Antisemitism for dummies

Some people might argue that Deborah Lipstadt has given us the book we desperately need from the author best equipped to write it. After all, in just the past few weeks the dumpster fire over the Labour party’s hand-ling of anti-Semitism burst into acrid flame again over general secretary Jenny Formby’s release of Labour’s record in responding to the problem — 673 complaints, 96 members suspended, 12 expelled. Labour’s failure to act decisively against anti-Semitism was also cited by most of the nine MPs who left the party.

Meanwhile, in Lipstadt’s own country, Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim-American women recently elected to congress, was condemned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic leadership after she tweeted that congressional support for Israel was ‘all about the Benjamins’ — a reference to a song by the rapper Puff Daddy. But it was also, according to her critics, a suggestion, by way of a historic anti-Semitic trope, that US congressional devotion to the Zionist cause owed more to Jewish money and power than to any deeper attachment to the Jewish state or an authentic sense of the American national interest.