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Stephen H. Norwood , Antisemitism and the American Far Left (New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013, $29.99). Pp. vii + 318. isbn 978 1 1076 5700 7 .
Reviews
Stephen Norwood's fascinating study delineates the roots and continuities of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism within the ranks of the American far left from the 1920s to the present day. Although his focus is on a small movement that never received electoral strength in the United States, the author's main premise is that the far left's influence far exceeded its numbers. In fact, he surmises that the far left's "contempt for Zionism and Israel and toleration of antisemitism have increasingly become part of mainstream opinion" (232). Norwood, who has written extensively about anti-Semitism in the American university past and present, outlines the history and characteristics of far-left anti-Semitic discourse, but fails to fully answer the question why academia and today's mass media have proven such fertile ground for hostility toward Jews and Israel.
After sifting through a plethora of writings and speeches by leading American communists and Trotskyists; by members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Black Panthers; by Old Leftists and New Leftists alike, Norwood concludes that the far left has all too often mirrored the anti-Semitic arguments on the extreme right and routinely downplayed the existence of anti-Semitism in favor of supporting socialist revolution and anticolonial struggles, even if perpetrated by militant Islamists fighting in the name of jihad. He notes that their anti-Semitic discourse embraces early twentieth-century conspiracy theories put forth in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by defining Jews as exploitative capitalists...