In the wake of the October 7 massacre in Israel, we have seen pro-Hamas activists on the political left celebrate the atrocities. The problem of left antisemitism seems worse now than ever before, or perhaps it has always been lurking just beneath the surface and now the mask has finally slipped.
This week, I spoke with the British sociologist David Hirsh, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, who literally wrote the book on the subject—Contemporary Left Antisemitism, published in 2018, for which I recently wrote a review.
Hirsh is also the founder of the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, which does the noble work of nurturing scholarship on antisemitism and the Holocaust and building “a community of living research, scholarship and teaching.”
In this conversation, we discuss the two types of antisemitism, the influence of societal structures versus personal agency in human behavior and in the Holocaust in particular, what it takes to overcome antisemitism, the importance of rational debate instead of simply denouncing people, the pro-Hamas protests we have seen on the political left in the wake of the October 7 massacre, and much more.
David Hirsh on left antisemitism