Antisemitism and the American Far Left
Cambridge University Press, 8/19/2013
EAN 9781107657007, ISBN10: 1107657008
Paperback, 328 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Stephen H. Norwood has written the first systematic study of the American far left's role in both propagating and combating antisemitism. This book covers Communists from 1920 onward, Trotskyists, the New Left and its black nationalist allies, and the contemporary remnants of the New Left. Professor Norwood analyzes the deficiencies of the American far left's explanations of Nazism and the Holocaust. He explores far left approaches to militant Islam, from condemnation of its fierce antisemitism in the 1930s to recent apologies for jihad. Norwood discusses the far left's use of long-standing theological and economic antisemitic stereotypes that the far right also embraced. The study analyzes the far left's antipathy to Jewish culture, as well as its occasional efforts to promote it. He considers how early Marxist and Bolshevik paradigms continued to shape American far left views of Jewish identity, Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism.
1. Promoting a socialism of fools
the new left's debt to the old left
2. American communists' tangled responses to antisemitism and nazism, 1920–39
3. World War II
the limits of American far left concern for European Jewry
4. Assimilation abandoned
communist resistance to antisemitism and celebration of Jewish culture in the immediate postwar period
5. 'Two, four, six, eight, we demand a Jewish state'
American communist support for partition and the Jewish war of liberation, 1947–8
6. 'Fiends in human form'
taking conspiratorial antisemitism to a new level
7. The Jewish question discarded
far left hostility to Jews and Israel, 1956–73
8. Shaping the next generations
the persistence of far left antisemitism, 1973–2012.