Abstract
This contribution is part of the collection ‘Antisemitism, Anti-Racism and Zionism: Old Debates, Contemporary Contestations’. 1
I feel incredibly privileged to have been asked to comment on the republication of Nira Yuval-Davis’s (1984) brave and lucid article about antisemitism and Zionism from Spare Rib September 1984 and on Nira’s framing introduction (Yuval-Davis, 2020). I also feel frightened about engaging in what was then, and still remains, a very painful and angry debate, largely amongst Jewish feminists. I feel ‘frozen’ because the issues reach to the core of my being—as Jewish and as a feminist. It is hard for me to speak about such sensitive issues, although I care passionately. The rise of feminism has helped to open up debate but also, with the inexorable rise of the religious and political right, sociopolitical contexts have become individualist and neoliberal. The connotations around what Gail Chester and I called ‘From A to Z with feminism in the middle’ are different (Chester and David, 2017). They are about antisemitism and Zionism, racism and antiracism, where Israel/Palestine fits and what it means to be a Jewish feminist today.
I write as a Jewish socialist feminist whose political position has inevitably changed over the last twenty-five years. Given the mantra of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the 1960s and 1970s that the personal is political, I am writing about how my personal experiences have framed my approach and sensitivity. Most of the public media debates about antisemitism, Zionism and racism still ignore the question of women or feminism. The Pears Institute conference at Birkbeck University of London on Zionism and Antisemitism in 2017 is an example. 2 At that conference, Gail Chester and I gave one of the few feminist papers about debates which had appeared within Spare Rib in the 1970s and 1980s.
I first met Nira in 1972/1973, when we were both living in Cambridge, Massachusetts (David, 2014). We joined a Jewish feminist group that was linked to the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective that later published Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) (Antler, 2018, pp. 122, 154–181). We became very good friends, although our perspectives on Zionist politics differed. She was already an anti-Zionist Israeli, and I had no understanding of what that meant, nor did I really want to engage with its critique of Israel. At that point, I did not understand how it did not lead to the denial of Israeli statehood. I was a socialist Zionist rather than an anti-Zionist, having been brought up in a northern English town with virtually no Jews.
My father was a refugee from Nazi Germany and my mother was from a strongly Zionist family that had come to the UK before the Aliens Act 1905 (1905). My parents’ backgrounds framed my consciousness of being Jewish as a private family matter. I was brought up in a kosher home, moderately religious and committed to Jewish values of social justice. I learnt modern Hebrew from Israelis who came as students to the neighbouring city of Bradford. I went to Israel as a volunteer during the Six Day War 1967, and considered settling there to study and work but returned home somewhat disillusioned. Nevertheless, Judaism and socialist Zionism remained very important to me (David, 2003). I accepted the political ideology of Zionism based upon central tenets of Judaism, with Israel as a homeland for Jewish people. I had gone to the US partly in search of a more explicit kind of Jewish feminism, given the involvement of so many Jewish women in the creation of second-wave feminism (Antler, 2018).
Both Nira and I found ourselves in the UK from late 1973 and we both became involved as feminist sociologists, especially in the British Sociological Association (BSA). I was in Bristol until 1985/1986, involved in the WLM and a nascent Jewish feminist group. We were involved from afar in the Spare Rib debates, contributing at least one unpublished letter about how Spare Rib denied our agency as Jewish (Zionist) feminists. Our group in Bristol was composed of a range of Jewish women from the US and UK who all felt an affinity with Israel as a potential homeland. At the time, we had no understanding nor knowledge of revisionist Zionism, let alone anti-Zionism. As Jews brought up in the shadows of the Second World War, we understood the creation of the state of Israel as a necessity. Our consciousness as Jews revolved around a secular notion of Judaism as a mix of religion and culture. For example, the Passover, with its specific rituals, was a time of great joy as a liberation movement.
However, my own Jewish consciousness, linked with my feminism, has changed in my family life. I moved to London in 1986 and became deeply involved in professional politics and personal (Jewish) travails. Ten years later, I started to marry my feminism with more secular Judaism and began to hold feminist seders where we all participated actively. Feminist politics, intertwined with my Jewishness, and Israel became less central to me, but the Israeli government’s moves to the right became, paradoxically, critical to my activism. I became a founding member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) in 2001, using the insights of both feminism and Judaism around concepts of justice and collectivity (David, 2003). This led to my involvement with the British Shalom-Salaam Trust (BSST), a charitable arm of JfJfP giving funds to educational, health and women’s projects in Israel-Palestine (2005 to 2014). Throughout these, there was a difficult balancing act of feminism, secular Judaism and questions of Zionism or being pro-Palestinian. I slowly withdrew from intensive involvement as I found contentious forms of critique of Israel-Palestine wearing and not particularly feminist or socialist.
Instead, I became more involved in feminist projects and I rejoined the Labour Party, as Jeremy Corbyn, who was my local MP, was standing for the leadership. The rise of neoliberalism and global moves towards the right with a renewed focus on individualism and populism meant that Corbyn was aiming for a more socialist agenda with anti-racism and welfare policies. Ironically, almost immediately there was concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party, conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism or Israel-Palestine and the Middle East. This led to The Shami Chakrabarti Inquiry (Chakrabarti, 2016) report. I submitted evidence and was keen to help with educational projects, given my professional expertise. The report escalated rather than allayed concerns about antisemitism, particularly for those on the right of the Labour Party. I joined Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) when it was created as a response to arguments about antisemitism. Yet feminism remains largely a sideshow.
The question of what is antisemitic remains problematic even amongst Jews. There are differences about how it is experienced and our commitments to being Jewish, culturally or religiously. It is certainly discrimination against Jews when they/we are deemed as being different and not afforded equal rights to citizenry, presaging racism but not completely equivocal to other contemporary forms of racism. The epistemic antisemitism resulted in the mass murder of Jews in Europe, later called the Holocaust, in the middle of the twentieth century. Our experiences of this vary and are deep rooted. The main focus of the current heated debates is about antisemitism and the Labour Party, rather than the rise of antisemitism and the far right or fascism especially in Europe. As Nira argues so clearly, antisemitism has been reframed as the ‘new antisemitism’ to include criticisms of Zionism, the state of Israel and its racist policies especially towards Palestinians. This has now received international legitimacy through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (2016). Its particular definitions are such that any criticism of the state of Israel or Israeli policies is deemed antisemitic and therefore out of bounds. This linking of the Holocaust with Zionism and antisemitism is particularly strong.
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, many nations have held an annual commemoration to remember those who suffered under Nazi persecution, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Union in January 1945. In addition, on Holocaust Memorial Day, many anti-racists expect Jews to recognise other genocides such as the Rwandan genocide. This makes Jews shoulder more responsibility than anti-racist groups demand of other victims of racism, such as Black victims of slavery. Jews throughout the world also are expected to be responsible for Israel’s actions over and above other similar militaristic nations. This can be seen as paradoxical and is in itself an antisemitic trope. On the other hand, there are Jews who appeal to Jewish concepts of justice to argue that Jews should be more sensitive and appeal to higher order concepts. The Israeli government’s moves to the right and joining with right-wing governments such as Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro’s in Brazil and Donald Trump’s in the USA are causes for consternation.
It is particularly pertinent that as I was drafting this commentary another angry debate resurfaced amongst a group of ‘Seventies Sisters’, women who became involved in the WLM in the 1970s. This is about how to deal with antisemitism in/and the Labour Party with a particular focus on Jeremy Corbyn as leader, and a contentious documentary film called WitchHunt (2019) about Jackie Walker, a black Jewish feminist who was in the Labour Party. The film is to be shown publicly through a local Momentum group and a Palestine Solidarity Committee, as advertised on the Seventies Sisters email list. Several Jewish feminists have reacted angrily to this being discussed again on this list. Many have not joined the Labour Party, seeing it as either not sufficiently committed to feminist politics and the left or too left-wing and not concerned with how antisemitism is woven through. Some of these radical feminists fear that the debates are not sufficiently nuanced and their views and feelings about antisemitism seem to be silenced. In particular, they articulate the view that antisemitism should not be conflated with criticisms of Israel and Israel’s actions towards Palestinians, and anti-Zionism. Somewhat paradoxically, they appear to accept the argument that Jeremy Corbyn is a member of the so-called ‘hard left’ and more sympathetic to Palestinians than Jews; Corbyn is not seen as having any feel for what it is to be Jewish or with antisemitism.
It so happens that I became the butt of these contestations on the email discussion list back in March 2019, as I had organised a screening of the film made by Jewish Voice for Labour. Afterwards, there was an email debate about whether or not Jackie Walker was in fact antisemitic as demonstrated through the film. Although she is not on the email list, I shared these concerns with her and those on the discussion list. I was therefore reviled for failing to keep the list confidential and allowing Jackie to see their comments about her. I had not been aware that I had signed any pledge about feminist confidentiality, although I was aware that sharing this discussion outside a feminist circle (however defined) could be problematic. Several members decided to leave the email discussion list because of what they called a ‘breach of confidentiality or trust’. My brand of feminism is about sharing and caring about women who claim to be feminists (as Jackie does) and their disadvantaged position in society.
For me, this revives the hurt and anger of the Spare Rib debates as it seems to revolve around how we see ourselves as Jewish and feminist. Whilst Nira is not involved with this particular email debate, the question for me is about what Nira and I share in our analysis of questions of antisemitism, Zionism, Israel and Palestinians and the ways they are embedded within feminism and anti-racism. Whilst we share a love and commitment to being Jewish (or, as Nira argues, after Deutscher) and to involvement in Jewish tragedy, we have taken different stances on the Zionist project in relation to socialism. However, in light of the rise in neoliberalism, we share a greater commitment to a critique of the Israeli government’s policies.
Finally, as Nira argues, the issue of feminism is crucial if only because these movements and ideologies have deeply affected the lives of many women in Britain either directly or as part of their involvement in activism (see Yuval-Davis, 1984, p. 22). She also shows in her new framing introduction to her 1984 Spare Rib article how the debate about ‘the new antisemitism’ in the US today has a ‘more specific feminist context … around the 2018 Women’s March’ (Yuval-Davis, 2020). This not only particularly maps onto her work on intersectionality but also is vitally important in our contesting the rise of the populist right internationally, its links with the Israeli government and its policies on Palestine. We urgently need feminist debate.