Name: On Antisemitism
ISBN: 9781608467617

Jewish Voice for Peace

The uses and abuses of antisemitism in the 21st Century, collected by Jewish Voice for Peace.

On Antisemitism

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book. It's a necessary book, "now, more than ever," to borrow a cliche activist phrase from this age.

The only thing I came away with somewhat negatively are my thoughts on the intended audience of this book. Don't get me wrong. Each essay has an important point of view in its own right. I don't doubt the necessity of any of these pieces, or the validity of any author's voice.

It says on the back that this book is intended as a "resource" for Palestinian solidarity activists, teachers, and Jewish communities.

Essay collections like these, I feel like, are more effective and persuasive if directed at a specific audience, no matter how broad that audience is.

As a member of the first item of the list as well as one possessing white Jewish ancestry, I found the essays that discussed the privileging of Ashkenazi narratives in Jewish communities, as well as essays like Omar Barghouti's that discuss very hyperspecific aspects of the Palestinian cause (most namely BDS) and that deliberate on these aspects' validity, basis, and purported antisemitism to be the most useful to me. 

There is something in this book, for sure, for everyone that this book has intended to reach out to. But I just wonder about this book's accessibility, especially for the group of people that (I think) most sorely need access to and need to understand discourse like this.

I'm talking about the Jewish community as a whole, which this book claims to be intended for (partially), but I found that from start to finish, the discourse around social justice, around activism, around identiarian politics would not do well with an entry level crowd.

Which clearly wasn't the intent of this book. So I don't feel the need to say much else about my thoughts about that. I just think a few of these essays would do really well with the Jewish community as a whole, as pieces that the Jewish community, particularly young, socially conscious Ashkenazim would do well to hear. 

But these essays get, well, buried, in the extremely well written rest of the book that seems to be aimed at more seasoned activists, as the book blurb says, or Palestinian solidarity activists more specifically.

There's much to be said about the merits of making academic discourse more accessible, language-wise, to those with less access to academia or with less experience within specific activist fields. I think it's a much, much larger conversation, one that even extends over the entirety of the left as they reckon with the gains gained by the right wing in America as well as worldwide over these last few years. And it has to do with the neglect, to some degree, of those with less access to university level education and spaces where discourse like this regularly occurs. If the left isn't reaching them, then sooner or later the right will.

So I dunno. I came away with a very positive view of this book, with just some misgivings about the book's audience.