Rachel Shabi: the Truth About Antisemitism

It is more important than ever, for the Labour Left, to have a route map to navigate the issue of antisemitism.  Bryn Griffiths, the presenter of the Labour Left Podcast sat down with Rachel Shabi to consider the truth about antisemitism. Some readers might be desperate to move on from antisemitism, the issue that bedevilled the Labour Left during the Corbyn period, but they would be very wrong.  It can never be right to back away from antisemitism and abandon our Jewish siblings, and Israel’s actions in Gaza make it more important than ever for us to get this issue right. So, discuss the matter of antisemitism we must, and Rachel Shabi is the ideal person to explain what antisemitism is and how the left should go about fighting it.Rachel Shabi has just published a new book - Off White the Truth About Antisemitism.  She’s a journalist, broadcaster and pundit who appears in papers such as the Guardian, the New York Times, Independent and the New York Review of Books. During the Left’s ascendancy in the Labour Party, she was an important ally. In her book, which is more than anything a guide to action, she offers an urgent analysis of one of the most divisive issues of our time.In the podcast, Rachel Shabi, addresses the truth about antisemitism.  She considers an Arab Jewish perspective; the contingency of whiteness; how the extreme right has managed to camp out on our anti-racist territory; how antisemitism so often derails the left; and, finally considers what a socialist antiracist approach to fighting antisemitism must look like.Rachel rises to the challenge set by +972 Magazine, a publication run by a group of Israeli and Palestinian journalists, that:“We need a serious, honest commitment to fighting antisemitism, in a leftist fashion, from a left perspective, both internally when we find it in our own ranks and also doubling down in fighting it on the right and not allowing the Israeli laundry machine to whitewash antisemitism on the right”.If you’re new to the Labour Left Podcast, please take a look at our back catalogue.  Previous episodes have included Bernard Regan from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Executive; Prof Harvey J Kaye on the legacy of the Communist Historians; Prof Corinne Fowler, talking about her book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain; Andrew Fisher telling the story behind For the Many Not the Few Labour’s 2017 manifesto; Jeremy Gilbert, a Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, a champion of Gramsci, talking about Thatcherism; episodes with Mish Rahman, Rachel Godfrey Wood and Hilary Schan on the contemporary Labour Left; Mike Phipps, author of Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, taking a longer term look at the Labour Left;  Mike Jackson, co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, on the Great 1984-85 Miners’ Strike; political activist Liz Davies telling her story as the dissenter within Blair’s New Labour; Rachel Garnham, a current co-Chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy looking back at the history of the fight for democracy in the British Labour Party; and finally myself telling the story of Brighton Labour Briefing, a local Bennite magazine of the 1980s.If you are enjoying the show please subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform so you never miss a future episode.  If you like what the Labour Left Podcast is trying to achieve, please help us to get the podcast in front of as many people as possible by sharing, following, liking, rating and commenting on every episode you watch.You can get the podcast on YouTube, Substack, Apple Podcasts and Audible. In fact, you can listen to it on all good podcast sites just search for the ‘Labour Left Podcast’. Bryn Griffiths is an activist in Colchester Labour Party and North Essex World Transformed. He is the Vice-Chair of Momentum and sits on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s Executive. Bryn hosts Labour Hub’s spin off – the Labour Left Podcast.