JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

Journal of Contemporary
Leftist Antisemitism?
Mark Gardner*
Routledge, the respected academic publishing house, has published a
book review that is a depressing tour de force of contemporary high-brow
leftist antisemitism. There has long been a sense of “anything goes” in such
circles, and this review goes a long way to proving that—an impression that
is only deepened by its carrying a “peer review integrity” logo.
Worse still, the review provides further evidence of the convergence
between the increasingly antisemitic anti-Zionism of parts of the left intelligentsia
and the increasingly anti-Zionist antisemitism of American neo-
Nazi ideologues.
The damage is done. The only thing remaining is to see if Routledge
and the editorial board responsible for the review belatedly distance themselves
from it.
The review is of James Petras’ book, War Crimes in Gaza and the
Zionist Fifth Column in America. It shames the May 2011 edition of Routledge’s
peer-reviewed Journal of Contemporary Asia, and is written by a
former United Nations official, Frederic F. Clairmont. Both Petras and
Clairmont, in addition to celebrity intellectual Noam Chomsky, are on the
Journal’s editorial board.
The Petras book, and its Journal review, present a conspiracy theory
that has very little to do with traditional Asian themes, but fits resoundingly
with the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century socialist linkage of
Jews with capitalism, now updated and repackaged for twenty-first-century
anti-capitalist discourse. Socialist antisemitism had nothing to do with biological
racism, but exhibited striking resemblances to the subsequent
national socialist propaganda that twinned “international Jewry” with
American capitalism and British imperialism. Soviet antisemitism continued
this lineage with its combined attacks on Zionism, finance capital, corporations,
millionaires, and so on. Today, the trend continues, with far-left
and far-right bastardization of the word “Zionist” providing the cornerstone,
and the word “Jew” lurking in its shadow.
Clairmont’s offending review in the Journal clearly derives from an
earlier review by Clairmont, dated September 5, 2010, that can be read in
full on James Petras’ Web site. The earlier review is the unexpurgated version:
the Director’s Conspiracy Cut, as it were.
The Routledge version avoids some of the trashier antisemitic aspects
of the original. We can’t know if this editing was done by the editors of the
267