Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination

Through a forensic and detailed excavation, Camila Bassi illustrates the subtle and insidious ways antisemitic tropes, presumptions and fallacies continue to creep into a wide range of academic arguments and left-wing political policies. Without being an apologist for the Right’s weaponization of antisemitism or for the oppressive and racist policies of the Israeli state, Bassi illuminates with clarity and precision how ‘Jews’ too often get pinned to particular tendencies, class positions, personalities and motives, how Zionism is too easily equated with European colonialism and how the distinct history of Jews in Europe is too readily discounted, dismissed or discredited as having any relevance to contemporary discussions of race, racism or racial politics. Indeed, at the heart of this book is not simply a critique of antisemitism, but a critique of identity politics writ large and the emphasis in contemporary academic and political debate to approach race not as an historical construction with varied and complex manifestations but as the result of a single event – i.e., British colonialism. The danger is a two-dimensional understanding of race and racial histories that provides limited opportunities for anti-racist politics. In response Bassi provides an alternative and far more hopeful left-wing vision. One that is resolute in its universalism and in its commitment to solidarities that can acknowledge and yet transcend the unaccountable differences that define us. Singular in its willingness to swim against the currents of so many contemporary political tides, this is a substantive academic work that should stimulate academic debate far beyond its immediate subject matter.

Outcast makes an original and unusually valuable contribution to the existing literature on contemporary Left antisemitism, partly because it’s written by an insider. Camila Bassi is an academic and activist on the anti-racist Left who draws on her personal knowledge and experience, as well as on historic and current scholarly work, to explain why today’s anti-racist Left fails to recognise Jews as a persecuted minority but regards them instead as racists. Dr Bassi is in a unique position to expose and explain the current Left’s obsessive hostility towards Jews, Israel, and Zionism, and also to show how it can overcome this hostility, and why it is so important for the Left, as well as for Jews, that it do so. This compelling book, drawing as it does on direct experience as well as on key scholarly work, provides a searching analysis which also demonstrates some welcome hope of redemption.

Camila Bassi's critique of antisemitism affirms an anti-racism rooted in universalism - a much needed corrective to those sections of the Left that have abandoned this foundation.