The struggle against antisemitism is a question of burning political importance. Across Europe, parties descended from or modelled on fascism are in government or on the threshold. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls as a major party. In Britain, far-right street mobilisations draw crowds unseen since the 1930s, while Reform UK sets the agenda in official politics.
At the same time, the charge of antisemitism has been turned into an instrument of state repression. It is wielded not against the heirs of Hitler and Mosley but against workers, students and Jewish opponents of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Any serious history of the fight against antisemitism must therefore answer definite questions. Who fought it? With what methods? On what class basis? And with what results?
This collection of essays, published by the Wiener Holocaust Library, poses the right question in its title. Its answers, however, are shaped by its producers’ institutional and political commitments.[1]
The book and its sponsors
The volume grew out of the Library’s exhibition Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, shown in London from March to September 2022 and later taken to Parliament. Barbara Warnock, the Library’s senior curator, and Toby Simpson, its director, edited it, and it launched in November 2022.
Its essays trace the individuals and organisations that have countered antisemitism since the Dreyfus Affair. They cover the campaign to free Dreyfus, Alfred Wiener’s anti-Nazi work in Germany and the Netherlands, the 43 Group’s post-war anti-fascist direct action, and the Library’s own monitoring work. A final section examines what the publisher calls the differing forms of antisemitism in Britain in recent decades.
The Wiener Library deserves credit. Founded by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1939, its archive is an irreplaceable record of the Nazi regime and its crimes. The exhibition catalogue drew on photographs from the Community Security Trust (CST) archives and credited the CST’s head of policy, Dave Rich, among others.
That partnership, and the choice of foreword writer, signal where the book will land. Julia Neuberger, senior rabbi of West London Synagogue and a crossbench peer, was among the most prominent establishment voices in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. That is the political lens through which a century of history is ultimately read.
Dreyfus: the decisive role of the socialist movement
The book rightly opens with the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer was framed for espionage by the French General Staff and shipped to Devil’s Island. The affair became the axis around which the Third Republic’s political forces polarised: the army, the Catholic Church, and Édouard Drumont’s antisemitic leagues on one side; republicans, intellectuals, and, decisively, the socialist workers’ movement on the other.
Appeals to the authorities’ good faith did not free Dreyfus. Zola’s J’accuse in January 1898 was an act of political war on the military caste. The turning point came when Jean Jaurès overcame the Guesdist wing of French socialism, which had dismissed the case as a quarrel between bourgeois factions, and brought the organised working class into the fight against clerical-militarist reaction.
This is the period’s first lesson, and it is the one a history organised around “methods” of countering antisemitism tends to blur. Antisemitism in France was the banner of a social coalition seeking to overturn the republic and crush the workers’ movement. The working class pushed it back by intervening as an independent force.
Weimar: the limits of rebuttal
Alfred Wiener, the Library’s founder, stands at the centre of the story. A decorated veteran of the First World War, Wiener worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein). He monitored the Nazi press, exposed its forgeries and published counter-propaganda. Around 1930, the Büro Wilhelmstrasse issued Anti-Anti, a handbook of facts for those responding to antisemitic lies.
The courage and diligence of this work are unquestioned. But its strategy rested on the assumption that Nazism could be defeated by information, by the law and by the institutions of the Weimar Republic. Every one of those props gave way. The Nazis were not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better facts. Amid economic collapse, German finance capital and the Junker landowners chose them as the instrument to smash Europe’s most powerful workers’ movement.
United action by Social Democratic and Communist workers offered the only realistic means of stopping Hitler’s advance. But both sides sabotaged such unity: the SPD leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and its institutions, and the Stalinist line denounced Social Democracy as “social fascism” and rejected a genuine united front. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned of the catastrophic consequences of this political paralysis and fought to mobilise the working class in a united front against fascism. Hitler did not conquer power through an irresistible popular mandate in January 1933. Hindenburg installed him as chancellor, backed by powerful sections of Germany’s ruling elite.
A history of anti-antisemitism that does not place this betrayal at the centre cannot explain why the Centralverein’s devoted labours ended in catastrophe. The Library’s archive of rebuttal pamphlets is, in the end, a monument to the limits of enlightenment in the face of a social crisis.
Britain: Cable Street and the 43 Group
The British chapters tell a story whose lessons point in the same direction. On 4 October 1936, tens of thousands of East End workers—Jewish garment workers, Irish dockers, Communist and Independent Labour Party members—blocked Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts at Cable Street. The police, who had been sent to clear a path for the fascists, were driven back.
Anglo-Jewry’s official leadership played no part in this victory. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to stay away and leave matters to the authorities. The Communist Party leadership had first planned to send its members to a solidarity rally elsewhere in Spain, and changed course only under pressure from the ranks.
The same pattern recurred after 1945. When Mosley sought to revive his movement, Jewish veterans formed the 43 Group. They broke up fascist meetings, infiltrated fascist organisations and fought them in the streets, again over the objections of the community establishment, which preferred quiet lobbying of the state.
The volume’s attention to the 43 Group is welcome. Their lesson, however, is not about the merits of “direct action” as a technique. It is that fascism was confronted successfully only when working people mobilised independently of—and often against—the police, the courts, and the official leaderships who counselled reliance on them.
Recent decades: Neuberger and the campaign against Corbyn
When the book reaches contemporary Britain, the gap between its historical material and its politics becomes a chasm. The “differing forms of antisemitism” of recent decades are, above all, the terrain of the campaign waged between 2015 and 2020 against Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.
Neuberger was a leading figure in that campaign. In 2016 she told Newsnight that Labour had a “very particular problem” with antisemitism on the hard left. In June 2018 she urged Jews to resign from the party and said she hoped the issue would stop Labour from being elected. Her 2019 book stopped short of calling Corbyn an antisemite but said he had “behaved like an antisemite”. In the 2019 election, she endorsed the Chief Rabbi’s unprecedented intervention against him.
Her central criterion is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when its tone would not be used of other countries. This tests subjective impression, not objective content. It mirrors the logic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition”, whose Israel-related examples Labour was forced to adopt in full in 2018 after a campaign in which the three main Jewish newspapers ran an identical front page against Corbyn.
The campaign was political. The Labour right, the Conservative press and the Israeli state set out to destroy a leader who, whatever his limitations, had attracted hundreds of thousands of young people with left-wing rhetoric. Corbyn’s own response was capitulation: he accepted the IHRA definition, suspended allies and offered apology after apology. The 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by Labour itself, found that the antisemitism issue had been used as a factional weapon. None of this alters the existence of real antisemitism, which socialists oppose without compromise. But a history that presents this episode as a chapter in the fight against racism adopts the state’s vantage point.
After 2022: Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism
The book closes in 2022. Events since October 2023 have exposed the consequences of the political framework it endorses. Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 raised plausible claims under the Genocide Convention, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced the territory to rubble.
Throughout, governments in Britain and Europe have used the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to criminalise opposition. Mass demonstrations in London, in which Jewish contingents marched prominently, were branded “hate marches” by a Conservative home secretary. The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, and hundreds of people, many of them pensioners, were arrested for holding placards. In Germany, appeals to Israel’s security as a reason of state have been used to ban protests and cancel Jewish and Palestinian speakers.
The effect is doubly reactionary. It shields a state committing mass atrocities by identifying all Jews with its crimes, the very conflation that real antisemites exploit. And it diverts attention from the genuine and growing danger posed by the far right, which combines hostility to Muslims and migrants with the old conspiracy theories about Jews and finds a friendly hearing in official politics.
Conclusion: the lessons the book does not draw
Read against the grain, the material this volume assembles supports conclusions very different from those of its sponsors. Modern antisemitism has never been simply an irrational prejudice to be corrected by education and monitoring. It has been a tool of reaction, mobilised during periods of capitalist crisis to divert social anger from the ruling class onto a scapegoat and to split the working class.
The working class, Jewish and non-Jewish, has beaten it back only when it intervened independently: in the Dreyfusard movement, on the barricades of Cable Street, and in the streets against Mosley after the war. Where reliance fell on the state, the courts, and bourgeois liberalism, as in Weimar Germany, the outcome was catastrophe. Trotsky, writing in 1938, warned that the further advance of world reaction would bring the physical extermination of the Jews. He insisted that only the socialist transformation of society could secure their future.
The Zionist project offered a different answer: a nation-state built on the dispossession of another people. That answer has produced a state now carrying out atrocities in the name of Jews everywhere, which in turn feeds the antisemitism it claims to combat.
The Wiener Library archives will remain an indispensable resource. But the fight against antisemitism today requires a political perspective this book does not provide. That perspective is the international unity of the working class against capitalism, war and every form of racism, including the racism directed against Palestinians.
Sources
- Wiener Holocaust Library: book listing
- Wiener Holocaust Library: book launch event
- Wiener Holocaust Library: exhibition catalogue
- Online exhibition: Fighting Antisemitism
- Jewish Chronicle, 2016: Neuberger on Labour
- Jewish Chronicle, 2018: Neuberger urges Jews to leave Labour
- Jewish Chronicle, 2019: Neuberger’s book on antisemitism
- PBS Amanpour, 2019: Neuberger on the Chief Rabbi’s intervention
Bibliography
Book under review
- Warnock, Barbara, and Toby Simpson, eds. Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022. Foreword by Julia Neuberger. London: The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.
Books and documents
- Equality and Human Rights Commission. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. London: EHRC, October 2020.
- Forde, Martin. The Forde Report. London: The Labour Party, July 2022.
- International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.
- International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Working Definition of Antisemitism.” Adopted 26 May 2016.
- Neuberger, Julia. Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
- Sonabend, Daniel. We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain. London: Verso, 2019.
- Trotsky, Leon. “Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism.” December 1938.
- Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
- The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2022.
- Zola, Émile. “J’accuse…!” L’Aurore, 13 January 1898.
Press and online sources
- “Jewish Peer Attacks Labour for Having a ‘Very Particular Problem’ with Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2016. Link
- “Senior Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger Urges Jews to Leave Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.” Jewish Chronicle, 22 June 2018. Link
- “Rabbi Julia Neuberger Rails Against Labour Antisemitism.” Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2019. Link
- “Senior Rabbi Julia Neuberger Talks Antisemitism in the UK.” Amanpour and Company, PBS, 27 November 2019. Link
- The Wiener Holocaust Library. “Book Launch: Anti-Antisemitism.” Event listing, 15 November 2022. Link
- The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Online exhibition. Link
[1] Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022, edited by Barbara Warnock and Toby Simpson, with a foreword by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.
