Antisemitism: the "modality in which the revolution was lived" : what Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution teaches us about the challenges facing antiracism and "the left" today

I read Brendan McGeever's Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution against the backdrop of my own family history and my ambivalent relationship to "identity". The fierce commitment of Jewish activists of the Russian Revolution both to its aims and to the struggle to end antisemitism points to the significance of experience over simplified understandings of identity. We do not struggle against racism because of a reified idea about who we are, but our commitment is driven by the striving to eradicate the material effects of racializing dehumanization. The misreading of antiracism as an identity struggle by the "white left" thwarts efforts to place the fight against racism at the heart of the struggle for human liberation.