Blaming the left – Antony Lerman puts Rachel Shabi’s book under the microscope
JVL Introduction
Rachel Shabi is an experienced journalist, of Iraqi Jewish heritage, who has been outspoken as a critic both of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and of those on left she sees as failing to take antisemitism seriously.
Her new book, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, has been much praised, for example in cover quotes from Naomi Klein – “Supple, generous and original” – and George Monbiot – “Wise, thoughtful and engaging.”
In his review written for Declassified UK, which we republish below, Antony Lerman is far more critical. While Shabi correctly identifies the way Holocaust memory has been manipulated to justify Israel’s devastating reaction to October 2023, her focus on blaming the left for not acknowledging “Jewish anguish” is a major weakness, Lerman argues.
Where Shabi writes “Broadly, much of the Corbyn-supporting left minimised the problem, while the right hyperbolised it”, Lerman responds: “Frankly this is a stunning piece of oversimplification, and loaded to boot.”
He points out the absence of any reference in the book to Jewish Voice for Labour which he says had been “at the forefront of pushing back against antisemitism accusations against Corbyn personally and the party in general.”
A charitable view might be that Shabi now wants to work together with old adversaries and therefore avoided publicly reinforcing past divisions. Building unity on the Jewish left is an urgent task, but it requires all parties to be clear that lessons have been learned and there will be no repeat of the betrayals so many have experienced.
NB: Antony Lerman’s book Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? explores how antisemitism has been redefined over recent decades, casting Israel, problematically defined as the ‘persecuted collective Jew’, as one of its main targets.
NWI
This article was originally published by DeclassifiedUK on Mon 12 May 2025. Read the original here.
No closer to the truth about antisemitism
Rachel Shabi’s new book, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, erases efforts by Jewish leftists to tackle the problem.
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Thanks Tony for this comprehensive review of what I found to be a shoddy and frankly weird book concerning the lack of understanding of even recent history and the broad ‘off-white’ framing (which in fact she does correctly discuss in the context of discrimination Mizrahi Jews face in Israel).
The chutzpah of being the ‘truth about antisemitism’ is off the scale.
Shabi as you point out bought into the idea that the left took its eye off antisemitism among racisms – that’s never been my experience. I find it offensive that apparently we need to reclaim it as an antiracist cause.
But the book has achieved the aim of being a talking point in liberal circles and I can’t help feeling Shabi is an opportunist who is spreading more heat than light. She seems like the left of centre foil to the David Baddiel opportunist centre right. If there’s room in the bookstore, we’ll fill it…
I recall now this lecture by Shabi in which she says Labour’s antisemitism crisis was real, quoting David Renton, who wrote another lamentable book, and she rehashed ‘muralgate’.
British Jews and the psychodrama of the Corbyn years
https://youtu.be/52GA0S3xvOA?si=aKprwg0XiL252IoL
Funniest bit in book:
“Whatever your view, the subject remains acrimonious and polarising – not unreasonably, but so much so that anyone who thinks I’ve just misrepresented the matter, with even one word out of place, will probably want to bin this book immediately.”
There are signs of a proper journalist – Shabi as far as I know is the only one apart from me maybe who tracked back to the original research that prompted the article that Diane Abbott then responded to in that Observer letter. But she tails off lamely with:
“Meanwhile, it is not true that British Jews are uniformly well-heeled, well-housed or well-employed.”
Well HERE’s one truth about antisemitism, or should I say CLAIMS of antisemitism (in a medialens piece from September, 2018):
In July, we conducted a ProQuest newspaper database search, which found the following hits for UK press articles mentioning:
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘antisemitism’ before May 2015 = 18 hits
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘antisemitism’ after May 2015 = 6,133 hits
None of the 18 mentions before May 2015 included any accusation that Corbyn was antisemitic. And it was not, as some people have claimed, that Corbyn, a leading anti-war MP, was unknown or unworthy of attention. ProQuest found 3,659 hits for ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ before May 2015.
https://www.medialens.org/2018/charges-without-merit-jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-norman-finkelstein-and-noam-chomsky/
And here’s another from John Bercow, the former Speaker of the House, in a GQ interview in November, 2019:
I myself have never experienced anti-Semitism from a member of the Labour Party… I do not myself believe that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic. That is my honest view… I’ve known him for the 22 years I’ve been in parliament. Even, actually, when I was a right-winger we got on pretty well. He was quite a personable individual.
He’s been very supportive of me and I’ve never detected so much as a whiff of anti-Semitism.
John Bercow: ‘I do not believe Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic’
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/john-bercow-interview
If he’d been saying the opposite, it would have been headline news right across the whole of the MSM, but in this instance every single main-stream media outlet omitted to cover it, which tells us all we need to know… even though we – ie just about everyone on the left (and the right!) – already new it.
… already knew it, even!
Excellent and well-argued review of Shabi’s sneaky capitulation to false accusations against the left.
Unfortunately books and articles like this perpetuate the notion that there is a thing called ‘The Left’ and that all those who are supposed to belong to it or identify with it, at any one time subscribe to the same set of (ever changing) beliefs. So that in recent years we have had people referring to themselves a ‘of the left’. And being ‘of the left’ nowadays seems to mean anti-racist, anti-apartheid, pro-Palestinian, pro-feminist, pro-Pride, pro-immigrant, concerned about ‘Climate change’, ‘calling out’ people who express views you disagree with, etc. One result is the growth of a group of people who are essentially ‘professional activists’ and in some cases seem to be able to make a good living out of it.
Attitudes to the things I catalogue in the first paragraph are I think better viewed upon two orthogonal axes, a liberal/conservative axis, and a left wing/right wing axis. Sometimes we have just got to accept what George Orwell said ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means having the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
I make no apology for saying that for me ‘left wing politics’ is, and for the past sixty odd years always has been, about the very unequal distribution of wealth and income in our society, which in turn brings with it a very unequal distribution of power. That is what I want to change. Quite a lot of ‘The Left’ seems to have forgotten this is a problem.
Wonderfully patient, convincing analysis. I am not surprised to read of the shortcomings of this book.
For many years I have been disappointed in Rachel Shabi’s work. When she appeared on the scene many of us mistakenly thought she was ‘one of us’ on the pro-Palestinian left, partly because her Iraqi background could have given us a new perspective . (In that context her interest in whether Jews can ever be permanently accepted as ‘white’ is of more interest to me than it apparently is to Anthony Lerner).
But it is the superficiality and careerism of the direction Shabi has taken that disappoints. Her writing and TV appearances always seem to confirm this.
I agree entirely with Lerner that it is ‘a Jewish imperative to work tirelessly setting right the injustice Palestinians have faced – a central task essential not only on its own terms but also because it would have a major impact on the hostility and antisemitism facing Jews today.’
I also very much liked the quote he cited about the study and discussion of antisemitism being “a dialogue of the deaf waged as a battle to the death”!
Hope to see you all on the march tomorrow – though in my case it will be more of a stumble as I’ve broken my toe.
An excellent review of Shabi’s shabby book which seems to be another case of Jewish exceptionalism. What is this anti-Semitism that forms the main topic of her book? Jews do not experience economic discrimination, police violence, institutional discrimination etc. It was mosques not synagogues that were attacked last summer.
Anti-Semitism has changed as the Jewish people have changed. As Abram Leon wrote ‘Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’
When Jews were fighting very real anti-Semitism in the 30s and 40s their allies were on the left. When Zionists weaponise anti-Semitism today they do it with the right and far-right. With the Trumps and Orbans.
What does cause anti-Semitism is when the Board of Deputies openly support the genocidal barbarities in Gaza in the name of Jews.
For Hannah Arendt the Holocaust was not as the Zionists insist, just about Jews. It was about the fascist attack on human diversity in all its forms. About eugenics, social Darwinism and racial cleansing. The sad fact is that this has found an echo in the so-called Jewish state.
As Michael Marrus wrote, for Arendt antisemitism was:
‘‘a manifestation of profound changes under way in European societies rather than a renewal of an ancient antipathy. Anti-Semitism was “symptomatic of something far deeper, namely the threatened collapse of all moral values under the pressure of imperialist politics.’
It is because the Holocaust for Zionism had no universal values, being unique, that Israel can perpetrate its genocide today in the name of the dead of the Holocaust.
If Shabi is relying Dave Renton’s appalling book on Labour Antisemitism that tells you all you need to know. In his book Renton speaks of Stephen Pollard, the Jewish Chronicle editor and ‘the care he took to expose left-wing antisemitism’. Which is not my recollection!
Antisemitism today is a threat to Palestinians not Jews. It is a marginal prejudice not a form of racism. We oppose anti-Semitism because it leads people to exculpate imperialism. Shabi is more concerned with virtue signalling.
Today on the Nakba march I saw Rachel Shabi walking with Edie Friedman of J-CORE , so I am glad of their basic commitment even though I have been frustrated by both of them at times.
BTW a JVL web moderator contacted me recently to point out that I had written ‘Lerner’ for ‘Lerman’ — apologies for that..
Amanda Sebestyen writes ‘it is ‘a Jewish imperative to work tirelessly setting right the injustice Palestinians have faced – a central task essential not only on its own terms but also because it would have a major impact on the hostility and antisemitism facing Jews today.’
I’m not Jewish, so I may be missing something here, but what is this ‘hostility and antisemitism’? How does it manifest itself in the UK? When I read the incidents which organisations like CAA and CST complain of I am sometimes inclined to wonder if a similar incident had happened to a different religious group, would anyone actually give a second thought to it?
I don’t know enough about the Lineker business to know whether he is culpable or not, but it does raise some interesting questions about prior knowledge.
I knew about the association Goebbels made between Jewish people and rats both in his words and his film; my wife did not. Nor did she know of the so called ‘Blood Libel’, though I did. Neither of us knew of the images first used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which were resurrected to advance the claim in March 2024 that the mascot of a University Challenge team was an example of antisemitism. The notion that everyone should be intimately aware of all the iconography associated with hatred of Jews merely promotes the notion of a Jewish exceptionalism, something I imagine most Jewish people would wish to dissociate themselves from.