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L'institut Canadien de Recherches sur le Judaisme

Analysis

What Britain’s Corbyn Era Can Teach American Jews

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the Labour Party General Election Launch 2017.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Jeremy Corbyn speaking at the Labour Party General Election Launch 2017.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Shany Mor

Jewish Chronicle, Apr. 24, 2025

“Britain is just ten or so years ahead of the US. And the long march of geostrategic antisemitism’s institutional capture in the US is only about a decade behind Britain’s.” 

This month marks five years since Jeremy Corbyn stepped down as leader of the Labour Party, and a chapter of acute anxiety for British Jews seemed to have come to a conclusion. Corbyn’s five-year tenure brought out into the political mainstream a battle about Israel and antisemitism that had been raging in left-wing circles for decades.

And while Corbyn is now gone as a formidable political power, Corbynism lives on as a mix of domestic resentments and foreign projections.

The most damaging misunderstanding about Corbyn and the problem of antisemitism was the instinctive framing of the issue as a prejudice, rather than as a fully formed ideology. Antisemitism, in this sense, was understood as a kind of personal moral failing, the accusation against Corbyn being that in his dotage he had held on to outdated stereotypes about a certain minority group.

This is the genesis of the now clichéd rejoinder that he hadn’t “an antisemitic bone in his body”. But the problem was never a personal weakness, but a comprehensive worldview that is remarkably entrenched in much of the Western left, and which rests on three pillars.

First, that Israel is essentially evil, a state and a society conceived in sin, and a bearer of inherited and ineffaceable guilt. Second, that Western, and especially American Jews, operate a powerful network of moneyed interests seeking to silence critique of Israeli sin. And third, that the Holocaust, while no doubt horrific, wasn’t especially unique, and that anyway the Israelis were guilty of similar crimes…..SOURCE

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