Stephen Norwood promises in Antisemitism and the American Left, as the title makes clear, to trace the history of anti-Semitism among leftists in America. His book stretches back to the nineteenth century, examining the writings of Karl Marx and other socialist thinkers, and ends up in the contemporary present, presenting episodes of political activity on American college campuses from the second decade of the twenty-first century that involve the State of Israel and that the author considers anti-Semitic. In between these two temporal poles Norwood recounts how American leftists, mostly communists, took their cues from Soviet authorities, who in the decades after the Bolshevik Revolution pursued various and at times contradictory policies toward the Jews in their own country. Norwood presents a chronological narrative that makes a single point, one that cannot be missed by even a casual reader: The history of the Far Left and the history of anti-Semitism cannot be disassociated.
“The Far Left,” a phrase he uses repeatedly, has been, according to this book, a major incubator of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism ran through the thinking, rhetoric, and political action of the left as a thread running from its formative years in the nineteenth century to today. Norwood clearly does not trust the Left and even when it eased its anti-Jewish tone during the Popular Front days of the middle of the 1930s and encouraged the flourishing of Jewish culture in both the Soviet Union and the United States, it did so only for strategic and nefarious reasons, being willing to change course to suit its own purposes. But anti-Semitism throbbed at its heart.
A history of the Left and its attitudes and policies towards Jews ought to be written. It should be written from a densely analytic perspective, and deserves to be deeply researched, with careful digging in primary sources. After all, the rise of socialist parties, the Russian Revolution, the formation of the Soviet Union, the development of communist parties in the United States and other countries, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust and World War II, the Cold War, Israeli independence, and the demise of the Soviet Union all constitute some of the most important events of modern and modern Jewish history. The fact that millions of Jews lived in the Soviet Union and that legions of Jews, for reasons well beyond the orbit of this review, found socialism and communism attractive ideologies and solutions to their anomalous status in the world, make the history of the Jews, anti-Semitism, and the Left well worth the attention needed for nuanced, sophisticated, and even dispassionate scholarship.
This book fails almost completely in this project. It reads like a political polemic intended fundamentally to demonize the Left. While much of the book deals with the period from the 1920s through the 1950s, it derives its rationale from recent events. It begins and ends with contemporary politics, labeled by Norwood as anti-Semitic. The leftists concerned, individuals and groups limited almost completely to American college campuses, have vociferously condemned Israel, its treatment of the Palestinians, and its policies on the Occupied Territories. In this recent political moment groups whom Norwood defines as occupying a place on the Far Left and whom he condemns as anti-Semitic have variously called for boycott, divestment, and sanctions—BDS—of Israel, Israeli products, and American companies that have derived profit from the Occupation. Norwood uses his book to try to show that these recent actions grow out of a pernicious history of anti-Semitism, one with a pedigree more than a century old. The blurbs on the back cover bear witness to this book's contemporary aim, that is, as a vehicle to alert the public to the existence of anti-Semitism in its last remaining pocket in American life: the anti-Israel movements that have arisen at many universities.
Norwood's underlying goal removes this book from the realm of competent history and exemplary scholarship. So too does the fact that in the historical section, which in terms of the number of pages encompasses most of this work, the author has not consulted a single primary source in its original language, other than English. How can a book claim to understand the policies of the Soviet Union toward the Jews and the directives it transmitted to its American branches without access to Russian documents, most of which have become abundantly available since the collapse of the Communist regime? For example, Norwood should have asked: how and why did a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union allow for the publication of Sovietishe Heimland? How can such a book claim to analyze the reactions of the Jewish communists in the United States to the Jewish question, without any Yiddish materials? The Freiheit (New York's Yiddish communist daily newspaper), the reams of articles and books, memos, manifestos, pedagogical material from leftist Yiddish schools, and printed programs of Communist Party and front organizations, written in Yiddish, could offer an important insights for the project the author has undertaken. But Norwood has not seen any of this material, limiting himself only to English-language material, scarcely any of which constitutes meaningful primary evidence.
As Norwood explores the behavior of American leftists towards Jews, Jewish culture, Zionism, and Israel over the course of the decades since the 1930s, he constantly argues with them, using his text as a way to belittle his historical actors, depicting them as naïve if not viciously anti-Semitic. When dealing with Jewish leftists—and Jews did make up an inordinate proportion of the membership of the American Communist Party and numerous other organizations sympathetic to the Soviet Union or the Party—the author repeatedly attempts, and not successfully, to demolish what they said and did. Such a rhetorical strategy robs this book of its scholarly integrity and reduces it to politics rather than history.
The book likewise suffers terribly from the loose and fast use of words like “anti-Semitism,” “Far Left,” “Left,” “liberal,” and “progressive.” What do these mean? How did they change over time? How did Norwood decide which groups, individuals, and publications fell on the side of the “Far Left” as opposed to the moderate Left? Whom does he define as his subject? This sloppiness becomes even more pronounced as it moves into the present, the book's true focus. On some pages Norwood links columnists like Thomas Friedman, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times, and even President George H. W. Bush with a leftist campaign to discredit Israel. Scholarship requires precision in language and terminology and this book lacks these entirely.
Norwood admits, ironically, that the American Left, particularly after the 1960s, had little and then no connection to the Soviet Union or the old Left. Yet when voices from the new Left articulated negative views of Israel after the 1967 war, according to this book, they not only engaged in anti-Semitism, but continued to act in a tradition forged at Karl Marx's desk and then bloodily executed in the inner sanctum of Stalin's Kremlin. Norwood admits that the groups on American college campuses, which he acknowledges have had nearly no reach beyond these limited spaces, do not act in the name of communism or the historic Left—which leaves the reader to question why they appear in a book entitled Antisemitism and the American Far Left.
The groups which have popped up around the country in various academic settings have a point to make. One may or may not agree with them, but they have offered a rationale as to why they find Israel's policies to be repugnant and inhumane. Who are these students who flock to this movement? What motivates them? Where do they get their funding? What fissures divide these groups from each other? What links do they have to off-campus groups? How do Jewish students fit in? All of these questions deserve to be answered, but they cannot be answered by linking them to the long and complex history of communism, the Jews, and anti-Semitism. Nor can they be addressed by assuming that all criticisms of Israel, including devastatingly harsh ones that question the basis for a Jewish state, are anti-Semitic.
Overall, Stephen Norwood has not produced a worthwhile piece of history—neither of the Left (which he never defines) nor of anti-Semitism. Nor has he done much to advance our understanding of the contemporary scene in which condemnation of Israel and Israeli policies has begun to spread beyond the towers of academe.
