The Marginalia Review of Books, 2022

Semitism has no actual knowledge of Jews and is, instead, a construction, projection, imagination. This is manifest, for example, in preventive pedagogies aimed at individualsʼ moral betterment from anti-Semitic thought and behavior to anti-anti-Semitism as a liberal personhood. The perhaps starkest example of this approach is the International Holocaust Remembrance Allianceʼs definition of anti-Semitism as "a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews." Notably in the absence of any knowledge and experience Anti-anti-Semitism, Lapidot explains, "categorically rejects in fact any knowledge of the Jewish"; it operates "as mere perception, construction, projection, imagination, fantasy, and myth." Lapidot describes this anti-anti-Semitic problematization of Jews as an epistemic dis-figuration, namely, as a "perception of the Jews as a historical human collective, whose existence, as a collective, lies outside the epistemic realm, outside the realm of knowledge, philosophy, and thought, and so, strictly speaking, outside of any perception or imagination, a non-figure or disfigure. It would be for this reason illegitimate, and philosophically invalid in principle, epistemically fallacious, to criticize, antagonize, or oppose this human collective, to be anti-Jewish, not because Jews are essentially ʻgood,ʼ i.e., not because the ʻantiʼ is wrong, but because ʻthe Jewishʼ stands for, manifests, or ʻfiguresʼ no specific content, no specific idea." According to Lapidotʼs

SUNY Press, 2020

In my new book I show how after the Holocaust philosophy tended to fight anti-Semitism by dimissing any thinking about Jews, including Jewish thought.

Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism , 2019

This paper argues that antizionism must be understood, like the antisemitism that came before it, as an ideology. Here I draw upon Arendt's definition of ideology as a radical distortion of social and political relations. I draw also upon Fine and Spencer's understanding of the Jewish question as the antisemitic reaction to Jewish emancipation. I argue that antizionism is a reconfiguration of that reaction in the context of Jews' modern emancipation in the form of national self-determination in the State of Israel. While that modern reaction, antizionism, displays both continuity and discontinuity with the antisemitism that came before it, it remains a manifestation of the Jewish question.

Unpublished, 2023

October Reflections: Antisemitism, Antizionism and the Jewish Question Abstract This presentation tries to make some sense of the aftermath of the events of 7 October in which approximately 1200 Israeli and non-Israelis were raped, tortured, kidnapped and slaughtered by the terror group Hamas. My argument is that we can try and make sense of this aftermath through three interrelated thoughts. The first is an understanding of the irrationality of the Jewish question as the doppelgänger or ‘evil twin’ of the rationality of Jewish emancipation. The second is the idea that antizionism has come to supplant, or, at the least is coming to supplant antisemitism as the latest iteration of this so-called ‘question’; and third, is the combined effect of these two ideas on the meaning of Jewish emancipation today.

European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2018

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013

Abstract Since the breakdown of the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David in 2000 and the start of the second Palestinian Intifada there has been a voluminous literature that asserts that hostility to Israel and Zionism is a new form of anti-Semitism. This essay critiques the ‘new anti-Semitism’ view. Reversing the method that Plato uses in the Republic, the analysis moves from microcosm (an imaginary ride on a London bus) to macrocosm (the Middle East). In the process, the author argues that anti-Semitism is best defined not by an attitude to Jews but by the figure of ‘the Jew’. In the light of the analysis, and bearing in mind the variety of possible reasons for hostility to Israel or Zionism, it is difficult to see how the ‘new anti-Semitism’ view can be sustained.

I am very grateful to Maurice Samuels, architect of this intellectu counter, and to Hindy Najman, Ivan Marcus, Francesca Trivellato, and Franks for the gift of engagement they offer. That engagement stag seems to me, some of the most basic and difficult questions imaginab a historian. How can we grasp another person's thought world? With interpretive practices should we approach the words, whether spoken or ten, that mediate and communicate that world? How do we determine th gree of continuity or discontinuity in those thoughts, since even at the of the individual states of consciousness are so unstable across time? Mov ing from individual to group, how do the thoughts and ideas of one person interact with and affect those of another?

Journal of Communication and Religion , 2016

H-France Salon, 2019