Questioning Öcalan’s Jewish Question

In January 2021, a fellow instructor from the Institute for Social Ecology sent me sections of The Sociology of Freedom, the third volume of a series of books by the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan, asking if I found the writing antisemitic. He had been contacted by a member of a U.S. social ecology study group seeking confirmation from social ecology scholars that the text was not antisemitic. 

Containing such passages as “A Jewish monopoly has always existed in the financial sector”¹ and “nation-statism derives from Hebrew tribal ideology,”² however, it was immediately clear to me that the text was riven with antisemitic narratives about Jewish relationships to capital and state power, both in the present day and as ahistorical explanations of their emergence in early modern Europe. Even where portraying Jewish people in a seemingly nuanced or positive light, the book’s arguments about them nevertheless rest upon false ideas about a transhistorical Jewish institutional power.

The study group member was stuck at a painful impasse: while the group’s Jewish members were troubled by the text’s antisemitic pages, the non-Jewish members saw no antisemitism at all. Even though my colleague at the Institute for Social Ecology explained that the writing was indeed filled with antisemitic tropes, the group’s debate wore on. About a month after this conversation, we learned that the group had dissolved, leaving some Jewish members demoralized with the left more generally. 

For those unfamiliar with Abdullah Öcalan, he is the symbolic and intellectual leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, whose Rojava Revolution in northern Syria is perhaps the most promising leftist experiment in direct democracy ever. They have been organizing since 2012 to create this new society, all while fighting ISIS as well as Russian, Turkish, and Syrian state forces seeking to annihilate them. 

There is a strong political alignment between Öcalan’s work and social ecology, a body of writings developed primarily by political theorist Murray Bookchin. Beginning in the 1950s, Bookchin developed a vision of a directly democratic and ecological world free of hierarchical formations such as the state, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy.  Öcalan encountered Bookchin’s work while in prison in the early 2000s. This engagement was significant in shifting Öcalan and the movement he leads from a fairly conventional Marxist-Leninist national liberation struggle to a decentralized, ecological, and feminist politics he called Democratic Confederalism.

As a faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology for nearly forty years, I’ve long been excited by the synergy between social ecology and the Kurdish freedom movement. It had never occurred to me that Öcalan’s revolutionary writings would promote antisemitism or bigotry of any kind. 

In response to this situation, I pored over Öcalan’s collected works, particularly the three published volumes of Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization. I was saddened to note a consistent thread throughout the three volumes of Öcalan portraying a Jewish power linked to the rise of money, capitalism, the nation-state, and even the Holocaust. 

Wondering if years of imprisonment had affected his thinking, I consulted a range of scholars long familiar with Öcalan’s work. Unfortunately, they confirmed rather than dispelled the concerns around antisemitism. I interviewed Corry Guttstadt, a German scholar who has been involved in solidarity work for Kurdistan on different platforms independent from PKK since the 1980s. Guttstadt said that Öcalans blatant antisemitism was addressed and criticized in several left-wing publications in Germany in the 1990s. However, there was no reaction; neither from the ranks of the organization itself, nor from the ranks of the PKK-dominated solidarity movement.

She was puzzled that much of the international left were still unaware of Öcalan’s history of producing antisemitic writings. As The Sociology of Freedom was first published in 2008 by a Turkish press, by the time PM Press published the book the core writings were at least thirteen years old. 

As Guttstadt explained, Öcalan came of age as a leftist in Turkey’s overtly antisemitic political culture. Though Kurds are an oppressed minority in Turkey, Kurdish leftists often absorb Turkish antisemitic portrayals of U.S. Jews as controlling an imperialist system that led in turn to Turkish fascism. As Guttstadt said, “Leftists don’t tend to recognize antisemitic tropes in Turkey because they’re normalized within the political culture as accurate.”³

My purpose in writing here is to carefully comb through Öcalan’s writings about Jewish people. I discuss five main anti-Jewish tropes that surface in his writing by raising five questions about what Öcalan calls “the Jewish question.” 

I hope that by reading what follows, leftists may become better able to identify and address anti-Jewish narratives when they see them. I also hope that groups like the one that contacted the Institute for Social Ecology aren’t demoralized and ultimately dissolved by a collective failure to understand and respond to instances of anti-Jewish racism when they arise in our movements. I seek to raise the bar for what counts as anti-racism in the broadest sense and deepen our movement’s understanding of how prejudice against Jews operates and distorts our social analysis. This is especially important when such ideas are parroted by the most important living thinker in the social ecology tradition, whose works are being distributed to and read by millions of people around the world. As critical readers, we need to be able to differentiate and disentangle Öcalan’s mistaken, damaging ideas about Jewish power from the vital intellectual work of democratic confederalism.

A note on terminology: going forward, I’ll utilize the term “anti-Jewish racism” rather than “antisemitism.” In 1879, German propagandist Wihelm Marr coined the term “Anti-Semitism.” Marr chose Antisemitismus as the pridesome name for a pro-German social movement portrayed as protecting the pure German culture and bloodline from being degraded by Jewish people. Marr seized upon the term “Semite” used by archaeologists and archaeo-linguists (unknown to the general public) to create antisemitismus because it sounded more scholarly than its crude predecessor, Judenhass (“Jew hate”). Antisemitism allowed Marr to cast Jewish people as a fictional race of “Semites” that never existed, thus making European Jewish people appear inherently “other” as non-European. 

The term antisemitism is, I believe, both undignified and misleading. When Jewish people and allies utilize the term, they unintentionally reproduce a racist and typological thinking that “others” Jewish people, putting them in danger. Retiring terms like Semite, semitic, and antisemitism is, in my view, central to establishing a historically accurate and antiracist understanding of Jewish history and identity. The term anti-Jewish racism shows racialized Jew hatred for what it is: a “modern” hatred of Jewish people that depicts them as a distinct and inferior race with a range of negative attributes.

Question One: How is Öcalan’s universal Jew central to his notions of a “Jewish Ideology” and a “Jewish Question”?

A first question is, why does Öcalan present Jewish people as a generalized universal entity? The answer is that all forms of racism reduce complex and changing groups of people to homogeneous and unchanging entities. Attributing timeless biological or cultural “essences” to particular groups is called racist “essentialism.” Just as U.S. anti-Black racism condemns Black people for sharing a universal essence that allegedly makes Black people intellectually and morally inferior, anti-Jewish racism portrays Jewish people as sharing an essence that makes them inclined to amass financial, political, and other forms of destructive power. 

Öcalan’s interchangeable and often random terms for Jewish people present “Jews” as a universal and timeless category that can be described by using a limitless and even ahistorical set of referents. Öcalan isn’t concerned with Jewish people’s locations at specific historical junctions, geographies, or ethnicities. He presents them as a unitary monolith that bounces across time, space, and culture—while retaining immutable qualities.

Aside from one instance of using the historically meaningful terms “Ashkenazi” and “Sephardic” Jews, Öcalan’s utilizes ahistorical, universal, and general terms such as Jews, the Jews, Jews of the East, Jews of the West, Judaism, Western Judaism, the Hebrews, the Tribe of the Hebrews, Jewish Ideology, Hebrew tribal ideology, Mosaic faith, Sabbatians, Sabbatianism, the diaspora, Kingdom of Zion, Zion, and Israel. Öcalan also categorizes Jewish people simultaneously as a tribe, religion, ethnic group, nation, and colonials. By referring to Jewish people as “Judaism,” Öcalan reduces a diverse ethnic group comprised of both religious and secular people to a religion. Öcalan’s varied terminology turns the category of “Jewish people” into a confused, essentialized jumble.

While the term “Jews” can be in many contexts an acceptable term for Jewish people, for the purposes of the text, I’ll use “Jewish people” to distinguish Öcalan’s essentialized depiction of “Jews” from my attempt to portray a diverse and historically dynamic set of peoples. 

Appealing to an essentialized “Jew,” Öcalan portrays Jewish people as sharing a universal “Jewish ideology” that is so important that he must raise “the Jewish question” to solve it. 

The word “ideology” generally refers to a specific set of ideas and beliefs backed by powerful institutions such as nations, states, dominant religions, classes, or castes. Öcalan’s notion of “Jewish ideology” inaccurately establishes Jewish people as a universal entity able to act as a powerful state-like institution, imposing “Jewish ideas” on the entire world.

Yet despite Öcalan’s repeated statements about the “importance” of understanding this destructive “Jewish ideology,” he never defines the ideology’s temporal, historical, cultural, or theoretical features. And this is because “Jewish ideology” is a racist fiction rather than historical fact. Jewish people, as a collective entity, are not a powerful institution commanding a unified ideology. Also, Jewish people—across the centuries—are simply too geographically, ethnically, religiously, and politically diverse and dispersed to share even a common culture, national identity, or worldview. 

In addition to presenting a universal and essential “Jewish Ideology,” Öcalan presents a universal “Jew” as the subject of the racist “Jewish Question” associated with 19^th century European nationalism. During a period of rising nation-building, Jew-hating political pundits like William Marr portrayed European Jewish people as racially non-European, thus deeming them incapable of ever being or becoming “true” Europeans. This is significant in light of the fact that by the 1800s, Jewish people had lived in Europe for well over a thousand years.

During the 19^th century, discussions of “the Jewish question” abounded as European political thinkers and politicians pondered what to do with Jewish people living in territories where “true Europeans” would embrace their modern national identity. Should Jewish people be physically relocated outside of Europe within colonial territories (such as in Africa) governed by various European countries? Should they be assimilated, expelled, confined to specific territories, or exterminated?

By the end of World War Two, Europe’s burning “Jewish question” lost legitimacy after Hitler finally solved the question with his Final Solution: the factory-style murder of two thirds of European Jewry.

Öcalan situates his discussion of Jews within the dialectical tradition associated with Hegel and Marx. Öcalan’s dialectic expands upon Marx’s focus on the primary contradiction between the oppressed proletariat and the bourgeoisie to include a range of oppressed groups including women and ethnic minorities such as Jewish, Armenian, Assyrian, and Kurdish people. 

Öcalan’s dialectical approach grants agency to the oppressed, viewing marginalized people as often more than simple passive victims of history. For Öcalan, oppressed groups often righteously use their agency to resist their oppressors. Yet he sees other oppressed groups (like the Jews) as doing something different: these oppressed groups use their agency to collaborate with their oppressors at the expense of a greater humanity. Öcalan’s Jews are not just victims of centuries of Jewish persecution, marginalization, and violence. They are a universal agent who historically collaborates with power. 

Öcalan’s dialectical and agency-oriented approach to understanding Jewish history is invalid, however, because ‘Jewish people’ are not a category analogous to race, class, or gender. Jewish people represent a mere 0.2% of the global population, and spanning classes, races, and nationalities, they do not possess collective “Jewish interests.” 

Despite this, Öcalan treats “the Jews” as a powerful class-like entity. He invokes a quote by Marx as he compares Jewish people to proletariat able to liberate the world: 

I would like to close this theme by repeating something Karl Marx said: “If the proletariat wants to liberate itself, it must proceed in the knowledge that this is not possible without liberating the world.” I say that if Judaism wants to liberate itself, it must understand that to do so it must necessarily liberate the world, using its strategic ideological and material resources to this end, which above all, includes democratic modernity.⁴

Jews, however, cannot constitute the revolutionary subject; they lack the “strategic ideological and material resources” (and numbers) backed by institutionalized Jewish power to make or break the revolutionary project.

All forms of oppression and hierarchy depend on institutionalized power. Wealthy people draw power from institutionalized capitalism, and men draw power from cis-heteropatriarchy, but Jewish people don’t draw power from institutionalized “Jewish power,” because institutionalized Jewish power does not exist. 

If a Jewish person or group collaborates with powerful oppressors to cause harm to members of any subjugated group, they don’t draw their power from their Jewish identity: they draw power from racialized and class status gleaned from institutions of capitalism, cis-heteropatriarchy, or white supremacy. This more complex field of power is collapsed by Öcalan’s erroneous invocation of a universal “Jew” whose Jewishness enables them to collaborate with powerful institutions.

Absent any identifiable global institutionalized system of “Jewish supremacy” over non-Jews analogous to white supremacy or colonialism, Öcalan’s theory of Jewish power falls apart. When Öcalan invokes a universal “Jew” or “Jewish ideology” as a form of institutionalized power, he enters invalid data into his dialectical theory of Jewish history. The conclusions he gleans from this theory of Jews are thus baseless—they are conspiratorial thinking dressed up as historical analysis. 

Question Two: Why does Öcalan reproduce the idea of the “moneyed Jew”?

Why does Öcalan repeatedly assert that Jewish people have a “special relationship to making money?” Because Öcalan is not a scholar of Jewish history or of anti-Jewish racism, he reproduces erroneous narratives generated by chauvinist historians inventing racist notions of Jewish economic difference.  

The narrative about Jewish people having a central “economic function” in the development of European capitalism was popularized during the 19^th century and found its most powerful form in 20^th century anti-Jewish propaganda such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.⁵ This narrative is still quite prevalent today as Jewish people are regarded as having a special relationship to capitalism. 

The myth’s rationale suggests that because the medieval church forbade Christians from engaging in the money lending required to develop European capitalism, Jewish people filled that role, benefitting mightily. Jewish people are seen as having no other choice outside of meeting Europe’s money lending needs because they were excluded from medieval craft guilds, elite professions, and property ownership required for agriculture, etc.

Scholars often accept the Jewish moneylender narrative as fact without questioning its historical validity and accuracy. Historians such as Julie Mell explain how 19^th century propagandists concocted the myth to provide a rational and economistic cause of medieval anti-Jewish racism.⁶ As Mell explains, medieval antisemitism was actually caused by irrational theological shifts demonizing Jews to justify their exclusion from European society. Medieval literature portrays Jews as a source of spiritual evil, engaging in ritual murder, drinking the blood of Christian children, and desecrating the host (the ritual bread used in the Christian Eucharist service).

As Mell also points out, historical records disprove the Jewish moneylending myth: actual historical documents from medieval Europe make only occasional mentions of Jewish moneylenders. In contrast, there is vast documentation of non-Jewish Europeans involved in money lending within both Christian and secular domains hailing from countries such as Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Holland, and England. 

Because notions of Jewish moneylenders are hegemonic and taken for granted, Öcalan doesn’t even have to reference the myth when invoking 19^th century narratives of Jewish economic difference. He need only note “the Jews’” relationship to many broad features of finance that include trade, merchants, markets, banking, economy, commodities, finance capital, capitalism, global economy, and monopolies. He writes:

When I think about the tribe of the Hebrews, two characteristics and survival strategies always come to mind. The first is a special relationship to making money. Jews sought financial influence at certain times and at times attained worldwide supremacy… Many influential people in the field of financial capital, which dominates the global economy, have Hebrew roots and are, therefore, Jewish.⁷

Öcalan here brings together several essentialist ideas. Establishing “Jews” as universal and timeless (“the tribe of the Hebrews,” an ahistorical identification separated from the emergence of capitalism by nearly two thousand years), he makes the unsubstantiated claim that they use ancient survival strategies to keep “making money” that in turn endow them with financial influence and “worldwide supremacy.” His assertion that many capitalists have “Hebrew” or Jewish “roots” is a racist claim, not a historical fact.⁸

Öcalan later explains that the Jews’ special relationship to “commodity, money, and trade relations” extends into a “second move” where their “[s]overeignty over money meant having a role…in the government of newly emerging states.”⁹ For Öcalan, therefore, Jews are not just good at finance. They’re also generally strategic actors always ready to seize opportunities to amass political power. And this imagined pursuit of power and wealth by “the Jews” is itself a source of  societal harm that actively impoverishes and disempowers non-Jews:

[The Jews’] wealth, the material and immaterial wealth, power, and dominance of one side is realized at the expense of the poverty and weakness of the Others, as well as their transformation into a herd.¹⁰

Because of this destructive role of Jewish social power, Öcalan argues, we cannot “take lightly the leading role of Jewish capital monopolism in both commercial capitalism and industrial capitalism in the modern age [or] refrain from emphasizing it.”¹¹

When credible left historians or economists write about capitalism, they explore its central features such as labor exploitation, the imperative for capital accumulation, or the destruction of the planet. Or they analyze powerful global economies such as the United States, Japan, or Germany and supranational bodies that advance capital, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization. They don’t cite “Jewish power” as a driving force behind capitalism. 

Öcalan raises the stakes of identifying the strategic position of Jews in the capitalist world system, claiming that without doing so our movements will fail: 

In a world system that has been hegemonic for four hundred years, the strategic position of Jews in commercial, industrial, financial, media, and intellectual capital monopolies continues to increase in importance. Without acknowledging this, we cannot theoretically analyze either a global or a local problem or solve it in practice. The role of Judaism, both as a strategic ideological and material force is even more evident in the construction of modernity and of the nation-state.¹²

These claims above about Jews (now represented as the religion of Judaism) rest on no supportive or evidentiary historical events, places, or dates.

Öcalan’s discussion about Jews and money invokes an ecumenical “we.” Does his “we” include Jewish leftists? How do such claims affect Öcalan’s anti-capitalist readers who accept his narrative about Jews and money as fact? How does it make them feel about the Jewish people in their movements and about Jewish people generally? 

Question Three: Why does Öcalan use the trope of political-statist Jews?

A third question arises: why does Öcalan assert that Jews created the nation-state? Given that Öcalan is explicitly anti-statist, he is making a serious charge about Jewish political power. 

In his discussion of Jews and the nation-state, Öcalan asserts that Jews played a role in “deriving” the nation-state from their own “Hebrew tribal ideology”:

To put it clearly, nation-statism derives from Hebrew tribal ideology, which has been adopted in a modified and adapted form by all other people and nations. This is my personal interpretation, and I consider it important.¹³

Öcalan’s discussion of the nation-state is both inaccurate and bizarre. Positing a “Hebrew tribal ideology” as a timeless historical force spanning from the late Bronze Age to the rise of the nation-state in the early modern period is of course entirely fictitious. But Öcalan explains this through the narrative of a Jewish survival strategy, where the fusion of capital and state power was a means by which Jews neutralized their Christian and Muslim “opponents” during the Middle Ages and “construct[ed]…every nation-state, thereby gaining a place to live…and the rapid growth of Jewish capital.”¹⁴

Judaism brings to light the capitalist nature of modernity. In so doing, Judaism concretizes and fixes modernity as the nation-state, which constitutes the union of trade, finance, industry, and power monopolies… At the end of the Middle Ages, the Jewish ideology, in the sense of a survival strategy, always sought to neutralize its Christian and Muslim opponents. The nation-state, the concentrated form of all trade, financial, industrial, and ideological monopolies, as well as monopolies of power, together with the worship of the national god always contained within it (in Judaism Rabb fulfills this function), confronts us here as the most suitable model for a survival strategy.¹⁵

In other words, he identifies the centralization of power in the emerging nation-state as a historical consequence of Jewish machinations. Öcalan’s reference to “Rabb” above (a Muslim term for Allah or God) is particularly confusing as “Rabb” has no meaning in the Jewish religion which, it must be reiterated, played no particular role in creating the modern nation-state. 

The historical origin of the nation-state is, however, the subject of actual scholarly debate, leading to precisely opposite conclusions. While some historians see the nation-state as an intellectual invention emerging during 16^th century Europe, others see it as not developing fully until the period of European nationalism in the 19^th century. To the contrary of securing Jewish safety, the historical relationship between Jewish people and the modern nation-state ranges from uneasy tolerance to outright exclusion or banishment. They were the frequent victims of the emerging European state apparatus in the early modern period, and served as the ethnic foil against which 19^th century European nationalisms frequently defined themselves. No credible historian in this debate attributes the nation-state’s origins to Jewish people.

Öcalan’s belief that nation-statism is of a fundamentally Jewish origin leads to an array of truly bewildering historical assertions. He claims that English and Dutch nationalism owe their development to “Jewish monopolies,” both in ideological and material terms “through the power of money and capital.”¹⁶ These imagined “Jewish monopolies,” of course, could not “play [this] major role” in the English case because Jewish people were expelled from England in 1290 by a royal decree known as the Edict of Expulsion (which was not overturned until Cromwell’s reign in the middle of the seventeenth century). During those three and a half centuries, there were occasional instances of small Jewish communities living in parts of England, but even these communities mostly lived underground.¹⁷ Jewish people in Holland played no role in nation-building.¹⁸ Though Holland tolerated the presence of Jews during the 150 years leading up to the Holocaust, the fact that three quarters of the Dutch Jews were murdered during the Holocaust—at a rate far higher than in any other country in Western Europe—is quite revealing regarding the existential vulnerability of assimilated Dutch Jews.¹⁹

He further claims that all contemporary nation-states and nationalisms are Zionist, with Israel as the current manifestation of “Hebrew tribal ideology” but with all other modern states cast in its mold.

The modern capitalist state organized on the basis of Hebrew tribal ideology presents itself as a nation-state (currently Israel). More importantly, in ideological—not racial—terms the core of any nation-state is of a Zionist character (Zionism as Jewish nation-statism). The nation-state is the state form that Judaism has taken as its model in capitalist modernity… Every nationalism is Zionist. So Arab nationalism is also Zionist. It is not wrong to define Palestinian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Iranian-Shiite nationalism as essentially forms of Jewish ideology primarily used by nationalist monopolies.²⁰

This precisely inverts actual historical causality. The historical phenomenon of Jewish nationalism (Zionism) developed in reaction to the many nationalist movements of Europe, many of which infused themselves with pre-existing anti-Jewish racism and sought to deny citizenship to Jewish people. Öcalan’s argument also amounts to an erasure of the unique histories of e.g. Palestinian, Turkish, Kurdish, and Iranian-Shiite nationalisms, none of which are attributable to a non-existent “Jewish ideology.”

In making his case, Öcalan deploys the rhetorical device of “not X but Y” to normalize the erroneous claim that “the Jews” have historically driven and steered the development the nation-state:

Of course, the Jews are not the god of the nation-state, but from the age of tribes to the present day, from its embryonic state to the present age of decay, they have masterfully developed it in their own sphere of influence.²¹

In Öcalan’s “not X but Y” above, he lightly admits that “the Jews” are not the god (or sole creator) of the nation-state. But his “not X” normalizes an equally untrue “but Y” that claims Jews are the midwives and custodians of state power from antiquity to the present, to extend their power or influence. 

Remarkably, Öcalan seems unaware of reproducing the racist triumvirate of Jews, capitalism, and modernity so central to 19^th and 20^th century anti-Jewish racism. Nazi propaganda under Hitler portrayed Jews as not only driving capitalism, but also modern cosmopolitanism marked by crass materialism and decadence. 

Öcalan ironically warns the reader against conspiratorial thinking only to assert his conspiratorial notion that nation-states around the world have all resulted from Jewish plots to expand their power and wealth. After disparaging anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that he believes overstate their case, Öcalan enumerates “certain allegations” that support such theories, rendering them “partly true”:

I have no love for conspiracy theories. Certain allegations keep coming up to support such conspiracy theories: secret Masonic lodges that rule the world, meeting of the Bilderbergers or meetings in Davos, a “standing committee of the twelve” that rules the world, the UN and other entities as “Jewish tools.” What all these theories have in common is that they exaggerate, lapse into dogmatism, and are unscientific, even if they contain assertions that are partly true. But the facts are obvious. The important role of the Jews in all three pillars of capitalist modernity is beyond question. They have strategic, often even decisive, ideological and material influence in all these areas.²²

Öcalan leaves the reader wondering which of the conspiratorial “assertions” listed above are “partly true.” Do Jews dominate the Freemasonry that secretly rules society, or is the United Nations a Jewish scheme for world domination? Öcalan quickly adopts a declarative stance, stating, “the facts are obvious” and “beyond question”: Jews play “an important role” in controlling “all three pillars of capitalist modernity.”²³

Question Four: Why does Öcalan celebrate the Jews he condemns?

Fourth, I ask why Öcalan presents contradictory views of Jewish people. After presenting Jewish people as a negative historical force driving capitalist modernity and the nation-state, why does Öcalan also lionize Jewish intellectuals, scientists, and leftists, claiming that democratic modernity is impossible without them? 

The answer is that most racist narratives are contradictory, emphasizing both positive and negative features of objectified racialized groups. By celebrating positive traits of denigrated groups, racist narratives can appear balanced and fair-minded. In the case of anti-Jewish racism, a contradictory view of Jews also makes anti-Jewish racism plastic and multi-purposeful, appealing to a wide range of audiences. For example, leftists who scorn bad “Jewish capitalists” can admire Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, or Rosa Luxembourg. Those who scorn “Judeo-Bolsheviks” can laud Jewish capitalists such as Sheldon Adelson or the Kushners. 

Philosemitism is a form of anti-Jewish racism that reduces a vast array of diverse Jewish people to a positive “essence” or stereotypes. Positive and negative racist stereotypes are equally damaging because they both perpetuate typological thinking and racialized systems of domination. 

For example, in the white supremacist United States, the same people who view Black people negatively often hold genuinely good feelings about Black excellence in domains such as sports, music, and entertainment. Praise for individuals associated with Black excellence in these limited areas coexists quite comfortably with racist paternalism towards Black people and avoidance of the broader problem of systemic anti-Black racism. Öcalan’s philosemitic praise for individual Jewish intellectuals similarly obscures the social and political obstacles that historically made their contributions difficult for most Jewish people to attain and serves as cover for assessing them as a discrete and unitary group about which sweeping stereotypes may be drawn:

If we mention names like Spinoza in the emergence of contemporary philosophy, Marx in sociology, Freud in psychology, and Einstein in physics, and add hundreds of theorists of the arts, science, and political theory, we would get a sufficient impression of Jewish intellectual strength. Can the dominance of the Jews in the world of intellect be denied?²⁴

Öcalan’s philosemitic praise for “the dominance of the Jews in the world of intellect” is ahistorical. Individuals such as Marx (who didn’t identify as Jewish), Freud, or Einstein contributed to the “world of intellect” not due to their Jewish identity, but despite it. Öcalan doesn’t note that most Jewish people living during the time of Marx or Freud were uneducated and illiterate. For hundreds of years leading up to the Holocaust, the vast majority of European Jewish people led unremarkable, toilsome lives. Especially in Poland and the Russian Empire, where the bulk of European Jewish people lived, they were largely poor, rural, uneducated, and excluded from intellectual or professional society. 

Philosemitism makes for stunning contradictions. After repeatedly condemning Jews for their alleged connection to capitalist modernity, Öcalan celebrates a strong “Jewish wing” of democratic modernity:

It would be insufficient and wrong to think of Judaism only in connection to capitalism, modernity, and the nation-state. [Jews] also exerted a strong influence on democratic modernity. Even if this influence fails to match that of the power-oriented, statist wing (e.g., the Kingdom of Judah and the State of Israel), there has always been a strong Jewish wing of democratic civilization and modernity.²⁵

Öcalan’s ideas about Jewish people are clear: while good Jews lean towards democratic modernity, bad Jews lean towards capitalism and the nation-state. But ultimately, for Öcalan, the Jewish statist wing is the more powerful of the two.

Öcalan’s philosemitism surfaces perhaps most intensely when he speaks of Jewish people in leftist movements:

What prophetic movement, what fraternity and solidarity of the poor, what utopian, socialist, anarchist, feminist, or ecological movement is conceivable without Jews? Likewise, philosophical schools, scientific and artistic movements, and religious denominations are hardly conceivable without Jews. How far could socialism have developed against capitalism, internationalism against nation-statism, communalism against liberalism, feminism against social sexism, ecological economy against industrialism, laicism against religionism, or relativism against universalism without Jews?²⁶

Öcalan’s philosemitic claims pose themselves as a counterbalance to his negative assertions that Jewish “survival strategies” cause harm to others. He lists Jewish contributions to political life, acknowledging Jewish socialists, anarchists, feminists, and ecologists as well as Jewish philosophers, scientists, artists, and religious people: 

From the time of Ishmael, the son of the Prophet Abraham and his concubine Hagar, to Joseph, who was taken to Egypt as a slave, and from Miriam, the sister of Moses, through Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the present, the list encompasses prophets, scribes, intellectuals, social anarchists, feminists, philosophers, scientists, and, together with its laborers, the other side of Judaism has produced great discoveries, inventions, theories, revolutions, and works of art in the struggle for democratic civilization and modernity.²⁷

This celebration of Jews only further reveals his confusion about Jewish history. In discussing Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious historical figures, Öcalan posits the three religions as if they form a unitary whole. He fails to note that Christianity and Islam are not extensions of a mythical “Jewish power” or “Jewish ideology.” Rather, Christianity and Islam are powerful institutions that worked within various state powers to tyrannize Jewish people for centuries. 

Öcalan’s celebration of good Jewish leftists also obscures the long legacy of left anti-Jewish racism that has always marginalized Jewish people in broader leftist movements—a shameful history of which Öcalan’s own identification of Jewish people with capital and state power is but a small, recent part. French utopian thinker Charles Fourier regarded Jewish people as greedy, parasitical, and deceitful. In turn, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon denounced Jewish people as the incarnation of finance capitalism, and declared that “The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated.”²⁸ Russian revolutionary anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, described Jewish people thusly:

This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other… This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found.²⁹

When Stalin noted more Jewish people in the Menshevik (rather than Bolshevik) faction of the Social Democratic party, he joked that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the Bolsheviks to arrange a “small pogrom” in the party. Although Stalin publicly denounced “antisemitism,” it was widely known that he denigrated Jewish people in private. Anti-Jewish racism was prevalent in the Soviet Union where Jewish people were relegated to the political status of “people of Jewish ethnicity” rather than ordinary Soviet citizens.³⁰ Hence, Jewish people were subject to exacting quotas for secondary education and entry into a range of professions. 

Unsurprisingly, marginalized Jewish workers in many parts of the world have often been obligated to establish their own trade unions, political parties, labor newspapers, and movements due to anti-Jewish racism in socialist movements.

Öcalan’s philosemitism is central to his view of Jewish power. Their mastery of “the art of influence in the intellectual world” is in his view precisely what has granted them their destructive proximity to power “almost as far back as written history,” even more so than their command over money.³¹ Even after celebrating their intellectual achievements as “philosophers, scholars, and artists,” Öcalan nevertheless relegates the contributions of these outstanding Jews as within the oppressive realm of capitalist modernity.  

Öcalan’s writings are a useful illustration of how even seemingly complimentary descriptions of Jewish people and their accomplishments are not merely compatible with but are in many cases a central feature of a fundamentally racist worldview about their place in society. Crucially, we must recognize how it remains entirely possible for individuals to feel no hatred or ill-will towards a group of people while retaining, uninterrogated, the retrograde views about what they are essentially like that are received from a social order that oppresses that group.

Question Five: How does Öcalan’s distorted view of Jewish power lead to Holocaust distortion?

So far, I have looked at Öcalan’s notion of two levels of Jewish power, one ideological (philosophy, science, art, and leftist theory) and one material (money, capitalism, and finance). I’ve also looked at how Öcalan’s claims about Jews’ cultural and political achievements depict them as possessing class-like or state-like power capable of making or breaking the revolution. In this section, I address how Öcalan’s distorted view of Jewish power is linked to Holocaust distortion.

Öcalan’s Jews are Janus-faced: they are either statist/anti-statist or capitalist/anti-capitalist. Here, I explore yet another binary where Jews are (imagined as) either self-serving or self-destructive. While self-serving Jews wield financial, religious, and political power, self-destructive Jews caused the Holocaust. Öcalan’s writing thus enters the realm of Holocaust distortion. 

Holocaust denial negates historically established facts surrounding the Nazi genocide. As the Holocaust is one of the most well-documented events in history, Holocaust denial is driven not by a lack of information but by anti-Jewish racism that uses misinformation to cast doubt on the racist motivations that drove the Shoah.

Holocaust distortion, however, adds to or changes established facts surrounding the Holocaust. While some distortions reduce the number of (six million) Jewish people murdered, other distortions argue that concentration camp deaths were caused by circumstantial starvation rather than an explicit policy for mass murder via firing squads or gas chambers. Öcalan’s form of Holocaust distortion adds to the established facts surrounding the Holocaust by claiming that Jewish people played a role in causing it.

Both in The Sociology of Freedom and in the essay “In Commemoration of the Holocaust,” Öcalan suggests that Jews themselves caused the Holocaust by antagonizing societies through their destructive power and conceit.³² Yet Öcalan (or his translator) avoid directly using the word “cause,” utilizing instead euphemistic terms to articulate Holocaust distortion.

Öcalan’s Jews are caught in a tragic genocidal cycle they neither understand nor consciously choose: “Jewish accumulators of capital, always aware of their past difficulties, objectively laid the foundations for the genocide that would target the Jewish communities.”³³ Öcalan’s phrase here, “laid the foundations for the genocide,” is another euphemism for Jewish action that he believes “objectively” caused the Holocaust. 

He also blends distorted Holocaust causality with notions of “Jewish wealth” and “freedom”:

We can also learn from the terrible genocide of the Jews that wealth and immaterial prestige based on the poverty and ignorance of others contribute no real value to freedom. Freedom in a true sense is the transcendence of the distinction between us and others that is characterized by being available to be shared by everyone.³⁴

Öcalan hopes that the ecumenical “we” of leftists will “learn” lessons from the “terrible genocide of the Jews.” Yet Öcalan doesn’t mean that “we” study the Holocaust’s historically documented causes, but rather hopes that “we” learn about the self-destructive consequences of Jewish power. While bearing ultimate causal responsibility for the Holocaust, however, “the Jews” were not (Öcalan suggests) “aware of what was going on and cannot be blamed for it.”³⁵

Öcalan’s phrase “not aware of what was going on” casts the Holocaust as a result of a euphemistic, passive-tense “goings-on,” perpetrated by no one in particular but unknowingly self-inflicted by Jewish people. His implication that Jewish people caused their own annihilation is obviously deeply disrespectful and hurtful, and simply indefensible on any factual grounds. The word “blame” should not appear in the same sentence with “Jews,” “Holocaust,” or “genocide” unless it is being unambiguously attributed to the Holocaust’s actual perpetrators. 

Öcalan’s Holocaust distortion, however, is not just about the past; it also has a future-oriented dimension. Today, Janus-faced Jews have the power to either liberate the world or give rise to “new Hitlers” in the future who will kill them:

If the Jews want to ensure their freedoms—i.e., their wealth, intelligence and power of understanding—they have no choice but to enrich and immaterially strengthen world society in a similar way. Otherwise, they could be persecuted by new Hitlers at any time. In this sense, the liberation of the Jews is only possible if it is intertwined with the liberation and freedom of world society.³⁶

If a leftist wrote, “If Asian Americans want to ensure their wealth, intelligence, and power of understanding, they have no choice but to enrich and immaterially strengthen world society in a similar way” to escape future genocidal annihilation, the statement would hopefully sound absurd and racist. If it doesn’t read as absurd and racist when Öcalan writes about Jewish people in this way, it is because people are accustomed to the hegemonic sound of anti-Jewish racism that paints all Jews as wielding and abusing great financial and political power. 

Öcalan has a variety of other euphemisms for Jewish Holocaust causality, asserting that Jews also created the ideologies that contributed to their own genocide:

(…) nationalism, positivism, religionism had triumphed, but only by simultaneously creating those who perpetrated the genocide of the Jews and committed physical and cultural genocide throughout the world.³⁷

Öcalan also uses the familiar euphemism of Jewish power itself being what “is behind” Jewish suffering: “The spiritual power of the Mosaic faith [i.e. Jews] and the financial power of Judaism is behind its many problems and crises.”³⁸ The rhetorical “X is behind Y” implies causality, suggesting that “X causes Y”—attributing the oppression and genocidal disaster inflicted upon Jewish people to their own exploitative power.

Elsewhere, Öcalan suggests that Jews were “representatives” of German nationalism, causally driving it: “The greatest Zionist nationalists were in various respects also the greatest representatives of German nationalism.”³⁹ He in effect argues throughout his discussion of the Holocaust that Jewish people persistently produced their own gravediggers. Credible historians, however, know that at no point in history did Jewish people act as “representatives” of a German nationalism that Hitler took to genocidal extremes.  

So far, Öcalan’s Holocaust distortion focuses on Jewish power as a causing the Shoah. He also hones in on Jewish “chosenness” as a causal element. Öcalan references “chosenness” six times in the short section “Jewish Ideology, Capitalism, and Modernity,” linking it in turn to notions of Jewish superiority, writing, “Jews consider themselves above all other societies.”⁴⁰ Jewish conceit is a central trope of anti-Jewish racism, used for centuries to justify persecuting and humiliating Jewish people to humble them, putting them in their place. He reflects on a three-part “particularity” he sees as central to “Jewish ideology” that led to the Holocaust: 1) The Jews as an “intertwined” ethnic-religious identity, 2) Jewish religious notions of “chosenness,” and 3) Jewish self-notions of superiority:

Judaism is perhaps one of the first examples of a historical-society identity in which ethnic and religious characteristics are ideologically intertwined. From Abraham to the present day, it has preserved this particularity. If we add the belief that Jews are the “chosen people,” the third important characteristic of this ideology appears to be that Jews consider themselves above all other societies. Historically, this concept of superiority has always carried with it the potential for conflict with other societies and has often led to conflicts that frequently reached the level of genocide. Jewishness has always retained the special feature of being an ideological society that developed in connection with this contradiction (emphasis mine).⁴¹

His attribution of causation of the Holocaust to Jewish “superiority” rests upon euphemistic, subject-vacating phrases like “carried with it the potential for conflict” and “led to conflict.” Öcalan reduces the mass slaughter of millions of Jewish people by weaponized nation-states to their “conflict with other societies.” 

The term “frequently” above signals Öcalan’s view that Jews are caught in a vicious cycle of self-destruction that he seeks to interrupt. But if Öcalan is concerned about Jewish safety, why doesn’t he reference any historically documented sources of violence against Jewish people, from centuries-old religious prejudices to Nazi ideologies of racist eugenics and white supremacy still prominent today?

To conclude this section, I ask why Öcalan distorts the established facts surrounding the Holocaust by adding Jewish power and conceit as causes. Perhaps it’s because the historical facts surrounding the Holocaust contradict Öcalan’s conspiratorial view of Jewish power. How indeed could Jews be both a unified and masterful global power and be victims of mass genocide? Öcalan concludes that Jews historically antagonized nations with their power and conceit, driving them to murderous ends. 

If a renowned leftist figure wrote that Black people in the United States had a power or pride that “led to,” “laid the foundations for,” or “created” institutions of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, how would leftists respond? I hope they would challenge such claims. Yet this is precisely what Öcalan writes of Jewish people in regard to their own genocide. It has been two years since the publication of the English translation of The Sociology of Freedom, and my ears are full of the deafening sound of crickets. 

Conclusion: How the Left perpetuates—and can challenge—anti-Jewish racism

As I’ve illustrated here, Öcalan’s imagined Jews are a class- and state-like body that have the power to make or break the world itself. If Jews would only choose to use their immense financial and political power to promote socialism, anarchism, feminism, and ecology, then humanity could win. If Jews fail to do so, humanity loses, and the leftist project is “impossible.” 

My concern in writing this essay is twofold. I’ve tried to make the anti-Jewish racism in Öcalan’s writings visible so that others can better understand and identify anti-Jewish narratives when they see them. My second concern has been to explore the network of people that brought Öcalan’s writings from his hands to the readers’ eyes. I’ll try here to make a case for why leftists reading this text might consider inserting themselves into this network, responding to the people who brought Öcalan’s anti-Jewish racist words to them.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about a seventy-three-year-old man raised in Turkey reproducing 19^th century racist tropes about Jewish people that he learned while coming of age in the Turkish left. What is remarkable is that his racist tropes are circulating out in the world in 2022 with little response. After reading Öcalan’s writings about Jewish people, one social ecology scholar who is also a scholar of antisemitism said to me, “What blows my mind is that this stuff lived to see the light of day. This is the kind of thing you just bury and hope no one will ever find.”

Written eleven to fourteen years ago in Turkish, Öcalan’s writings on “Jewish Ideology” from The Sociology of Freedom would have remained unknown to the English-speaking world if a network of people in the U.S. and Europe didn’t step up to actively choose to translate, edit, authorize, publish, publicly endorse, promote, and circulate the text. 

Books possess a materiality that makes their “networks of production” visible. Networks appear simply by examining a book’s front and back cover as well as pages of copyright and archival data listing authors, book-series editors, translators, publishers, book-blurbers, foreword-writers, as well as the various dates, places, and terms of publication.

Less visible are “networks of reception” that include those who read, review, discuss, defend, and critique books once they’ve left the press. Public reviewers (positive or negative) are visible nodes of book-networks as people identify and critique both text and those who facilitate textual production. 

I conducted both formal and informal interviews with people in both networks of production and reception surrounding Öcalan’s writings about Jewish people. Out of 31 interviews, two main kinds of responses to Öcalan’s anti-Jewish writings surfaced in these encounters: a small minority (two people) said that they didn’t recognize the anti-Jewish content of Öcalan’s writings, while a majority said they clearly saw it but would never admit it publicly. 

In January of 2021, I joined a small ad-hoc group of nine social ecologists associated with the Institute for Social Ecology to discuss Öcalan’s writings. Because people in these discussions used the term “antisemitism” rather than “anti-Jewish racism,” I’ll use the former term here for the sake of linguistic fidelity.

At our first meeting, we decided collectively to write a short reflection piece about the antisemitism in Öcalan’s writings.⁴² The group also welcomed a member’s recommendation that we meet with two leaders in the Kurdish freedom movement and two scholar-activists involved with the Kurdish freedom movement (henceforth, I’ll refer to this group of four as “Öcalan scholars”).

In January and March of 2021, four social ecologists from our group of nine spent a total of four hours in two Zoom meetings with the four Öcalan scholars. All four were unable or unwilling to identify or acknowledge the antisemitism in Öcalan’s writing. The Öcalan scholars dismissed our group’s concerns about Öcalan’s writing and expressed anger that we had determined the writing antisemitic—even though two members of our group are scholars of antisemitism (Peter Staudenmaier and Rob Ogman who hold PhDs related to and teach on the subject). The Öcalan scholars explained that once we fully appreciated Öcalan’s complex and unique theoretical approach to analyzing Jewish people, we too would see Öcalan’s writing about Jewish people as “dialectical and beautiful” rather than antisemitic.

They recommended that our group of social ecologists refrain from publishing any statement about the antisemitic content in Öcalan’s writing—which we had already drafted. At the end of the second dialogue, the Öcalan scholars said that even though they saw no antisemitism in Öcalan’s writing, they would do three things to address our concerns: they’d bring our concerns to Öcalan, who might modify his critique of Jewish people as he’d previously done for Armenians after they publicly challenged his unfavorable writings about them.⁴³ Second, they would create an educational exchange with the Institute for Social Ecology and Rojava University—which in some way might raise awareness about antisemitism. Third, they said that they would continue to do more Zoom dialogues with our group to keep the lines of communication open.

Nearly two years later, there’s been no follow through. Our group did receive a final email from the Öcalan scholars in May of 2021 reconfirming that they would never accept that Öcalan’s writing was antisemitic.

These Zoom dialogues between Öcalan scholars and social ecologists had a ripple effect as the four social ecologists who’d met with the Öcalan scholars consulted with other social ecologists and leftists about how to best do educational outreach work that could raise awareness on the left about Öcalan’s antisemitic writings and left antisemitism generally.

Jewish people within various social ecology circles found themselves pitted against each other, in some cases eroding decades-long friendships and working relationships. Some Jewish social ecologists felt demoralized by comrades in their social ecology study groups and organizations who felt that, out of fears of bringing negative attention to both the Kurdish freedom movement and Jewish people, they must abide by the request to cease speaking or writing about it publicly. Difficult conversations resulted in several Jewish leftists leaving a social ecology group, with one group member vowing to cut political ties to the left generally.

More troubling were conversations with individuals in study groups and political forums in the United States and Europe who tried but failed to address the anti-Jewish racist content of Öcalan’s writing. Many of these people related to me their stories of reaching out to Kurdish leadership who dismissed their concerns as baseless. One leader in the Kurdish movement even went as far as to say to them, “When I first read Öcalan’s writing about Jews, I, too, was troubled by it. But then, over time, I came to understand and appreciate his dialectical approach to understanding Jewish peoples as well as his approach to even Kurdish people.”⁴⁴

Perhaps most harrowing to me were the stories from seven Jewish individuals I interviewed who expressed pain at having their worst fears about Jews confirmed by Öcalan’s writing. Even if they felt that this writing was antisemitic, they nonetheless internalized its narratives about a special relationship between capitalism and Jews as an unfortunate historical truth.

Five reasons why the left needs to address anti-Jewish racism

Öcalan’s Sociology of Freedom provides an overview of what antique 19^thcentury anti-Jewish racist tropes look like. The book’s publication and the lack of response to its racist content is a reminder that the left indeed has an anti-Jewish racism problem. I’ll conclude here with five main reasons why anti-Jewish racism is a serious problem for the left. 

1. Left anti-Jewish racism makes the left a target for external meddling

Left quietism about anti-Jewish racism makes the left vulnerable to divisive polarization from both inside and outside leftist movements. This is because while leftists might not see anti-Jewish racism as an important issue, the right does. The right knows exactly how to weaponize existing left anti-Jewish racism, using it to increase infighting among leftists that fragments already tenuous movements. One example of this was the deepening of  existing rifts within the organizing committee of the Women’s March. In 2017, upwards of four million people gathered in one of the largest single-day mobilizations in U.S. history which should have launched an impactful wave of feminist organizing. 

But it didn’t. We can point to a number of causes, but significant among them was the unwavering public support by Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory for Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam known for a long history of racist anti-Jewish statements that include rants about powerful “Satanic Jews.”⁴⁵ Other March organizers stood by her, responding defensively and dismissively to the issue as a distraction. Positive media generated by the event fizzled while outrage at anti-Jewish racism (some genuine, some opportunistic) overpowered public discourse about the event, including a wave of Russian Twitter bot activity against the Women’s March.⁴⁶

Similar dynamics can be seen in Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral loss in the UK. This was at least in part due to the left’s unwillingness to address incidents of anti-Jewish racism within the Labour Party, which their opponents in the Conservative Party and even within the old Labour Party bureaucracy were able to exploit in the lead-up to the election. Had leftists working with Corbyn or the Women’s March addressed anti-Jewish racism in their organizations before a crucial election or a historical march, the outcomes of these crises might have been very different. It has indeed consistently proven to be the left’s Achilles heel, a site of vulnerability for outside forces who seek to weaponize the left’s anti-Jewish racism against itself.

2. Left anti-Jewish racism feeds conspiracy theories, obscuring understandings of actual power and Jewish realities

Hannah Arendt explains that authoritarianism thrives when publics are long exposed to propagandistic lies that engender a culture of gullibility and cynicism.⁴⁷ When publics are pummeled for years by incomprehensible lies, they come to accept a lie one day, retreating the next into cynicism if the lie is disproved. Instead of challenging leaders who lie, publics simply say they know all leaders lie, admiring leaders they like who they see as using lies tactically and cleverly. Fascist leaders like Trump successfully use lie-driven conspiracy theories, creating publics who often know he’s lying but cynically admire his ability to achieve his goals by lying. 

Anti-Jewish racism is a set of lies about Jewish histories and realities so longstanding and pervasive that they are taken for granted as true. Öcalan is seemingly sincere, believing his racist writings about Jews are an accurate account. As the centerpiece to most conspiracy theories of power, anti-Jewish racism erodes the left’s ability to distinguish facts from fiction and lies from truth. 

When leftists deny that Öcalan could possibly write anything antisemitic, they are perhaps so long-exposed to lies about Jewish people that they simply accept his conspiratorial writing about them as factual. When others admitted to knowing that Öcalan’s writing contained antisemitic lies but said they would never publicly admit it, they too enacted Arendt’s ideas about lying and power. They lapsed into cynicism, accepting lying as a strategic necessity—for the “good of the movement.” But this is a trap, only perpetuating the conspiratorial thinking that undergirds the authoritarian regimes they seek to counter. Theories of Jewish power serve only as a mask for the actual dynamics of capital and state power.

3. Left anti-Jewish racism weakens leftist organizations by alienating Jewish leftists

For many cultural, historical, and religious reasons, Jewish people are often drawn to the left. Yet they are often demoralized when organizations fail to address instances of anti-Jewish racism both within their movements and in the outside world. Unaddressed anti-Jewish racism can leave Jewish leftists feeling forced to choose between fighting their own oppression or commitment to a left that continuously ignores or rationalizes that oppression.

Leftists who value the contributions of their Jewish comrades could create inclusive organizational policies sensitive to dynamics that emerge between Jews (and among Jews and non-Jews) when issues of anti-Jewish racism inevitably emerge. When non-Jewish leftists step up as allies, speaking out against instances of anti-Jewish racism within and outside of left spaces, Jewish peoples aren’t left in the cross hairs, fighting alone. 

As David Baddiel notes, the left generally supports ethnic minorities to define the features of racist speech or action directed at their group. Yet leftists often deny this right to Jewish leftists, obliging them to debate with non-Jews about the validity of their definition of anti-Jewish racism.⁴⁸

Moreover, when leftists don’t include anti-Jewish racism in an intersectional analysis of racism generally, everyone loses out: the left is deprived of the opportunity to develop an understanding of anti-Jewish racism as a form of oppression that often undergirds white supremacy, nativism, transphobia, and other dangerous forces that attack many non-Jewish marginalized people. In turn, Jewish leftists are deprived of a sense of belonging in a left that cares about its Jewish members, with the left weakened by the absence of their otherwise potential contributions.

4. Left anti-Jewish racism puts Jewish people in danger  

Although many leftists don’t regard anti-Jewish racism as a significant intersectional form of racism, statistics indicate otherwise. Since 2015 when Trump began his presidential campaign, anti-Jewish racist incidents have increased considerably. There were more in the United States in 2021 than any other time during the past forty years.⁴⁹ While it is difficult to ignore mass killings like the 2019 Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh or chants of “Jews will not replace us!” at the 2017 Unite the Right march, the public is generally becoming desensitized to frequent acts of Jew hatred that result in injuries and vandalism of Jewish spaces but yield fewer deaths. Furthermore, anti-Jewish racism isn’t just a problem in the United States: it is steadily rising globally, reaching record highs in countries including Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany.⁵⁰

At times these racist attacks tap into or are generated by political conflict about Israel/Palestine due to a widespread acceptance of the conflation of the Jewish religion and non-Israeli Jewish people with the State of Israel. In 2021, 345 of 2,717 Jew-hating incidents in the United States referenced the words “Israel” and “Zionism.”⁵¹ Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish people living outside Israel are lightning rods for hatred and violence as their clothing make them more identifiable than assimilated or secular Jewish people. 

5. Left anti-Jewish racism keeps the left from successfully becoming a fully antiracist movement capable of fighting white nationalism

Over the past few decades, white leftists have increasingly realized that fighting white supremacy is central to any left agenda. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in particular has underlined what the civil rights and Black Power movements emphasized years ago: fighting anti-Black and Brown racism is necessary to any attempt to create a truly democratic and ecological world. 

The left will only succeed in fighting the white nationalist movement if it also confronts anti-Jewish racism, as it is a lynchpin of the white nationalist agenda. As Eric K. Ward explains, white nationalism rose in response to gains made by Black and Brown people in the 1960s.⁵² White nationalism uses anti-Jewish racism to claim that gains made by Black and Brown people (as well as by women and LGBTQ+ peoples) must have been orchestrated by Jews as these groups lack the power and cleverness to do it on their own. He goes on to argue that challenging white supremacy requires fighting anti-Jewish racism because it not only unites the right, it can unite the right with the left as well. 

This happens when leftists set aside a structural analysis of capitalism in favor of a conspiratorial one, where Jewish people are imagined as the source of society’s problems due to their insatiable lust for financial and political power. The facts of history are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that before the Holocaust, the vast majority of European Jewry were powerless and lived in impoverished rural shtetls. It doesn’t matter that most Jewish people permitted to immigrate to the United States between 1880 and 1920 were equally powerless, fleeing pogroms as well as political, educational, and vocational exclusion. It doesn’t matter that these powerless Jewish immigrants would eventually lose two thirds of their European family members during the Holocaust because the United States closed its doors to Jewish immigrants at the end of the 1920s.

The only thing that “counts” is that Jewish people in the U.S. became an increasingly visible minority in the 1960s and were gradually afforded a provisional whiteness that allowed them to join the American middle class.⁵³ As history bears out, Jewish people’s white privilege is utterly rescindable; popular rage about mythological Jewish power can always take Jews down.

In conclusion, Öcalan was wrong about Jewish people. Rather than constitute a unified and monolithic entity, they are a diverse multiplicity organized along a wide array of ethnic, political, and religious lines. Jewish people share no common ideology or power that destroys society while driving governments into genocidal rage. Jewish people are neither responsible for the left’s greatest achievements nor for its greatest failures.

Leftists need to be able identify and confront anti-Jewish racism when they see it. They also need to be able to replace erroneous racist myths about Jewish people with real Jewish histories. If leftists choose to become educated about Jewish history and the history of anti-Jewish racism, there is hope for the left to become a more fully antiracist movement. 

1. Abdullah Öcalan, The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III (Oakland, PM Press, 2020), 231.
2. ibid 228.
3. Corry Guttstadt 2021, personal interview.
4. Öcalan 2020, 238.
5. “Published as fact by the Nazis and antisemites like Henry Ford, ‘The Protocols’ gathered believers across the 20th century and had a resurgence in the 21st, post-9/11. ‘The Protocols’ are available today at many ethnic or nationalist book outlets, as well as online versions, while Arabic editions can consume up to few percent of any given year’s book runs in Egypt, which is the center of Arab publishing.” (Peter Staudenmaier, personal communication, November 18, 2022). See also David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York and London, W.W. Norton, 2013).
6. Julie Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, Vol. 1 and 2 (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
7. Öcalan 2020, 28.
8. See Mell 2017 for a more detailed discussion.
9. Öcalan 2020, 224.
10. ibid 28-29.
11. ibid 231.
12. ibid.
13. ibid 228.
14. ibid 229.
15. ibid 231-232.
16. ibid 228.
17. Peter Staudenmaier, personal communication, November 18, 2022: “Just as important as the official expulsion in 1290 is the two centuries of increasing persecution that preceded it, during which many Jewish communities abandoned England. When all Jews were finally expelled in 1290, they were an impoverished and tiny minority (circa 2000 total in a population of perhaps 5 million), due in part to previous restrictions placed on them by the English state, which severely narrowed the economic and social space for Jews step by step throughout the 13th century. The list of official and unofficial measures aimed at the Jewish community in medieval England before the expulsion is very lengthy, from repeated massacres and anti-Jewish riots to imprisonment to mass executions to discriminatory taxation and expropriation, from legal strictures such as segregated residence and required badges on clothing, to state agencies like the establishment of the Exchequer of the Jews in the 1190s to the 1275 Statute of Jewry. From 1290 until 1655, there were no Jewish communities in England, with rare and fleeting individual exceptions. The few cases of individual Jews living in England during this period, for example as physician to the monarch, often ended with them being expelled or publicly executed for some supposed transgression. There were evidently some very small hidden groups of covert Jews in London at some points, and some communities of Marranos from Spain and Portugal, but there was no open Jewish life in England for those three and a half centuries, much less any sort of economic prominence. Öcalan’s claim is an unfortunate example of a wildly inaccurate assertion that is entirely at odds with uncontroversial historical information that has been established for a very long time… [I]t is completely backwards; if anything, the nation state of England took shape by excluding Jews. (Heng makes a similar argument in an earlier historical period, that medieval England was the first ‘racial state’ by virtue of its regulation, exclusion, and expulsion of Jews.)” See also Geraldine Heng, England and the Jews: How Religion and Violence Created the First Racial State in the West (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019); Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford, Oxford University Press 2010), 139-47; William D. Rubinstein, A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (London, Palgrave Macmillan Press, 1996), 117-119; and Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1941), 68-90.
18. Hans Knippenberg, “Assimilating Jews in Dutch Nation-Building: The Missing ‘Pillar’”, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (Vol. 93, No. 2, May 2002), 191-207.
19. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, “Comparing the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, France and Belgium, 1940–1945: Similarities, Differences, Causes”, Peter Romijn, ed, The Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).
20. Öcalan 2020, 228.
21. ibid 231.
22. ibid 232.
23. Which the book’s editors helpfully remind us are “capitalism, industrialism, and the nation-state”—absent, of course, any comment to the contrary about their inherently Jewish nature. ibid 385.
24. ibid 28.
25. ibid 237.
26. ibid.
27. ibid.
28. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “On the Jews” (1847). https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/1847/jews.htm.
29. Quoted in Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (London, Fourth Estate, 1999) 340.
30. For more detailed discussion of the status of Jewish people in the Soviet Union, see Yefim Kogan, “Why are Jews from the Former Soviet Union Often called Russian?”, Jewish Federation of the Berkshires (June 15, 2021). https://www.jewishberkshires.org/community-events/berkshire-jewish-voice/berkshire-jewish-voice-highlights/why-are-jews-from-the-former-soviet-union-often-called-russians.
31. Öcalan 2020, 28.
32. Öcalan’s essay “In Commemoration of the Holocaust” was previously hosted at https://rojhelat.info/en/?p=1188, from 2010 to 2021. It was removed immediately following Black French scholar of antisemitism Yves Coleman’s publication of a scathing critique of it and The Sociology of Freedom. The rojhelat.info website claims translation “inconsistencies” as the reason for its removal. The original has been downloaded, however, and is available here. A particularly telling passage from Öcalan’s essay on the Holocaust is that “I full heartedly understand the victims of genocide; I feel and understand it to the level that not a single Jew would be able to reach; since the same system has encircled me and befall the same calamity upon me. Nonetheless it was the Jews who created and reinforced such a system.” See Yves Coleman, “Abdullah Öcalan adds a new chapter to the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’”, Mondalisme (January 2021). http://mondialisme.org/IMG/pdf/_Ocalan_s_Protocols.pdf.
33. Öcalan 2020, 229.
34. ibid 29.
35. ibid 229.
36. ibid, 29.
37. ibid, 229.
38. ibid, 224.
39. ibid, 229.
40. ibid.
41. ibid.
42. This reflection was published to the Institute for Social Ecology website as “Reflections on the Antisemitic Content in Öcalan’s The Sociology of Freedom” (2021). https://social-ecology.org/wp/2021/07/antisemitic-content-in-sociology-of-freedom/.
43. Öcalan had previously made similarly racist claims about Armenians. These were challenged, however, by organized groups within the PKK, and Öcalan ultimately relented and retracted. Source: Corry Guttstadt, personal interview (2021).
44. Personal interview, 2022.
45. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O5eL2MzNtA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjuMJNc5Zys.
46. Ellen Barry, “How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step,” The New York Times, September 18, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/us/womens-march-russia-trump.html.
47. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Schocken Books, 1951).
48. David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity (London, TSL Books, 2021.
49. “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2021”, Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism. https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2022-05/ADL_2021%20Audit_Report_042622_v11.pdf.
50. Jelena Subotic, “Antisemitism in the Global Populist International,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations (Vol. 24, No. 3, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211066970; Benjamin Ward, “Europe’s Worrying Surge of Antisemitism,” Human Rights Watch (May 17, 2021), https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/17/europes-worrying-surge-antisemitism.
51. “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2021”, 5.
52. Eric K. Ward, “Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism,” Political Research Associates (June 29, 2017), https://politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism; Erik K. Ward, “Skin in the Game: Antisemitism, White Nationalism, and the Work for Inclusive Democracy.” Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Video: https://ypsa.yale.edu/videos/skin-game-antisemitism-white-nationalism-and-work-inclusive-democracy.
53. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1998).