What is antisemitism? What are its roots? How has it been politically weaponised? And how can it be opposed? JUDY BEISHON critically reviews a recent book on the issue.
Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism
By Rachel Shabi
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2025, £10-99
It has been during the war on Gaza, with its massive and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli state, that Rachel Shabi has published her book about antisemitism. What she describes as “a wider global spate of antisemitism” – its reemergence from “dormancy” – came after the start of that war.
Shabi clearly states that criticism of the Israeli state’s actions is not antisemitic, and she condemns the war on Gaza and the brutal occupation of Palestinian territories. She also acknowledges that false allegations of antisemitism have been used against protesters in the anti-war movements. At the same time, she argues that “in different ways and to varying degrees, we are all bad at talking about or understanding antisemitism” and she sets herself the task of raising understanding on the issue. But while making many apt observations and providing some useful information, her approach and confusion does not deliver greater clarity on the subject.
Some of the most muddled parts of the book are on the approach to antisemitism taken by the ‘left’, a broad part of the political spectrum that Shabi lumps together as if there are not significant differences within it. She criticises the left for having “ceded the space on antisemitism – responding to accusations of it, sure, but not taking up the fight against it as a left-wing cause”. In trying to identify the exact deficiencies, she cites left individuals minimising accusations of antisemitism on the basis of them coming from ‘white people using their privilege’. She points out that Jewish people should not be dismissed as white or using privilege to draw attention to their own issues, or that doing so detracts from fighting racism against black people. Basically, she seeks to remind anti-war protesters, anti-racist activists and all on the left that genuine antisemitism does exist and must be opposed, along with other racism and division.
She also takes up incidences of careless language that – often unintended by the person using it – can be construed as possibly or definitely antisemitic. As she recognises, antisemitic comments can upset and alarm Jewish people – as even can comments that are dismissive of their fears about antisemitism. She points out that some of those fears – for example of deportation – might not appear rational in today’s conditions, but are a consequence of Jewish history as well as a reaction to media coverage of antisemitism today.
Non-scientific approach
However, unfortunately her book makes no attempt to dissect the reports of antisemitic incidences today in order to determine what proportion of them are genuine cases, as opposed to politically motived, false allegations or criticisms of the Israeli government’s brutality. A third category to examine would be incidences where a Jewish person has been targeted due to being viewed as associated with that brutality just because they are Jewish. While any such association should be rejected, it isn’t possible to understand antisemitism today in all its aspects without analysing what lies behind attacks on Jewish people when they occur.
Instead, Shabi is overly alarmist and condemnatory in a sweeping way against the left and anti-war protesters, for instance by stating that “anger over Israel’s war in Gaza is being viciously turned against Jewish people outside of Israel”. Shocking attacks like the May 2025 killing of two young Israeli embassy staff in Washington DC, in the US, are most likely linked to anger against the war, but they’re not indicative of the overall character of the anti-war movements and even less so of the left within them. Shabi rails against a polarising environment on antisemitism, yet falls into inadvertently promoting polarisation herself.
She notes that Western political leaders and the media, while shouting against antisemitism are “often the source of racism” targeting black, Asian or Muslim communities. Her conclusion on this is that “one of our responsibilities is to generate a language and analysis that are neither led by nor replicate the noxiously divisive, racial-hierarchy-producing contours of our mainstream political conversation on such issues”. Yes, but such analysis has to start with a class approach – a recognition of the class interests in society. Shabi comes close to getting there when she states: “Our baddies are systems: crony capitalism, surveillance capitalism, unregulated markets, exploitative multinationals, environment-wrecking industries, sweatshop manufacturers and wage-slave gig economies”. How about saying: ‘capitalism’ full stop? Capitalism, a system that in any of its forms breeds competitive division between capitalists and ‘divide and rule’ division among ordinary people.
In failing to clearly identify capitalism and imperialism as being responsible for antisemitism today, Shabi even falls partially into shadowy speech that can be found in the conspiracy theories she opposes, such as when she refers to the “real enemy” as being “the power too big to see, the force of European racial thinking and colonialism”.
Also her ‘off-white’ theme, which is the book’s title, can only cause confusion. It stems from her argument that many Jewish people regard themselves as white and are viewed by other people as white, but at the same time they can feel less white due to the effect of antisemitism. The theme appears in varying contexts in the book, with important qualifications having to be made at times, such as when she mentions a 2023 survey in Britain that showed high levels of abuse and discrimination against Gypsy Roma and Traveller communities who have been coded as ‘white’.
In keeping with her non-scientific approach on the types, sources and level of antisemitism, Shabi draws her information on ‘leftists’ from anecdotal conversations rather than from examining the positions of left organisations. She lives in the UK and describes herself as a socialist, yet she makes no comment on the ideas of the Socialist Party, despite us being unmissable on the large demonstrations in London against the Gaza war, with many stalls, sellers of the Socialist and tens of thousands of leaflets. We have always opposed genuine antisemitism; we would not dismiss fear of it as ‘white privilege’; and we have a socialist programme that advocates for the only form of society that can eventually eradicate it.
Corbynite left
On the 2015-2019 tidal wave of accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, Shabi uncritically quotes an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) finding that the Labour leaders had not dealt with antisemitism effectively enough. She doesn’t comment on the validity of the EHRC’s conclusions, which in fact were politically motivated distortions. (See The Establishment HRC Does The Job, in Socialism Today No.244, December-January 2020/2021)
She goes on to say that people voicing concerns over antisemitism “might at times voice it unreasonably and disproportionately – as I believe was sometimes the case during the Corbyn years. And it might well be that the Jewish groups raising the issues are prominent organisations – like the US Anti-Defamation League or the Board of Deputies of British Jews. But it is not those Jewish individuals and community bodies that are making the decision to centre parliamentary politics on such claims, or to plaster them on our front pages and jam our airwaves with the issue, day in day out. That is where the ‘privilege’ is. That is where the power in this equation truly lies”.
Those sentences wash over reality. Corbyn was seen as a major threat by the ruling class because of the growing appeal to workers and youth of his pro-working class stance. Shabi fails to see the extent to which allegations of antisemitism were seized on in establishment circles as a main weapon against Corbynism. The accusations were massively disproportionate to the reality and were not based on genuine concern about antisemitism. Organisations like the Board of Deputies – dominated by pro-capitalists – were fully engaged with that political defamation project and should not be separated in intention from the capitalist media. (See The Great Anti-Semitism Smear Campaign, in Socialism Today No.254, December-January 2021/2022)
Shabi points out that ordinary Jewish people did not want the copious media coverage, which made them feel less safe because of the polarisation being whipped up. Yes, that was another indication that the accusations were not in reality about combatting antisemitism.
The unwarranted tirade against Labour’s left on antisemitism was cultivated in part from a backdrop of certain political weaknesses on the issue of Israel-Palestine in much of the left. For example, parts of the left do not condemn attacks on Israeli civilians by right-wing Islamist political parties like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; and many don’t differentiate between the classes in Israel, so don’t view Israeli workers as having a role to play against Israeli capitalism.
Shabi bemoans that “after the 2023 outbreak of war in Gaza, it can be harder to see Jewish people as a racialised minority, as the oppressor ‘side’ in Israel who are nonetheless allies against oppression and also simultaneously vulnerable to race hatred and attack”. She is right to view Jewish workers worldwide and those in Israel as potential allies against oppression, despite most of the latter at present not seeing an alternative to their ruling class’s terrible oppression of the Palestinians. But Jewish capitalists, including the Israeli ruling class, will be no such ally. Their interests lie in siding with other capitalists rather than with struggles against oppression.
Early in the book, Shabi tells of how the 2017 anti-Trump women’s marches that erupted across America became divided by accusations of antisemitism. In particular, the march organisers were being told they should denounce the Nation of Islam in order to root out antisemitism. The book doesn’t say that the organisers should have clearly differentiated themselves politically from right-wing political and social aspects of the Nation of Islam’s ideas – publicly criticising those ideas. This would not necessarily prevent ‘united front’ protest action with an organisation that is criticised, though that should be contingent on assessing its overall character.
Instead Shabi resorts to hand-wringing, writing: “Looking back at the Women’s March and Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, what’s striking is how easily antisemitism ruptured these mass movements… To watch both movements riven by the same weakness was dismaying. To see such fissures draw such extreme media attention, thus escalating the tensions, was mortifying. And to then contend with the assumptions, within progressive camps, that antisemitism was getting special attention because of privilege was a devastating twist of the knife”.
The issue of Corbyn having presided over Labour’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism in 2018 remerged recently when his parliamentary colleague Zarah Sultana MP described it as a capitulation and a serious mistake. She reminded that the definition wrongly equated antisemitism with anti-Zionism and warned that any new party being formed by Corbyn, herself and others will need to withstand the kind of pressure that Corbyn came under when he reluctantly succumbed to it. However, while that is true, Sultana stressed that she is an anti-Zionist without putting forward any solution to the Israel-Palestine national conflict. As well as building the anti-war movement and international solidarity with the Palestinians’ struggle for liberation, socialists should oppose the capitalist, Zionist Israeli state and advocate socialist change in Israel: through the building of independent workers’ organisations with a programme for removing capitalism, ending national oppression, guaranteeing the rights of minorities, and defending the right of both Palestinians and Israelis to have their own state.
Why a materialist understanding is necessary
The author suggests that Jewish people can feel ‘off white’ due to the role played by white elites in the historical persecution of Jews, as well as due to modern antisemitism. Yet, while not all Jewish people are white, neither were all the elites who persecuted Jews historically. Historian Geraldine Heng is quoted: “England was the first, and England was the worst”, referring to the vilification of Jews in the Middle Ages. But antisemitism dates back to antiquity in the Middle East and elsewhere, including to the period of the Roman empire.
The material basis for the historic persecution is touched on by mentioning that after Jews were invited to England by William the Conqueror they were not allowed to own land but they could lend money and receive interest at a time when the Christian church said that such lending was immoral. If the author had used a Marxist analysis of feudal society, she could have explained that the feudal mode of production and wealth of the elites was based on agricultural production by serfs and that Jews were mainly playing a social, intermediary role between the classes in feudal society – landowners and peasantry – through engaging in global East-West trade and money lending.
Shabi points out that the ruling elites taxed the money-lending and so profited from Jews. But it should be added that while the money-lending and mercantile role played by Jews was used by the nobility, it also undermined their wealth and power, which wasn’t based on trade. Also, the money-lending contributed to the ruin of a layer of both the landowners and peasantry who couldn’t repay their debts. These factors lay behind the restrictions that were placed on Jews, and the Christian church’s condemnation of usury – the interests of the ruling class were threatened. And they lay behind the suspicion and anger of the peasantry towards the mercantile activities being carried out by Jews. As Abram Leon explained in his book, The Jewish Question, a Marxist analysis written around two years before his death in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944, in medieval times Jews were a social group providing a specific economic function, and persecution arose largely as a reaction to that function rather than for religious reasons.
Shabi refers to atrocities like the massacre of York’s Jewish population in 1190 “egged on by noblemen seeking to wipe out debts owed to Jewish moneylenders”. In 1290, England’s Jewish population was expelled – an exclusion that lasted for 366 years – with all their assets passing to the Crown. “Other parts of Europe followed England’s lead in expelling their Jewish populations whenever they needed a quick cash boost or a political outlet for a dissatisfied population” – ie, for money grabbing by the ruling classes along with playing ‘divide and rule’ through scapegoating Jews, though the above class interests underlay those persecutions.
When moving on to antisemitism under capitalism, Shabi does so without saying that it was a change of system to a different mode of production, based on mass production and commodity exchange, and therefore with different ruling class interests. As capitalist-owned industrial production started to develop under feudalism, the capitalists were pushing intermediary Jews out of commerce. So the social role played by Jews collided with the early capitalists as well as the feudal classes, creating a new historical era of further persecution and migration of Jews, but also the integration of a layer of them into industrial labour. Later, when Jewish populations in Eastern Europe fled from pogroms and poverty in the late 19th and early 20th century, another form of antisemitism arose, involving petit-bourgeois layers in the West who feared that their living standards would be affected by competition from small business and artisanal Jewish immigrants. Nazi propaganda drew on that fear in Germany before and during the Holocaust, the slaughter of a third of the world’s Jewish population.
Rather than drawing out the root causes of antisemitism, Shabi points more to the superstructure of it, such as when she concludes: “Racism and antisemitism, invented and propagated in different forms across the centuries, are tools used by those in power to maintain their power”. She elaborates on the ‘scientific racism’ that was developed in the 1700s and leant on until the middle of the 20th century. It was used to justify European colonialism across the globe, and in Europe accompanied “antisemitism’s most vicious phase, in which Jews were dehumanised and derided as filthy, ‘Asiatic’, ‘Oriental’, scheming, rootless, parasitic, disloyal and greedy. At the same time, they were held responsible both for the ills of industrial, metropolitan capitalism and for the looming evil of socialism, because, of course, Jewish people were behind every dastardly plot to tear apart the very fabric of society”. Not covered in the book is that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many Jews in Europe did indeed gravitate towards socialist ideas, with the workers’ movements having a number of prominent leaders from a Jewish background, including Leon Trotsky in Russia.
Zionism
Regarding Zionist agitation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Shabi quotes Theodor Herzl, a leading proponent, who in 1895 proposed it should be “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation, as opposed to barbarism”. Shabi recognises that “undoubtedly, he and other Zionists were imbued with the European colonial thinking of the time”. The book also refers to Zionism’s “roots in the Jewish experience of centuries of exclusion and persecution in Europe”, that for the advocates of political Zionism it was necessary to escape from. Nevertheless, when in 1917 Lord Balfour in Britain wrote a declaration of support for the establishment of a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, it was not a goal that most Jewish people were seeking. Shabi comments that “Palestine was hardly the destination of choice for most Jews in dire straits” and that its Jewish population grew as a consequence of “Zionist mobilising and borders closing around the globe”. As late as 1947, 250,000 Jews in Western Europe were stuck in Displaced Persons camps, with emigration to Palestine being one of their few options.
The sweep of immigration into Israel of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries was also not mainly due to support for Zionism in those communities but because of the worsening conditions they were facing, especially following Israel’s mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, the ‘Nakba’, together with Zionist persuasion and manoeuvring.
The forerunners of the Socialist Party were not against the creation of a Jewish state somewhere on the planet, as Trotsky mentioned in his writings. But they did not support the creation of Israel in Palestine, recognising the national conflict that would arise. However, today Israel is established as a developed state with a national consciousness – which, as Shabi puts it, “gives meaning and identity to millions of people, and so can’t be taken out of the equation of any solution”.
In deploring the horrors inflicted on Gaza she asks why Western nations have provided Israel with military aid and diplomatic cover. Her immediate answer is: “The most obvious rationale fits a timeworn story, of white, Western nations carrying out or turning a blind eye to the most sickening atrocities against brown people, whose lives are considered worthless”. Overly limited explanations like that are interspersed in the book with more elaborated points. On the issue of the motives of Western imperialism, she later refers to the US in the Cold War period and notes: “Having battle-winning Israel as its client state in a region that was closely aligned with the Soviet Union held obvious appeal. That was the start of what is now, as the hackneyed phrase goes, an ‘unshakeable alliance’ of unqualified diplomatic cover and unparalleled military support for Israel”. Those two sentences omit to point out the great fear that US imperialism had of the potential for revolutions to threaten capitalism in the Middle East. Today, Israeli capitalism is still viewed by the Western powers as an important ally for their interests in the Middle East – though the relationships have come under increasing strain as the aggressive barbarity of Netanyahu’s regime has been going too far for their interests.
Far right and antisemitism
The book expectedly covers the fact that leaders like Trump in the US and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and rising votes for populist right or far right parties in France, Germany, the UK and elsewhere, have meant increased racism in mainstream politics and the media, and with that, “antisemitism slipped in”. Jewish people in all classes are targeted by the far right, including billionaire George Soros for putting billions of dollars into liberal and migrant-friendly causes – though of course they don’t mind his ‘anti-communism’.
When right-wing leaders have not been directly antisemitic, their general racist rhetoric has been seized on by far-right groups and individuals to bring antisemitism into the picture, for instance Orban’s posters have been decorated with anti-Jewish graffiti and “swastikas appeared alongside pro-Trump slogans”. Shabi writes that in the first two years of Trump’s first presidency the racial intolerance he unleashed led to a doubling of antisemitic assaults.
She digs into the conspiracy theories of the far right – and the ‘alt right’ as white supremacist groups are often called today, including the ‘Great Displacement Theory’. This contends that Jews are conspiring to flood the west with mainly non-white, non-Christian migrants. The 2011 killing of 77 people at a youth camp in Norway; the 2018 shooting dead of eleven at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; the 2019 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand which killed 51; the 2019 killing of 23 shoppers in El Paso, Texas; the 2019 attack on a synagogue in California killing one; the 2019 attack outside a synagogue in Halle, Germany killing two; the 2022 Buffalo, New York killing of 13 in a supermarket: the perpetrators in all these cases and more had expressed belief in the ‘great displacement’. The targets were different minorities – black people, Hispanics, Jews and others – and although the perpetrators didn’t in every case refer to Jews as being the orchestrators of ‘displacement’, they are commonly regarded as such in the media circles of the alt right.
Also, references to ‘control by Jews’ are “rampant all over QAnon forums” – QAnon being a right-wing conspiracy theory network in the US. Shabi argues that “antisemitism is, at its heart, a conspiracy about power. It is the racist imagining of a shadowy cabal of Jewish people manipulating and pulling strings for their own personal gain”. And that the point of antisemitism is “to confuse us over where actual power lies and to dilute and repel our efforts to confront the social, racial and economic injustices emanating from those real structures of power”. Those points have some validity regarding antisemitism today, especially by the far right, but are too divorced from historical and other contexts to be an overriding definition.
Israel and the far right
The populist and far right’s use of antisemitism doesn’t prevent them from adopting a pro-Israel stance, as a smokescreen for their antisemitism or as an attempt at image rehabilitation following past antisemitism. Also, they can find common ground with the Israeli ruling class regarding the idea of mono-ethnicity and for agitation against Muslims. The fact that the likes of Orban lean on antisemitism is no problem for Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, as for him, their alliance with the Israeli right is paramount.
Meanwhile, as Shabi writes, academics, journalists and others in the US and much of Europe – especially Germany – live in fear of being accused of antisemitism just for reporting facts about the war in Gaza. She mentions the “grotesque irony” of cases like Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, a son of Holocaust survivors, who was labelled as antisemitic by German officials for making an award-winning documentary about Palestinians.
Shabi would not have been surprised by a report in the New York Times on 21 May 2025, about a mainly Christian right-wing thinktank, Heritage Foundation, producing a fundraising pitch for a campaign named Project Esther – to “destroy the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States”. It attacked some Jewish billionaires – including Soros – for ‘leading the way’ and declared as targets “virtually all attempts to shift US foreign policy in a less pro-Israel direction”. The article noted that Trump has pursued policies that reflect Project Esther, including defunding universities on the pretext of punishing antisemitism and attempting to deport Palestinian activists. Project Esther wants him to go further – to sack targeted university staff and deny the right to protest.
While right-wing Christian Evangelists supply funds and ideas for such attacks, 64% of US Jewish voters disapprove of Trump’s approach to antisemitism according to a GBAO poll in May 2025. They can see the dangers of the populist right posing as protecting the safety of Jews.
Shabi points out that the Israeli right draws its greatest support internationally from Christian Evangelism rather than from Jewish people, and in particular from the majority within it who adhere to Christian Zionism. Much of the support base for the US Republicans and Trump lies in sections of those communities and their leaders, from which millions of dollars a year are sent to Jewish settlement projects in the Palestinian West Bank.
While not discounting the considerable pressure exerted by the US right-wing Jewish lobby AIPAC, which pledged more than $100 million in the 2024 US primaries towards standing candidates against the ‘Squad’ – a group of left Democratic congresspeople who have criticised the ultra-right Israeli regime – the largest US pro-Israel lobby group is ‘Christians United for Israel’.
Shabi explains that Christian Zionists believe they have a biblical duty to defend Israel, on the basis that the ‘second coming of Christ’ won’t happen unless all Jewish people are in Israel. The Israeli right embrace them as ‘no better friends on earth’, but the incredible paradox is that Christian Zionism has been described as one of the largest antisemitic movements in the world, not least because its adherents believe that after the ‘second coming’, Jews will have to convert to Christianity or die.
Another aspect examined in the book is the way a concept of ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ has become regularly used by Western pro-capitalist politicians. Trump, Marine Le Pen, Tony Blair, Romano Prodi, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Helmut Kohl, are among the many who have used the term. Shabi writes: “The Judeo-Christian heritage which has been spoken about politically from the postwar period onwards is not actually a thing. It isn’t real, religiously or philosophically or even culturally”. She elaborates: “If anything, the actual shared heritage, historically, is Judeo-Islamic”. The ‘Judeo-Christian’ label suits certain pro-capitalist politicians, though, to aid racist propaganda against Muslims, or in helping to justify Western capitalist alliances with the Israeli state.
What are Shabi’s conclusions in the book? She notes: “When our political conversation is mostly about the supposed antisemitism of pro-Palestine marches and college students, we are not talking about the dangerous and violent forms of antisemitism in our societies. Meanwhile, this whole dynamic – fixate on the left, absolve the right – cements the idea that complaints of antisemitism are politically motivated and thereby not real… The antisemitism itself, whatever its source, remains unaddressed, causing chaos and spreading fear. It exists only to be instrumentalised”.
However, unfortunately Shabi has nothing to offer regarding ways to oppose antisemitism or a path towards removing it from society. The penultimate page of her short concluding chapter, flags up “US universities where members of staff from the Israel studies and Middle East studies faculties did not agree with each other over politics but nonetheless wrote joint letters urging for campus discussions to be held in civil tones. It sounds small, but the fact that academics from these faculties could unite over such statements actually worked. It set a tone and led the way”.
Small steps are welcome, including regarding debate and discussion. But socialists must continue to build the anti-war movements and socialist ideas within them, and reject the attacks and slurs that are aimed at dividing and curbing them. At the same time, incidences of genuine antisemitism in society should always be opposed by anti-racists and socialists, and action taken against them when necessary – whether through protests and trade union actions or through taking disciplinary action in any cases of it within workers’ movements.
This is while recognising that only a socialist programme can seriously provide a route to countering antisemitism and all other forms of racism, division and oppression, and show the way forward towards eliminating them entirely.