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9/13 Outcast: How Jews Were Banished From the Anti-Racist Imagination

Wednesday, September 13, 2:00 PM EDT

Note from Ann - this event supports the notion that progressives supporting justice for Palestine are unjustly claiming that Zionists’ claims of antisemitism are primarily being used to cover up Israeli crimes against Palestinians. I’ve included it as an opportunity for anyone interested in researching this argument in more depth as we all fight to resist the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Camila Bassi will talk about her new book 'Outcast', which explains how antisemitism has been cast out of anti-racist discourse on the Left.

Outcast is an exploration – and explanation – of how the very possibility of recognizing anti-Jewish racism has been displaced by a commonplace left wing belief that when Jewish people cry 'antisemitism!' their true intent is to cover up the racism propagated by Israel against the Palestinians.

This is related to the notion that racism is exclusively a colonial phenomenon of 'white over black' domination and it tends to reconstruct the old antisemitic form of 'the Jewish question', which asks what should be done about the harm that Jews pose to humanity.

Outcast shows that these notions, in the context of an orthodox contemporary understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, constructs Zionism and the Jews who are associated with it, into representations of racism incarnate, demanding the unprecedented aspiration to wipe out Israel.

As a route forward, Camila Bassi offers an analysis of the conflict through the wider historical context of European antisemitism, colonialism and nationalism, and she breaks from template of 'the Jewish question'.

Escaping the confines of identity politics, including one that tends, de facto, to re-naturalize 'race', Outcast makes the case for a genuinely universal politics of human liberation.

Camila Bassi : “Outcast is the product of my search for the reasons why sections of the Left are so singularly obsessed by Israel and are disposed to cast out those who identify as Jewish as unworthy of solidarity. This book elucidates how Jews have been banished as victims of racism by their demotion as the Left’s racist pariahs, while offering a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to the study of racism and to emancipatory politics.”

For more info and to register: Outcast: How Jews Were Banished From the Anti-Racist Imagination. Tickets, Wed 13 Sep 2023 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

Sponsored by the London Centre Study of Contemporary Antisemitism