The recent stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London, has served as the grim catalyst for a renewed national alarm. Escalating hostility towards Jewish targets in Britain and across the Atlantic has subsumed the event into a prevailing narrative of “unprecedented” crisis. The UK government has threatened to ban pro-Palestinian protests, while leading politicians have taken to the airwaves to denounce the left for its alleged indifference to Jewish suffering.

Yet if the reality of contemporary antisemitism is undeniable, the dominant discourse surrounding it remains impoverished. Both the political centre and the right have failed to provide any serious attempt to understand the historical roots of Jewophobia. Instead, it has been repurposed as a convenient tool of state discipline. By treating it as an eternal, inexplicable pathology, they have reduced a complex history of prejudice to a shallow rhetorical weapon.

The historian Barnaby Raine has written incisively on both the roots of contemporary antisemitism and the politics of anti-antisemitism. In this exchange, which took place on 5 May, Raine dissects the mainstream response to anti-Jewish violence, argues for a recovery of the radical universalism that once animated the Jewish left, and examines the perilous logic of a Zionism that seeks security through the patronage of a declining Western hegemony.

Gavin Jacobson: The recent attacks on Jewish targets in London have sparked national alarm. The press has insisted we are experiencing an unprecedented surge of antisemitism. What does this moment feel like on the ground, and what do you think is happening?

Barnaby Raine: Last October, I was in synagogue on Yom Kippur when we heard news that a synagogue in Manchester had been attacked and two people murdered. Since then, the violence against Jews has escalated: synagogues in Finchley and Wembley have been firebombed, a Jewish-owned shop in Watford was set ablaze, and four Jewish community ambulances were destroyed in a targeted arson attack in Golders Green – the same neighbourhood where, more recently, two men were stabbed. In north London’s ‘bagel belt’ there is a genuine feeling of living under siege. Jewish schools already operate under armed guard; now, simply walking the street in religious dress feels dangerous.

The state, the media and many community leaders have framed this crisis as the result of widespread anguish over the genocide in Gaza – which fits into a narrative of “Muslim rage”. Keir Starmer has called for arrests over chants like “globalise the intifada”. Jonathan Hall, a senior barrister who serves as the government’s independent reviewer of antiterror legislation, claimed it was “impossible” for pro-Palestine marches not to “incubate” antisemitism, and many leading political figures have called for a ban on these protests. The author Howard Jacobson announced this week that when he sees these protests, the chant he “hears” – though he noted no one actually says it – is ‘gas the Jews’.

We are seeing a dangerous convergence between the political centre and the hard right. One presenter from the right-wing TV channel GB News announced at a rally against antisemitism that “if we don’t call [Islam] out, we’re going to be fucking murdered”, while Nigel Farage visits Golders Green to accuse the government of “appeasing” British Muslims. Meanwhile, the state has pledged an extra £25 million for policing, and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley has called for dedicated police teams in Jewish areas. The Green Party is smeared as “soft” on antisemitism, and its leader Zack Polanski – the only Jewish leader of a major UK party – was publicly rebuked by Rowley for questioning police conduct during the arrest of the Golders Green attacker.

So the current public discourse about antisemitism is defined by two claims. First, that Jews are victims of Muslims and the pro-Palestine left, and, second, that the proper response to racism is more aggressive policing. While Farage is applauded in Golders Green, Starmer is heckled. This framing pulls the entire discourse rightwards, allowing the far right to reposition themselves as the ‘only true defenders’ of Jews because they are the ones most willing to target Muslims.

What are the conditions for rising antisemitism today?

The immediate trigger is the deliberate conflation of Israel’s actions with Jewish people. By narrating its violence in Gaza through biblical analogies (such as the injunction to “destroy Amalek”) and by defacing ruins and branding tortured prisoners with Jewish symbols, the Israeli state positions itself as the answer to Jewish history. It legally defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as the state of all Jews, simultaneously disavowing Palestinians and claiming moral authority as historical recompense for the Holocaust. Given this conflation, it is unsurprising that some people – horrified by the genocide – mistakenly conclude that the way to oppose those actions is to oppose Jewish people.

To use a term they have popularised, the Israeli state treats diaspora Jews as human shields. They attempt to strap us to Israel, effectively encouraging people to attack us in order to attack them, placing us in the line of fire by tethering our identity to their genocide. Diaspora Jews may sometimes participate enthusiastically in this conflation, but that doesn’t change the fact that Israel’s policy is marked by a cynical bid for self-protection that actively endangers Jews overseas. Antisemites who treat Israeli violence as some peculiar ‘Jewish pathology’ are swimming in the waters that Israel feeds.

This occurs against the backdrop of a deeper social crisis. Antisemitism is rising today because it offers a language of discontent for those living in the wake of successive historical failures. Since the collapse of the twentieth century’s great emancipatory movements signalled by the ‘end of history’ in 1989, we have seen the social struggle for a better world replaced after 9/11 by a racialised ‘clash of civilisations’. The 2008 financial crisis created a desperate need for a language of antielitism. In this vacuum, antisemitism becomes potent. It provides a way to express discontent with powerlessness when real social change feels impossible, and when politics is narrated as a form of racial and cultural conflict.

There have been many calls for urgent action against antisemitism in Britain this week – is this likely to protect Jews?

Western leaders claim to protect threatened Jews – whereas they usually treat minorities as threats – less because of Jewish influence, and more because the narrative serves specific political agendas. The image of Jews threatened by Muslims and the wretched of the Earth is a potent tool for the far right; it’s why Nigel Farage shows up in Golders Green.

There is a particular ‘eternalist’ theory of antisemitism wielded here – it is ‘the oldest hatred’, rooted in psychologies of resentment and antielitism. Whereas white supremacy typically imagines black people as stupid and physically threatening, antisemitism imagines Jews as cunning and intellectual. Antisemitism conceives of itself as a revolt against concentrated power. This makes it an appealing villain for conservatives to identify lurking behind any radicalism.

But this is a misunderstanding of the specifically racialised quality of antisemitism, which we might describe as a form of purported antielitism that treats social power as essentially a biological or cultural problem caused by a racial pathology. And so the work of defeating antisemitism is presented as attacking discontent with power, rather than attacking ways of thinking about politics as intractable racial conflict.

For almost two millennia, Jews were identified as the primary ‘Other’ of Christian civilisation – its Semitic fifth column. Now, we are being used in a different way, to serve those same interests: by positioning us as the alibi for Western violence, the victims of its radical critics. This post-Holocaust shift from explicit antisemitism to philosemitism among European and North American elites evokes the old Yiddish joke: “A philosemite is just an antisemite who happens to love Jews.”

The great irony is that while the political left is constantly smeared with antisemitism, Jewophobia actually signals a crisis and decline of the left. It gains traction precisely because people have lost faith in the possibility of transformative politics. Consequently, we face two simultaneous issues: a widespread antisemitism now turbocharged by a genocide, and a dominant right-wing and liberal-centrist rhetoric that claims to oppose antisemitism, but has no real interest in protecting Jews.

How would you describe the extent of antisemitism on the left, and the way it is depicted in the mainstream?

It is present, and dominant ways of talking about it are worse than useless. They’re not even really trying to deal with antisemitism; they have other goals. So they blur the line between anticolonialism and antisemitism, which is precisely the line we need to stress to undermine antisemitism amid a colonial genocide.

Once you understand antisemitism today as a racialised discourse for expressing powerlessness after the loss of hope in social transformation, you can see why it might appeal to those who feel disempowered. But you can also see how the logic of antisemitism is alien to the politics of the left, which sees social problems as the product of particular, contingent social relations – not as the result of the deformed essence of racial Others.

So there are two problems: one is that bigotries can proliferate on the left as exceptions to its supposed commitments to equality and freedom, as in the case of misogyny in a male-led left. The second is that antisemitism is especially appealing at this historical moment, which is a real threat to Jews and also undermines the whole project of the left.

By contrast, the current moral panic about antisemitism treats the left as the natural home for antisemites. The panic is designed not to protect Jews but to defend the image of Western civilisation by redefining that civilisation in glowing terms as the last defender of Jews threatened by savage hordes. The far right is most confident playing at this table, and liberals awkwardly trail and echo this framing. It identifies Muslims as antisemites, and it then treats the political left as tarnished by its association with Muslims in opposing the War on Terror or the destruction of Gaza. The panic deliberately blurs the line between anticolonial opposition to Zionism in the name of universal freedom, and racist opposition to Zionism driven by hatred of Jews.

Consider the common conception in mainstream discussions, even among those who concede the legitimacy of antizionism, that it might sometimes ‘spill over’ into antisemitism. That is absolutely the wrong language: as if moderate criticism of the Israeli state is OK, but it becomes antisemitic when it becomes more radical.

The result is a text like David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count, which makes the influential accusation that “progressives” – who are depicted as universally hostile to all other forms of racism – don’t lift a finger to protect Jews. This is what we have heard repeatedly in the past week from Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and many others. The claim is misleading on multiple fronts. At points it inverts reality by suggesting other racial minorities in Britain are universally cherished, almost like the far-right claim that “two-tier justice” sees the police treat black people better than their white neighbours. People who face constant racism and who are now told that “no other minority” is treated as badly as Jews are likely to be exasperated by this surprising news.

The Conservative Party position is now that pro-Palestinian demonstrations should be banned in the name of antiracism, but a march by far-right leader Tommy Robinson the same day should go ahead. This framing also attacks the left for its reluctance to join an official anti-antisemitism programme that is bound up with other racist agendas. The left ties itself in knots sometimes, wanting to be antiracist but confused to be charged with racism. The confusion could be addressed by critically understanding the racist framing served by this panic.

What does the liberal and centrist framing of antisemitism and racism miss?

The most fundamental shift has been away from a politics that sought to abolish the concept of race entirely, by abolishing the material conditions that produced racial hierarchy. Antiracism used to be about what Marx called “free individuality” – a world where you could define yourself outside of racial categories. This was a universal project: the belief that ending racial hierarchy would liberate everyone. In Britain, Paul Gilroy has been a powerful defender of this humanist tradition. It is the same logic Simone de Beauvoir used to conclude The Second Sex, where she called for universal brotherhood and argued that the liberation of women would also free men from the anxieties of patriarchy.

Antiracism once imagined that ending racial categorisation would liberate all of us to be free individuals. Where we once fought to overturn the global order, we now settle for ‘safe spaces’ in a world we assume will always be unsafe. Liberal antiracism introduces a language of “microaggressions” and “privilege checking” because everyday behaviour seems easier to change than the world. We have lost the understanding that the struggle to overturn racist ideas and the struggle to overturn social realities are inextricably connected.

What did that more radical antiracism ask that the current version doesn't?

It asked: to what ends are we racialised? A structural diagnosis of racism forced people to identify the systems that required it – namely, imperialism and the accumulation of capital. The optimism of that era lay in the belief that if you could end imperialism and capitalism, you would naturally dismantle the racial hierarchies used to reproduce them. This framework traversed borders, both in its picture of its enemy and its political community.

Today, as fewer people believe we can overturn those global systems, antiracism has shifted into a more local ‘politics of recognition’. We now seek dignity within our racial categories, rather than their abolition. Popular figures like Ibram X. Kendi suggest the solution lies in antiracist education for toddlers. But as early as 1985, the Tamil Marxist A. Sivanandan identified the rise of “Racial Awareness Training” as a “degradation of the black struggle”. What we have lost is an antiracist universalism that views the negation of race as a path to universal emancipation by ending the global systems that produce racial hierarchies.

This is why the question of how Western power constructs Jews is virtually invisible in modern debates on antisemitism. We desperately need to revisit it. The current image of Jews as the ‘protected minority’ of Western power is a strategy for defending that power while simultaneously throwing Jews under the bus. The entire setup must be contested.

If we are living in a time of rising antisemitism, are we also living in a time of rising panic about antisemitism?

Ostensibly, yes. A civilisation that once identified as Christian and viewed Jews as the slayers of their God – the worst people imaginable – has now rebranded itself as ‘Judeo-Christian’. Within this new framework, Jews are cast in a dual role. Israel acts as the macho warrior in the wilderness, confronting the enemies of the West, while diaspora Jews are cast as uniquely vulnerable – much like white women were imagined in Jim Crow America – threatened by the supposed barbarism of racialised Others. Sai Englert has pointed out that this is an old colonial trope; French power in Algeria once discussed Jews in these same terms: a ‘protected minority’ of the empire, supposedly menaced by anticolonial revolutionaries.

Today, this image of Jewish vulnerability is deployed to justify fear and loathing of Others. In my PhD research on twentieth-century Britain, I found a category from the 1970s journal The Black Liberator particularly helpful: “anti-racist racism”. Proclamations of concern for Jews have become the primary vehicle for mobilising a racist panic about Muslims. This explains how Nigel Farage can transition from reportedly performing Nazi salutes as a schoolboy to declaring himself a defender of Jews – while at the same time warning that migrants arriving on small boats are an existential threat.

We see this perverse logic across Europe. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders reacts to clashes between Israeli football fans and locals by calling for the deportation of Moroccans, claiming the Netherlands “has become the Gaza of Europe”, a reading that frames both places as a conflict between Muslim ‘savages’ and Jewish ambassadors for Western civilisation.

You have described this as a “moral panic” – one that does not overstate the prevalence of antisemitism, but misreads its significance. How does this idea of moral panic explain this moment?

In the 1970s, Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics established that these panics are evidence of epochal transitions. When a society heaves under the pressure of disruptive change, it often identifies the new groups produced by those changes as the evil agents responsible for the crisis. Social change is thus moralised: the breakdown of the old world is blamed on those who fail to play by its rules.

A landmark text of British Marxism from that same decade, Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis, applied this analysis to the state-manufactured panic over race and crime. As neoliberalism dismantled the postwar order, inner-city black youth – facing mass unemployment – were reimagined as a criminal threat tearing society apart. The lesson is that moral panics are reactions to real crises, but they narrate those crises in a way that protects the old ideology, fixing the responsibility onto supposedly degenerate outsiders.

We can see something similar happening today. There are three overlapping crises – stagnation in living standards and ballooning billionaire wealth, the shift of the geographical centre of world capitalism away from the West, and migration flows into that creaking core of old imperial power – which are generating political turmoil the state feels it can no longer manage.

In this climate, the ‘antisemite’ – variously imagined as the radical leftist, the Muslim immigrant or the Palestinian – is cast as the face of this crisis. They become the immoral subject who stands for the breakdown of the civilised order. Policing the Crisis showed us that while mugging was a real phenomenon, the panic over mugging was actually about a much wider-scale transformation. Similarly, the decline of the West and the absence of any emancipatory alternative in our politics generates both a rising antisemitism and a panic that is less about protecting Jews than it is about protecting the Western order.

You’ve written about what you call the “new anti-antisemitism” and traced it back to the 1960s and 70s. Can you give us its history – how does it differ from the old antisemitism, and why do you consider it “worse than useless as an instrument for understanding and opposing” the reality we’re in?

The term “new antisemitism” emerged in the 1970s, largely as a reaction to the 1975 UN resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism. As Tony Lerman has documented, this began as a deliberate campaign by the Israeli state to identify itself as the ‘collective Jew’.

We see this pattern throughout history, where settler-colonists defend their violence by understanding themselves as victims. The apartheid state in South Africa frequently invoked the British concentration camps used against Boers to position themselves as victims of European power – even while they claimed to be the truest representatives of European civilisation in a savage wilderness.

By reimagining antizionism as racism, the new anti-antisemitism provided a convenient shield. This project has since broadened: framing anticolonial politics as racist allows defenders of the colonial order to present themselves as antiracists.

Ultimately, this new anti-antisemitism is dangerous because it insists on tethering Jewish identity to an increasingly genocidal state. While I don’t believe this conflation is the sole cause of rising antisemitism – there are deeper forces at work, in our post-1989, post-9/11, post-2008 world – when defenders of Israel consistently link Jewishness to genocide, they inevitably fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose.

There’s been a wave of antizionist expression on the new right – Tucker Carlson being the most prominent example. These are people you wouldn’t consider friends of Jews, and yet they seem to be occupying discursive terrain that was once the preserve of the left. What’s going on there?

The genocide in Gaza, documented on social media, has forced a crisis of conscience – or at least a crisis of optics – on the right. On one hand, the politically consistent reaction for the right should be approval. The violence is the same kind that has long built the civilisation they defend, from King Leopold’s killing fields in the Congo to the use of nuclear bombs against Japan to the war in Vietnam. The underlying logic has always been that some lives must be sacrificed to secure the comfort of those who really matter. Israeli policy is a continuation of that tradition.

On the other hand, colonial violence was historically kept out of the public eye. Social media has collapsed that norm. Americans and Europeans are viewing explicit horrors on their phones every single day, but because the perpetrators are Jewish, it triggers centuries of Western antisemitic connotations – the image of Jews as a sick people. This allows the right to oppose the genocide not by rejecting colonial violence, but by removing Jews once more from the ‘civilised’ Western order. They can then frame Israeli violence as an external, Jewish problem rather than a product of the very civilisation the right champions. Essentially, they can view the genocide approvingly, as a Western project, or disapprovingly, as a Jewish one.

The latter explains the rhetoric of figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and more explicitly antisemitic voices like Nick Fuentes. They imagine America is in hock to Israeli power. But the question is whether shock at this colonial violence will lead people to criticise the wider imperial system Israel participates in. We have to ask why Theodor Herzl, writing to Cecil Rhodes, positioned Zionism as a continuation of the British colonial project in Africa. Understanding this doesn’t deny Israeli agency in the slaughter of Palestinians, but it acknowledges that Western imperial power is the condition of possibility for Israel’s existence.

What does Israel represent for you as a historical phenomenon? And how do you make the argument to a Jewish person who feels Israel is the only guarantor of Jewish safety that Zionism actually increases danger rather than reduces it?

Zionism has created a ‘safe space’ for Jews where Jews are actually less safe than anywhere else in the world, and in doing so, it has made Jews less safe globally. If physical security was the goal, Zionism has failed on its own terms. Its underlying theory of safety is fundamentally paranoid: it assumes people will always hate Jews, so rather than combating that hatred, we must simply build a fortress against the next storm. This mindset has fostered a remarkably casual attitude toward provoking antisemitism; if one believes hatred is inevitable, there is little incentive to avoid fuelling it.

Zionist strategy has long fused the creation of a garrison state with an appeal for patronage from the very civilisation that produced the gas chambers. They have lashed the Jewish people to a sinking ship called ‘the West’, and that ship will take us down with it unless we jump overboard. Zionists often draw analogies between the Jews and the Kurds – as stateless peoples suffering for their lack of a country. Yet we should look at the lesson of the Kurds: from Iraq in the 1990s to Syria today, American power has used them as a tool and then abandoned them.

The route out of this tragedy lies in reengaging with Jewish traditions, not abandoning them. I interpret the state of Israel as an attempt by Jews to become less Jewish. Historically, the mark of Jewish distinctness in a Europe of nation-states was our absence from that order – we were a nation without a state, a transnational people living in the ‘pores’ of European nations. While other diasporas have a physical homeland, our only true homeland is the future: as in the religious concept of a Messianic era when everyone is free and safe.

Both Stalin and David Ben-Gurion used the derisive term “rootless cosmopolitans” to condemn Jews outside the state of Israel. Theodor Herzl himself was an assimilationist who turned to Zionism because he realised that to make Jews into good Europeans, they had to leave Europe – a paradox common to settler-colonialism. By mimicking the Western model of rapacious, colonising states, Zionists hoped to shed our distinctness and become a “nation like all others”.

This represented a double death for Jewishness. First, Zionism abandoned the diasporic condition that had enriched Jewish life for centuries – a condition of sharing space rather than owning it. Second, it sought to live under the aegis of a European colonial order that had perfected the concept of ‘race’ to use against us, and was now seeking to incorporate us – just as that same idea was being turned with murderous intensity against others.

Zionism is tragically naive about why Western civilisation seeks to launder us. It saves its paranoia not for the powers that built the ghettos, but for the other victims of that world order. By letting the West set Jews against its other victims, we suffer alongside them, while only the civilisation that historically abused us truly benefits.

How did growing up Jewish shape your political thinking, and at what point did being Jewish and being on the left start to feel – for others, if not for you – like they were in tension?

I am on the left because I am a Jew. I don’t mean that in a congenital sense, but as a reflection on a specific collective experience. At the Passover Seder, we are famously invited to identify with the stranger, for we were once strangers in a strange land. The Seder then defines the “wicked child” as the one who excludes themselves from the community by disavowing its emancipation from slavery. What does that mean? To me, the Biblical tradition often represents a people called to think beyond themselves, with prophets arriving to condemn sins among the Jews of the time.

I found that much of what I later discovered in Marx resonated with my early Hebrew school education, particularly the idea of a ‘chosen people’ (for Marx, the proletariat) who were not a master race, but a group burdened by a peculiar obligation to ensure universal emancipation. Though Marx grew up without Jewish observance, he came from a lineage that prized rigorous study and rituals that held together a people whose Messianism imagined a radically different future. He is an example of a thinker produced by a tradition but also able to look beyond it.

There is a new consensus, popularised by the historian Yehuda Bauer, that we should not hyphenate “antisemitism” because “Semitism” does not exist. But I think it is worth reclaiming: “Semitism” names a rich orientation produced by European modernity. The word was coined in the late nineteenth century, a period of lurid Orientalism. By calling Jews “Semites”, Europe identified them with Arabs as people liminal to the West – neither total insiders nor total outsiders. As Isaac Deutscher put it, Jews were “here, but not of here”. C. L. R. James used exactly the same phrase about Caribbean immigrants in Britain. This condition made Jews and migrants intimately aware of the violence of Western civilisation, without being so entangled in it that they couldn’t imagine an alternative. This ‘outsider-within’ status is precisely where the idea of revolution takes root.

Ultimately, my Jewishness entails a refusal of nationalism. Because our history spanned borders and the very idea of ‘Europe’ was honed against us, I knew I could not be a British or European nationalist. But a Jewish nationalism is no better. It severs the link between Jews and others who suffer the depredations of the West. I am inspired by a Jewish history that seeks a world beyond insiders and outsiders, where people are no longer categorised by differently sized packages of rights. When I read Winston Churchill’s 1920 essay distinguishing between the “bad” international Jews – the subversives like Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky – and the “good” Zionist Jews who could be useful to the British Empire, it was always clear to me which side I wanted to be on.

I think many of us relate to identity through a dialectic of embrace and refusal – a lifelong conversation about staying faithful to the traditions that shaped us while seeking to overhaul the unjust world that produced them. As Hillel famously asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?” There is nothing inevitable about the current embrace of the state in much Jewish politics. This is not a ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation; it is a Western order whose first hated Other was the Jew. We can choose instead to be part of the coalition that brings down this order – including its Zionist outpost.

Making that choice means refusing to be conscripted into a role that harms us, and harms others, too. None of this removes responsibility from antisemites themselves. When I encounter antisemitic reactions to genocide in Gaza, I argue with them. As Trotsky said: you should first argue, before you acquaint their heads with the pavement.