Steve Cohen - Thats Funny, You Dont Look Anti‐Semitic

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First published in Great Britain in 1984 by
the Beyond the Pale Collective
Republished by Engage www.engageonline.org.uk 2005
This edition is published by No Pasaran Media Ltd in 2019

Copyright 1984 Steve Cohen
Copyright 2005 Engage www.engageonline.org.uk
Copyright 2019 No Pasaran Media Ltd www.nopasaran.media

Acknowledgements for photographs:
25, Rollins Collection at Modern Records Centre, Warwick University.
7, Manchester Studies Unit, Manchester Polytechnic (special thanks to Don)

This publication and parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, by any method, except for noncommercial use. In citing the publication, please acknowledge author and source.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: Print: 978-1-9162357-0-0; Kindle: 978-1-9162357-1-7;
eBook: 978-1-9162357-2-4

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Typeset and Printed by: Dolman Scott Ltd
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This republishing is done with the expressed permission of Steve Cohens children Tom Cohen and Rachel Cohen, and Toms childrenand inheritors of their grandfathers intellectual propertyFintan and Ellen. No Pasaran Media wants to add a special thanks to Tom, Rachel, Fintan and Ellen for their help, support and cooperation in the reprinting of this important piece of work.

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Foreword

My dad, Steve, was a lifelong revolutionary socialist, who sadly passed away in 2009. He joined the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1968. Dave Landau, in his obituary, said Steve "was attracted to this group because of its dynamism, openness to ideas and discussion and the seriousness with which it took oppressions that the rest of the Left either avoidedsuch as questions of sexuality and genderor which they didnt see as fundamental; such as racism". He left the IMG in 1974, but remained committed to many of the ideas, especially the cause of anti-imperialism in Ireland. He wrote a pamphlet against the Prevention of Terrorism Act entitled Apartheid in Britain and was invited, in 1976, to speak at a meeting organised by the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) about its contents. The meeting was broken up by fascists and Steve was knocked unconscious. He was not deterred. Steve championed the rights of the Palestinian people and actively opposed the two-state solution as racist. Incidentally, he thought a one-state solution was worseand derided by arguments around both states trading together and mercantilism as a capitalist trick.

Whilst being hopeless as a husband, but thankfully much better as a father, father-in-law and grandfather, he was an activist until the end, fighting Tony Blairs immigration controls as a member of the No One Is Illegal (NOII) campaign. He viewed the New Labour Governments policies as the latest manifestation of what he considered the most egregious piece of government legislation ever: the Aliens Act 1905. He lived by NOIIs motto DEFIANCE NOT COMPLIANCE. Steve redefined how immigration cases were litigated in the 1980s. He took the view that the system was racist therefore the fight had to be taken to the streets as well as the courtroom. Anwar Ditta and many others are here because of Steve and countless others courage to selflessly battle injustice.

We are a family of atheist JewsSteve was a member of the Jewish Socialist Group off and on over the years. For most of his campaigning life this had little bearing on his politics, until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s. He started putting pen to paper for a book full of his condemnation about the aggressors actions. During the research, he stumbled across Left antisemitism by self described anti-racists time and time again. He was in shock and horrified. This racism perpetuated by leaders of the radical and revolutionary Left was an affront to his senses.

The 1984 polemic Thats Funny, You Dont Look Anti-Semitic was the result of what he found. It was groundbreaking then and it is groundbreaking now. Its greatest impact was to help those on the Left understand and address their own racismon this it remains pertinent today.

But the issues on which he touches have resonance once again. Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the number of stories about antisemitismespecially on the radical and revolutionary Lefthas skyrocketed.

However, two things will be apparent to a modern reader of this work. One is the single-mindedness of some of the characters in Thats Funny over the three and a half decades since it was published; both Tony Greenstein and Ken Livingstone now find themselves outside the Labour Party because of recent accusations of egregious behaviour. Second, the themes my dad identifies are playing out again. I identify five to watch out for.

First there are those who do not deny the problem but resist any utterance of the problem in case it helps the Tories. Behind all this, Steve argues, is an extremely dangerous assumptionnamely that historical and contemporary truths should be suppressed in order to avoid further weakening the Left. In the introduction, he writes, this book might well provide some perverse ammunition to reactionaries of all kinds, who want to denounce revolutionary change. So be it. Reaction has to be defeated honestly, not by defending the indefensible. He quotes Leon Trotskys, only the truth is revolutionary, as back up. He writes of the Left fighting Margaret Thatcher, it is inconceivable that a socialist movement which is shot through with its own antisemitism could face up to any of the aspects of Tory, let alone fascist, chauvinismthe same could be said of Labour fighting the current strand of populist Tory leadership and alt-Right today.

Second, conspiratorial anti-capitalism. Jeremy Corbyn, in one of the few articles he has written facing into the problems of antisemitism in Labour, wrote in the Evening Standard, there are people who have come to see capitalism and imperialism as the product of conspiracy by a small shadowy elite rather than a political, economic, legal and social system. That is only a step from hoary myths about "Jewish bankers" and "sinister global forces". Steve refers to the equation of Jews with capitalism as the classic socialism of fools.

Third, the interplay with Zionism. For my dad there was real clarity on this point: "the distinction is absolute". Things are either antisemitic or anti-Zionist. One does not lead to the other. One can masquerade as the other, but they are not on a continuum. Linked, however, is how hostility to Zionism, now mainstream on the Left, touches left-wing Jews. It is a problem every time a Jew on the Left comes out as Jewish and is immediately requestedwith grave suspicion by the person making the requestto give their position on ... Zionism. Many Jewish Labour Movement activists report the same hostility in the post-2015 Labour Party. Steve always understood Zionism as a product of antisemitism and, in the face of denial and passivity, urged all socialists to resist antisemitism.

Four, antisemitism and identity politics. Steve describes those who suggest antisemitism exists only in "history'", not as a modern reality. This gets built on with groups arguing that either there are more important experiences of racism to fight today or that the Left can only fight one at a time or that Jews do not fit into or experience structural racism. He argues this appeared in a very mainstream way in the propaganda slogan of the AntiNazi League in the middle of the 1970s: "Yesterday it was the Jews, today it is the blacks". He responds, "Would anyone seriously expect women and black people to stop challenging the Left whenever it operates on sexist and/or racist assumptions?" Again there are many comparisons today.