The book argues that the Left needs a clearer understanding of the threat of antisemitism. Why is this argument necessary? And how is this different from right-wing claims that Palestine solidarity is inherently antisemitic?

Shane and I wanted to write this book because the Left was developing a strong, structural, intersectional analysis of so many other forms of oppression, but there’s still this tendency to not see the role that antisemitism plays in upholding broader structures of injustice. There’s a kind of bias that antisemitism is ephemeral, or not structural to our world — that maybe antisemitism is a holdover from the past and is not worth taking seriously on its own terms.

There are many dangers to that. First, it creates an obstacle to effectively transforming the world, because antisemitism emerges as a pressure valve specifically in moments of capitalist crisis. Authoritarian and nationalist leaders use conspiracy theories to divert popular anger away from root causes and onto a scapegoat.

Also, if we don’t have a strong left analysis, if we’re not speaking in an authentic voice as leftists about this issue, that gives it to the Right to craft their own narrative. And their narrative is that only Israel will keep Jews safe, that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

I came out of writing about the far right, and there’s no question about the central role of antisemitism in white nationalism. Antisemitism is the Right’s version of speaking class language, but through conspiracy theories and figments. We have to be clear on that and be able to counteract it. But the institutions tasked with fighting antisemitism mischaracterize where the threat is coming from, mislabeling anti-Zionism as antisemitism, shifting resources to attack campus protests.

The fact that we don’t understand right-wing antisemitism also creates a weak point in talking about left-wing antisemitism. There are moments when the Left takes on conspiracy theories that are more widely found on the Right but can adapt to the Left when activists have bad analysis or when populism overtakes radical theory.

The idea that antisemitism is ephemeral or a holdover from the past reminds me of the way anti-black racism was discussed in the “color-blind” [Barack] Obama years. In contrast, you argue that antisemitism is an ongoing structural element of society, which is why people with conspiratorial ideas that are not intentionally antisemitic often end up going down that road. Can you talk about what this structural antisemitism is?

It can be hard for leftists to wrap our heads around this. When we talk about structural oppression, we think about state policies or inequities baked into economics or housing. And that can certainly happen in some moments of antisemitism. But it’s more helpful to think of antisemitism, if you want to use Marxist terms, in the superstructure.

It’s an ideology that primarily comes from Christian Europe. These tropes were circulated that demonized Jews as the “other” of Christianity. Jews were scapegoated as the absolute evil, as literal devils, as predators who preyed upon children. Jews were slotted into certain economic roles and then scapegoated as economic exploiters. Over time, these Christian stories about Jews in the modern era formed the basis of the conspiracy theories that are demonological in nature. Jews are imagined as this kind of immensely powerful, abstractly intangible global conspiracy that is literally demonic.

It has been built into Western thinking, particularly Western economic thinking, which hides the productive process in capitalism and leads people to conspiratorial theories about how to solve serious class problems.

Even if people aren’t consciously thinking, “Oh Jews are controlling the banks,” we have these tropes, these methods of thought that draw on that collective memory. Why does antisemitism return? Because it’s baked into the Western concept of how to address economic and social crisis, and how to respond to the conditions that economic inequality has created. That’s part of what we talk about when we talk about structural antisemitism — a false narrative about how to solve the social stratification and alienation that capitalism causes.

Structural antisemitism also exists in ways that mirror other kinds of structural oppression, though not as endemic as anti-blackness or other manifestations of white supremacy in the United States. So, for example, Orthodox Jews have high rates of poverty, report disproportionately high rates of police violence, and face higher rates of workplace and housing discrimination. Prison can be a volatile place for Jews, where people are facing antisemitism like it was a century ago. These are also manifestations of antisemitism baked directly into the structures of society.

In the book, we have practical recommendations for activists who might encounter these tropes in their work. For example, we interviewed a housing organizer who talks about going door to door and hearing essentially, “Oh, my slumlord is a slum lord because they’re Jewish.” The organizer discusses how these tropes get in the way of a significant analysis of the capitalist housing market and gentrification. Our goal is to help activists counter these conspiracies and lead people instead to a structural analysis.

It’s been almost a decade since [Donald] Trump won the presidency, but many progressives remain disoriented by the right-wing mode of never-ending conspiracies and panics. Has a lack of clarity on modern antisemitism weakened people’s ability to understand the frameworks that animate so much of right-wing politics?

Antisemitism is part of the intellectual scaffolding that holds together far-right ideas, turning their guttural racism into an ideology and worldview. Eric Ward, who we interviewed in the book, says this is how white nationalists explain black freedom struggles: if black people are so “incapable” (in their view), then how did they win on major issues and create large social movements? It had to be these wealthy, exceedingly intelligent Ashkenazi Jews who orchestrated this attack on non-Jewish gentiles. Likewise, with trans health care, it couldn’t just be that now we’re affirming trans identity — it must be that the Rothschilds or George Soros or some kind of globalist cabal is reengineering young people.

It’s not always explicitly antisemitism. There are plenty of rightists who, when they talk about “globalists,” aren’t thinking of Jews in their heads. But even on those parts of the Right, we’re seeing the implicit antisemitism grow more explicit. Major right-wing figures like Elon Musk go that extra step and say explicitly that it’s a fact that Jews are behind hatred against whites. So we’re seeing that white nationalists’ explicit antisemitism has really moved mainstream.

The Palestine solidarity movement has steadfastly rejected antisemitism, but as the genocide in Gaza continues, there are troubling signs (online at least) that some are drifting toward antisemitic conspiracy explanations for why the world’s main powers continue to back Israel.

The Left is trying to build between the rock of rising far-right antisemitism and the hard place of what you could call “imperial philosemitism”: support for Israel that is driven by geopolitics and Christian theology but masquerades as love for a Jewish state. How can we help people see clearly when both sides insist that there is something mysteriously exceptional about Jewishness?

We are currently watching as an unprecedented genocide is happening in Gaza, the US media and political class is complicit, and large-scale pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] have swayed elections, defeating progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. So there’s an understandable feeling that powerful people are controlling our political and social situation, lending credence to the idea that we can’t trust established narratives offered by mainstream sources.

But the reality is that a larger analysis of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism actually explains what is happening today with great clarity. And this kind of analysis doesn’t separate Israel out as something wholly extraordinary and apart from the larger social systems of domination. Israel’s behavior is just a piece of the larger Western, colonial capitalist system.

We don’t talk enough about what the US ruling class has to gain by having a far-right militarized Israel in the Middle East as the figurehead of its interests, about the advantages conferred by hiding behind the supposed moral clarity of the Jewish state after the Holocaust. It’s not about shadowy leaders or distinct cabals. It’s systems of power we’ve come to know and understand on the Left, and we need to locate Israel as a piece of that larger web.

It also means understanding what reactionary critiques of power can look like and how they differ from the criticisms we construct from the Left. Recently there’s been this controversy about whether it’s fine to call the US a “Zionist Occupied Government.” That’s a neo-Nazi phrase, where Zionism specifically means Jewish, and it comes out of a very particular white nationalist trajectory. It doesn’t mean the kind of anti-Zionism that comes out of the Left, which should be motivated by a desire for universal liberation.

The struggle against colonialism in Israel is part of the larger struggle against these systems of oppression, not some kind of exceptional hatred for only one particular manifestation or opposition based on its supposedly unique “Jewish character”. We have to remind ourselves every time we make choices of messaging or tactics: What kind of anti-Zionism will get us to the Left’s larger goals?

Historic numbers of American Jews have joined the Palestine solidarity movement, but the majority remain sympathetic to Zionism. You argue that taking antisemitism seriously requires not simply lumping together all supporters of Israel — whether they are weapons manufacturers, Holocaust survivors, or Mizrahi Jews — as Zionist oppressors. Why do you argue for a more nuanced approach?

The political scientist Mira Sucharov did a study showing that most American Jews still identify as Zionists, but that if they’re further asked about what it means — if they’re asked if they support a status quo in Israel where Palestinians face structural inequalities — many disavow that conception of Zionism. Survey results like that should really give us pause.

At one of our book events, someone said, “I’m offended by all the talk about anti-Zionism. I’m a Zionist, and for me Zionism means full equality between Jews and Palestinians in the holy land.” I responded, “Well okay, for me anti-Zionism means the same thing. So maybe let’s stop arguing about the word Zionism altogether.”

We certainly don’t want to give anyone a pass for supporting Israel’s genocide. At the same time, being more attentive to the nuance is important for winning over more American Jews, for whom the definition of Zionism might not really mean support for an ethno-state. It might be more of an identity, meaning more or less Jewish pride.

There are a lot of reasons why that’s come to pass in American Jewish identity, but when we make the struggle about Zionists in such a way that leads us to ignore the identity formations of large swaths of liberal American Jews, we’re alienating a lot of potential allies. I ultimately think our energy will be much better spent organizing against Boeing or Raytheon or pro-Israel politicians.

I attended an event a few months back at a Jewish community center to hear two anti-Zionist Jewish authors speak. I knew the guy who managed the center. He stopped me to ask how I liked the event — the local Jewish United Fund didn’t like his choice to host the speakers, but he did anyway. He said, “Shane, they’re anti-Zionist, but what do they mean by that?” So I explained it to him and he seemed surprised, as if he had never learned what this term meant. This was a fifty-year-old Jewish professional who didn’t have a clear idea of what anti-Zionism was.

There’s a weird lack of clarity about what people are asking for. I think it’s imperative to explain clearly what the anti-Zionist left is fighting for, and what decolonization and a free Palestine actually look like. These terms are often scary to Jewish communities, but when you unpack what this vision actually is, you can see many people shift their political stance.

I would love to see the Left go on the offensive about the antisemitic elements in America’s Zionism. This is a majority-Christian imperialist country using Jews as the face of an unpopular policy — in this case, mass murder — which is a role that Jews have long been forced to play in the West.

At the same time, we’re in a movement in solidarity with Palestinians, who are constantly facing erasure. Is it possible to highlight this antisemitism without reducing the focus on Palestine and Palestinians?

It’s a really important question. We’re operating on terrain where the media loves to fixate on questions of possible antisemitism on the Left, and frankly on Jewish trauma. But I come back to the point that we can’t abandon that terrain to the Right, which is going to continue to use antisemitism discourse to attack the movement for Palestinian rights. Leftists have to articulate our own antisemitism analysis. The way to do that is to say that Jews won’t be safe in the world until Palestinians and all people are safe. We can reject a scarcity mentality and fight multiple forms of oppression at the same time.

We talk in the book about antisemitism in Zionism, whether it’s Christian Zionism, the Judeo-pessimism of the early Zionist movement that denigrated the diaspora, or ongoing elements of the Right that are pro-Israel on the one hand but push antisemitic conspiracy theories on the other. I think that stuff’s important, but it’s best articulated when it’s coming with a sincere commitment to fighting antisemitism.

One of the biggest obstacles to an effective challenge to real antisemitism is that a lot of charges of antisemitism are weaponized and frankly untrue. But because they’re levied so forcefully, anti-Zionists are then compelled to respond to those claims. What I think is ultimately more effective is to just participate in projects to confront real antisemitism as it happens, such as collaborating with antifascist groups fighting the growth of white nationalism or developing internal competence in dealing swiftly with antisemitism inside our movements when it does show up. Building up our capacity to fight legitimate antisemitism is always going to be the most effective proof that claims of systemic antisemitism in the Palestine solidarity movement are false.

I’ve seen some anti-Zionist organizations try to fight back against the pro-Israel right by pointing out the antisemitism that often flows from Christian Zionists and others, but it’s always been unclear to me whether or not this is an effective strategic decision that we should prioritize. What I do think is strategically sound is to make sure organizations, both in the Palestine solidarity movement and across the larger left, have a good analysis of antisemitism. We need to develop the capacity to see and address antisemitism wherever it occurs, and a political vision that keeps our values at the heart of every tactical move.