Good Jew, Bad Jew: Racism, anti-Semitism and the assault on meaning

by Steven Friedman

Shows how anti-Semitism has been distorted to serve the Israeli state

Good Jew, Bad Jew is a critique by one of South Africa’s foremost political theorists of mainstream understandings of Jewishness. Steven Friedman offers a searing analysis of the weaponisation of anti-Semitism in service of political objectives that support the Israeli state and global white supremacy. Looking specifically at the way in which language is used to shape identities, Friedman uses many examples to illustrate how anti-Semitism and anti-Semites are increasingly defined as anything and anyone that opposes the interests and policies of the Israeli state.

The use of anti-racist language to defend racial domination distorts not only the meaning of what it is to be Jewish, but sheds light on how all dogmatic nationalisms function. Friedman uses India and South Africa as examples, but the analysis applies across the world too.

Good Jew, Bad Jew does not offer a simplistic binary understanding of Jewishness and the actions of the Israeli state and ideology. It is a detailed, deeply researched and critical work that will appeal to both specialists and general readers looking for a considered view on how language shapes belief systems and how the powerful forces of racism and nationalism – and their opponents – are being misrepresented.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

244 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2023

Reviews

[David Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went to the launch of Steven Friedman's Good Jew, Bad Jew because I've admired his writing for many years. This book did not disappoint. To call it thought-provoking would be an understatement. I've had the book next to my bed for two years (along with many others, some having been gathering dust considerably longer). Nothing is out of date, in fact, it is more relevant than ever as Zionism continues to widen the gap between good and bad jews. Friedman, using comparisons with South Africa and India, looks at the politics of exclusion - using narrow definitions of nationalism to exclude all who don't fit an ever-increasing racist set of criteria necessary to belong to the club. Zionism he argues, is a policy of divide and rule, ruling without dissenters - Jews who don't support Zionist Israel are the bad Jews, falling into that ever-widening category known as antisemitic. Zionists, defending their perceived piece of Europe in West Asia, have "elevated" themselves to the level of white European, a phenomenon not exclusive to Israel. Friedman argues that the former colonised, whether in Africa, Asia or elsewhere, often strive to be what the colonisers once were. And therein lies the problem. Today is the best time to read this book. Tomorrow may be even better.

[Raj Naran · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book got me seriously thinking and questioning a range of concepts related to race, identity, colonialism, and domination of one ethnic group by another. In my mind it really raised more questions than it answered. On the down side, I think it does go into a level of analysis that becomes too detailed and unnecessary.
Overall, Friedman strikes me as highly informative, deeply knowledgeable, and intellectually challenging.

[Avril · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, although the title makes it difficult to read in public, which looks at the way Israel and its supporters have changed the definition of 'anti-Semitism’ from a description of anti-Jewish racism to a weapon against Israel’s critics. ‘Good Jews’ are now those who support Israel, ‘Bad Jews’ are those who don’t, and Bad Jews can be punished for their ‘anti-Semitism’, like Diana Neslen, a Jewish woman in her eighties and a regular synagogue attendee against whom the British Labour Party brought disciplinary charges for a tweet: 'The existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour and I am an antiracist Jew.’

Because this is the way accusations of anti-Semitism are now used, to browbeat opponents of Israel, actual anti-Semites are no longer seen as a problem. The purveyors of the ‘new’ anti-Semitism are apparently “more comfortable with fundamentalist preachers who said that God did not hear the prayers of Jews than with liberal clergy who endorsed the rights of all.” This appreciation is mutual; the anti-Semitic Right loves Israel either as a model ethnic supremacist state, because they share its Islamophobia, and/or because they want Jews to be corralled in their own state far away from the US, according to Jewish Voice for Peace.

Friedman points out that Israel cannot describe itself as a democracy: “Democracies do not declare themselves the nation state of one ethnic group in a territory where there is more than one; they do not discriminate against citizens who are not of a particular ethnic group; they do not, as policy, dominate citizens who are not of the dominant ethnic group. The Israeli state and its courts do not even recognise an ‘Israeli’ nationality; for them, only ethnic labels describe nationhood.” He also argues that actual democracy can protect Jews better than Israel can, that “in no democracy were Jews denied full civil rights; it was only when democracy had collapsed, most notoriously in Germany in the 1930s, that Jews faced peril”; that “While it is an article of faith among Zionists that the Nazi genocide was possible only because of Jewish statelessness, the millions of Slavs who the Nazis killed were helped not at all by the fact that they did have their own states.”

Friedman also looks at the lives and thought of ‘self-hating Jews’ Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, to argue that, “Zionism was not a rebellion against Europe’s refusal to accept and include Jews. It was an application form for membership to the European club from which Jews were excluded.”

Beyond the specific case of Israel, Friedman describes the ways in which colonialism has justified the massacres of colonised people (Tasmania’s genocide is name checked), the way the current ethno-religious nationalism in India is a product of the colonialism it claims to challenge, and the way racists in South Africa are using similar tactics to Zionism to argue that anti-racists are the real racists.

In conclusion, Friedman points out that “Reverence for a state - which is always portrayed as a nation state even if it is not - that governs a variety of identities but is said to belong to only one is not restricted to Zionism. It is common and includes the constant efforts of dominant groups to repel immigrants to their states, which has become one of the most serious forms of exclusion and discrimination in the world today. It is no surprise that the Israeli state is so admired by those who use the state as a discriminatory fetish; it is perhaps the starkest example today of a state founded on the principle of exclusion and domination. And so it serves as an inspiration and role model to those throughout the world who see the state as the property of a single group.” (p. 164) The fight against Zionism is only part of the struggle against all ethno-religious nationalisms.

[Ari Damoulakis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am supposedly a politics graduate. I have read very long books from many spectra, even finishing mein kampf, to Wretched of the Earth, to even EFF election manifestos.
But this book was so academic, wordy, pretentiously highbrow in the writing, and abstract that I couldn’t finish it at all.
It was definitely one of the most boring, underwhelming and disappointing books I’ve tried reading.
We are lucky that there are much better and livelier books that say mostly the same thing compared to yet another dry, painful, long-winded and deathly dull piece of thinking and writing from this professor from Johannesburg.
An example, read Being Jewis After Gaza instead.

[ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

zionism declares that “the ‘jewish state’ is all important: jews only exist to serve it. if they must endure bigotry in its interests, so be it. the self-proclaimed cure for antisemitism is now its accomplice.”

🗣️‼️💯🐐🇵🇸

[Allegra Harpootlian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taught me a lot about the weaponization of antisemitism against critics of Israel, but was a bit too academic to be a casual read.

[Matthew Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth the read, and incredibly relevant to current events