Nick Cohen, Colin Shindler and left antisemitism

I stumbled across this, sort of, on the Standpoint website. It's Nick Cohen's review of Colin Shindler's "Israel and the European Left". Actually, I was chasing down a link in a comments thread elsewhere, but what matters is that I found it!

Cohen starts off with a set of general comments on the original ideological links between Communism and Zionism, before they became, in his own words, separated at birth. Then he comes to Shindler's book. Almost his first direct comment on it is the following: "If [Colin Shindler] has not produced a secret history, then it is a history of a secret in plain view; an account of facts that are available but not discussed. After I interviewed him at Jewish Book Week, members of the audience said they had never before heard anyone examine the racist strain in left-wing thinking, even though it was there from the beginning."

Of course, the readers of this and similar sites will not be at all surprised that this strain, as Cohen puts it, in left-wing thinking. If we weren't aware, we wouldn't be here in the first place. Anne's opinions (another Israel based website, in English) was kind enough to post a longish article by me on the Jewish Book Week, including my reactions to the Shindler/Cohen session.

By Brian Goldfarb.