaders offer us revenge against those who we can blame for our own feelings of inadequacy.

The populist demagogues construct communities of the good and they cast out those who do not fit. The Corbynites call the bad people, the ‘one per cent’, the Zionists, the bankers or the elites. The Brexiters call them betrayers of the will of the people or they denounce those who side with foreign nations and bureaucrats against ‘us’. There is much contempt for the ‘liberal elite’, cosmopolitans, globalists and citizens of nowhere. Populism embraces nostalgic nationalism but it has one eye on a more radical project for the whole of humanity.

Populism tends to explain inconvenient facts by reference to ‘fake news’, conspiracies which are said dishonestly to manufacture the consent of ordinary folk to their own subordination. It is contemptuous of science and expertise; only the charismatic leader?knows. Witness President Trump’s recent advice on technical issues to the Paris fire service.

The populists do not understand markets and they are itching to repeat the disastrous economic policies of 1930s style protectionism and economic nationalism.

What does all this contempt for democratic culture, norms and politics have to do with antisemitism?

Antisemitism was at the very centre of Stalinist Communism and Nazism. These movements, by which people who felt powerless aspired to world domination, required a global, powerful and cunning ‘other’. Antisemitism is always projection. If you want to know what antisemites dream about, listen carefully to what they accuse Jews of doing.

The antisemitic construction of ‘the Jew’ has been forged over centuries by a succession of distinct antisemitic movements, each adding to the narrative and emotional vocabulary of the other. It sits there in our culture and we think it is a thing of the past, too vulgar and awful to constitute a contemporary threat. But antisemitic ways of thinking are nevertheless entrenched in our subconscious and are tempting resources for anti-democratic movements because they give material shape to unendurable, abstract, fear and fury.

Conspiracy fantasy is not always antisemitic but it is always ripe for it. The bad news is that we are all going to have to educate ourselves in the stealthy vileness of antisemitism. We cannot leave it to the Jews because it is not only about them. But we are resistant to this bad news. Nobody wants to be seen as the pro-Jew party, we prefer a universal message.

We cannot understand contemporary populism without understanding its relationship to antisemitism; but if we make that understanding explicit, then people will recoil against it and the message will be lost.

Of course it is far from true that every Labour supporter, Trump supporter or Brexiter is antisemitic. Indeed all of these movements have Jewish support, people who mobilise their own identities politically and publicly in an effort to protect their movements from such accusations. The angry denials of antisemitism are plausible because they are genuine. People are not aware of the antisemitism in their own movements, whether it is explicit, whether it is hidden and difficult to interpret, or whether, so far, their ideologies are only similar in shape and content to antisemitic ones.

What is true is that populist movements animate conspiracy fantasy and they denigrate ordinary democratic processes, cultures and ways of thinking. And where that is allowed to happen, antisemitism becomes hugely attractive, and it finds fertile ground, while opposition to antisemitism looks like special pleading and Jewish tribalism.

David Hirsh