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Showing posts with label Keith Kahn-Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Keith Kahn-Harris. Show all posts
Keith Kahn-Harris ✏ writing in New Statesman. Recommended by Christopher Owens. 

Cooperation between Palestinian and Jewish Israelis is the only model for a peaceful future.

Being a Jew on the left right now feels like being torn apart.

I work for two British Jewish communal organisations and I’ve been involved in the Jewish community all my life. 

These are dark times and I share the worry that, sooner or later, the growing wave of anti-Semitic incidents in this country will have deadly consequences. I’ve also spent significant time in Israel, I speak Hebrew and have family and friends in the country. I am mourning those who were killed on 7 October and I am desperate for Hamas’s Israeli hostages to be returned unharmed.

Yet while I can share these feelings of loss and trepidation with much of the UK Jewish community, I also feel like an interloper. I am constantly fretting that if I make one false step – one ill-advised tweet or blog post – I will be cast out.

My fears may or may not be justified but I still feel the need to be cagey about what I believe. 

Continue reading @ New Statesman. 

The Left Fails To Appreciate Competing Loyalties

Keith Kahn-Harris answers thirteen questions in a Booker's Dozen. 

TPQ: What are you currently reading?

KKH: I just finished Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It's a novel of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s by a then-prominent former Bolshevik exile. The book's a savage yet moving satire and brings out the lunacy of the purges.

TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?

KKH: Not an easy question! The easy bit is the worst book: I once tried to read a Clive Cussler thriller called Inca Gold. I've read a lot of thrillers in my time but I didn't last 20 pages with this one. Cussler's hero is called Dirk Pitt, which is a name so ludicrously macho that I couldn't really get past it.

As for the best, I don't really know what criteria to use. But I will choose two for different reasons: David Maurer's The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man is an ethnographic classic and describes a world almost too extraordinary to be real. It was the basis of the film The Sting.

In terms of sheer enjoyment, I adore Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which manages to achieve structural perfection as a thriller whilst also injecting a note of psychological complexity in its portrayal of the unamed narrator.

TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?

KKH: Almost too many to count! But really it depends on what stage of childhood you are taking about. I started on 'adult' books fairly early and I can well remember the sense of triumph on finishing The Lord of the Rings and James Michener's The Source.

TPQ: Favourite childhood author?

KKH: On the cusp of adolescence I went through a George Orwell phase and read ever book I could find by him.

TPQ: First book to really own you?

KKH: 1984 haunted me for years. It still does.


TPQ:  Favourite male and female author?

KKH: Female: I love the work of the sci-fi author Becky Chambers. She manages to do something remarkable in her work: to portray kindness and friendship in interesting ways; to portray a future that retains the best of humanity and other non-human races.

Male: In my discipline of sociology, I would single out Les Back and Richard Sennett as practitioners of beautifully crafted writing from whom I always learn something important every time I read them.

TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?

KKH: I go through phases. I have to read academic books for my work but sometimes my brain is too fried to cope with non-fiction outside that. For the last, anxious, year I have been focusing on fiction.

TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?

KKH: The Disaster Artist by Ton Bissell and Greg Sestero is the funniest book I have ever read, let alone the funniest memoire. It's the story of how the actor Greg Sestero became friends with Tommy Wiseau, writer/director of the cult film The Room. The book was subsequently filmed. I'm a fairly obsessive Room fan and the story behind it is so odd that it genuinely deserves the phrase 'stranger than fiction'.

TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?

KKH: From bitter experience, I have vowed to myself that I will never read another John Le Carre novel. I quite like the early ones but from The Perfect Spy onwards his books became intolerably pompous and bloated. Plus all his characters seem to have bizarre verbal tics. It's a shame because he was a fascinating person and I loved reading interviews with him. His books, even the recent ones, seem to work much better on film.

TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?

KKH: I don't think any one book sums me up. But one book sums up the kind of life I would love to live but will almost certainly never be able to: Brian Eno's diary A Year With Swollen Appendices showcases a life of endless curiosity, multiple fascinating projects and constant creativity.

TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?

KKH: I bought my mother Craig Brown's Ma'am Darling, his biography of Princess Margaret. As with everything he writes, Brown's depiction of Margaret is savagely funny yet also oddly sympathetic.

TPQ: Book you would most like to see turned into a movie?

KKH: It sort of already happened. China Mieville's The City and the City was turned into a BBC series shown in 2019. They did a decent job but nothing can really compete with the imagined world in the book.

TPQ: The just must - select one book you simply have to read before you close the last page on life.

KKH: Talcott Parsons' The Social System is a legendarily turgid doorstop of a book. Up until the 1960s, Parsons' work dominated sociology, but he has since become deeply unfashionable. I've dipped into the book and it is simultaneously unbearably dry and totally bonkers. Parsons aspires to nothing less than a total description of how the social world works. I'd like to read it properly in order to bask in the hubris. 

Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, runs the European Jewish Research Archive at the IJPR and is an Honorary Fellow of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College. His most recent book is Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity (Repeater 2019).  

Booker's Dozen @ Keith Kahn-Harris

Keith Kahn-Harris ✒ In 2018, American Jewry became embroiled in the then-current ‘#MeToo’ movement when multiple allegations of sexual harassment by the prominent sociologist of Jewish life Steven M. Cohen were made public. 
Cohen did not contest the allegations and stated that he was ‘engaged in a process of education, recognition, remorse and repair’. Since then he has mostly dropped out of sight.
 

Responding to the affair, three American-Jewish historians, Kate Rosenblatt, Ronit Stahl, and Lila Corwin Berman, co-authored an article in The Forward in which they argued that Cohen’s behaviour could not be disconnected from his research and writing. 


Much of his work addressed issues of intermarriage, fertility and ‘Jewish continuity’, that have been a central part of Jewish organisational communal concerns since the 1980s (and not just in the US). Rosenblatt et al. argued:

Most troubling about the data-driven mode of Jewish continuity conversations are its patriarchal, misogynistic, and anachronistic assumptions about what is good for the Jews. We learn that single women, queer people, unwed parents, and childless individuals or couples are all problems. And we learn that the Jewish community, should it want to survive, must step into the role of calling out and regulating those problems….The continuity crisis — and its prescriptions about how to regulate primarily women, their bodies, and their sexuality — has its own productive energy that can be harnessed to convince donors to open their pocketbooks and support the very research and programs that prove that the crisis exists.

This article, and others like it, identify the problematic impact that continuity discourse can have on Jewish communal life. Injunctions to Jewish marriage and fertility can end up othering and policing those whose sexuality does not ‘fit’ and can end up putting enormous pressure even on those who are straight and do indeed want to find a Jewish spouse.

None of this necessarily negates the results of research carried out by Cohen and other Jewish communal social researchers that demonstrates that, at least under current circumstances, intermarried Jews are more likely to be Jewishly less active than in-married ones. And in one respect the authors of the Forward article missed something important in the nature of continuity discourse. Cohen’s writings, for the most part, do not exhibit the detailed and prurient interest in sex that he displayed in his ‘private’ life. In fact, continuity discourse rarely openly engages in talk about sexual activity at all – and therein lies its strangeness and its limitation.


I made a similar point in a review of Nathan Abrams’ 2008 edited collection Jews And Sex, that I wrote for the Jewish Quarterly. Recalling my work for the short-lived UK organisation Jewish Continuity, I noted that amidst all the effort to commission research on those oh-so-crucial Jewish ‘singles’, no one was investigating Jewish sex lives and sexual attractions. That is still the case, at least in the UK: Despite the continuing anxiety about Jewish continuity, no Jewish organisation has ever sought to investigate the mechanism through which Jews come to make babies with other Jews. Nor has there been any academic work on the subject in the UK.

In my review, I stated that Jews & Sex left me with ‘a lingering feeling of disappointment, heavy on representation but thin on sociology.’ That was a little harsh in that the collection was focused on Jewish sexuality in art and culture. But it does exemplify an odd duality: Post-war Jewish cultural expression has often been highly interested in sex and its representation and is often created by those who are organisational estranged from organised Jewish community with all its anxieties about continuity; Jewish organisational life is preoccupied with continuity but can rarely represent or engage with sex in an open way.

One could even say that organised Jewish communal life is often reliant on increasing sex yet can only engage openly in the practices that lead to sex (getting Jews together with other Jews) or the outcomes of sex (Jewish babies and their upbringing). What happens in between isn’t just left as a ‘black box’, at times its existence at all is suppressed. This leads to tacitly mixed messages about sex in Jewish communal life.

Jewish organisations are, in fact, very good at creating the conditions for sexual expression (including, but certainly not limited to, sexual harassment and exploitation). Summer camps and Israel tours are laboratories for the exploration of sexuality. At the same time, while part of the aim (acknowledged or unacknowledged) of Jewish youth provision is to encourage Jews to partner with other Jews, sexual activity beyond kissing is often frowned upon or actively proscribed. There are very good reasons for this of course. Unbounded adolescent sexual activity may lead to coercive sexual activity in some cases. But there is little acknowledgment that the messages are mixed, to say the least.

The Cohen affair, therefore, exposed not the dark underbelly of the organised Jewish community’s obsession with regulating sex, but the dangers of an unacknowledged obsession with regulating sex. To talk of Jewish continuity without talking about sex leads to an absence that can easily be filled with sexual exploitation.

Jews & Sex demonstrated that Jews have distinctive preoccupations with sex that are expressed in Jewish cultural activity. The problem is that Jewish arts and culture are often so separated from Jewish organised communal life that no number of Annie Sprinkles or Portnoy’s Complaints can fill the absence in Jewish communal sex talk. The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways of encouraging cultural responses to sexuality within organised Jewish communal life.

Otherwise, Jewish life will be marked by a continuing preoccupation with sex-that-is-not-sex.

Art by Gus Condeixa

Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, runs the European Jewish Research Archive at the IJPR and is an Honorary Fellow of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College. His most recent book is Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity (Repeater 2019).  

On Jewish Communal Sex-That-Is-Not-Sex

Keith Kahn-Harris discusses Left Out: The Inside Story Of Labour Under Corbyn
 
Ever since its publication, snapshots of sections of Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn have been gleefully shared on Twitter amongst detractors of the Corbyn project. 

Antisocial Socialist
@Antisocialsoc19
Turns out everyone's favourite millionaire communist hobbyist Andrew Murray was such a fierce opponent of the Tories, he wanted to go into coalition with them to deliver Brexit. Amazing the brass neck of Corbynites calling others Tory lite #LeftOut
 
It’s the revelations about antisemitism or general incompetence that seem to have attracted the most attention. For me though, it’s the following passage that jumped out:

Witnesses still dispute the cause of the conflagration, and the precise language Alvarez used to deliver her coup de grâce. One attendee recalled Alvarez ‘having a pop’ that Thompson, as a long-standing friend of the couple, found particularly wounding. ‘Marsha finally blew and gave it right back to her.’ The previous evening she herself had rowed with Corbyn, whose lax approach to timekeeping and failure to keep to diary commitments had at points threatened to derail LOTO’s delicate plans for conference. That he was suffocated by his countless admirers did not help. On the night of Laura’s clash with Thompson, the hotel in which they had dined shut down its bar and kitchen temporarily so 120 of its staff could have their picture taken with Corbyn. One aide likened him to a ‘stroppy teenager’. When Thompson confronted Corbyn for an explanation of his behaviour, he accused her of siding with Murphy.

The confrontation took place at the 2019 party conference, at a time when Karie Murphy, executive director of the leader’s office, was losing Corbyn’s trust and under severe factional pressure from within the ‘project’. Marsha-Jane Thompson was Corbyn’s head of campaigns. Laura Alvarez is Corbyn’s wife. At the same time as this tight-knit inner circle was becoming dysfunctional, the leader was the focus of public celebration and adoration to the point that the business of leadership was imperilled. Behind closed doors, Corbyn was squabbled over; in public, he was venerated.

The details of this particular spat are not really important, although it’s a tribute to the authors that they have revealed a steady stream of similar anecdotes. But the story seems to encapsulate a wider duality that explains much about what happened to the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

On the one hand of this duality lay brutal conflict; on the other, joyful love. From 2015 to 2019, the Labour Party was engulfed in waves of vicious in-fighting and almost ecstatic hope and celebration. And we cannot understand one without understanding the other; the queasy dialectic they produced eventually leading to ignominious defeat.

Jeremy Corbyn was the propulsive force at the heart of this dialectic. He was the object of love, hate and struggle. Yet at the same time, as Left Out shows, he was often curiously disengaged. He loathed confrontation of any kind. He spoke in generalities. He avoided detail and the messy business of party management.

Usually, I am suspicious of historical accounts that centre on particular individuals. Social and political movements are rarely reducible to one person. Yet Jeremy Corbyn’s role within the Labour Party might be an exception. While the social and political forces that propelled him to the top and that resulted in electoral semi-success in 2017 and total defeat in 2019, are multiple and complex, in the end we cannot understand what happened without a clear focus on Jeremy Corbyn himself.

Or, rather, on ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ himself. There were multiple constructions of who he is and what he represents and it was these constructions that were the object of struggle. The movement that elected him and adored him usually constructed him as a man of unimpeachable integrity, of unflappable plain-speaking kindness, of idealism and as the embodiment of the hope of change. Amongst his detractors, Jeremy Corbyn was, according to taste, a crank, an antisemite, a lover of tyranny, a naive fool and an empowerer of bullies.

The hate and the conflict that scarred the party from 2015 and 2019 was, largely but by no means completely, the result of the clash of these irreconcilable ‘Jeremy Corbyns’.

The antisemitism issue is the most devastating example of this. Antisemitism on the left is not new, and the expansion in the scope and seriousness of the problem would have been an inevitable result of the election of any left anti-imperialist Labour leader. But what shifted the problem from ‘difficult but possibly solvable’ to ‘impossible and unsolvable’ was the use to which antisemitism was put in defending Corbyn from perceived and real threats. The 2016 coup against him from his critics in the PLP triggered an outraged response from those for whom Jeremy Corbyn was the repository of their hopes and dreams. Antisemitism was one weapon in the arsenal to defend the leader against those who threatened the golden future that Corbyn embodied. Those Jewish MPs who took part in the coup (Luciana Berger being one of the most prominent) became a symbol of the treachery of the Labour right and centre.

Love can make people do terrible things in defence of the loved object. Love led members of Corbyn’s staff to tear each other apart in their rival attempts to defend the leader. Love led people who had rarely thought about Jews, Israel and the Palestinians, to retweet memes about ‘The Rothschilds’. Love led Corbynite Jews to let themselves be chosen as the ideal Jew, to be a beautiful reflection of the leader himself, to abandon any kind of solidarity with other Jews. Love led Corbyn’s inner circle to fight amongst themselves over how best to protect the man, when it was really he himself who should have had the strength to protect them from their worst selves. And Corbyn’s own love for the people he could relate to, was accompanied by an inability to relate to those he could not love.

The Corbynite who comes across best in Left Out is John McDonnell. While he was, for many years, Corbyn’s only real friend in the House of Commons, the events of 2015-2019 show him to have been motivated by a love greater than love for one man. McDonnell loved the project to build socialism first and foremost. Sometimes that meant steadfast defence of Corbynism and all that it entailed (including, on occasions, colluding in dismissing antisemitism), but from 2017 to 2019 his greater desire for socialism began to win out as he pushed back against what he saw as the increasingly disastrous job that Corbyn’s acolytes were doing. In fact, the closer one got to the Corbynite inner circle, so it became easier to express frustration with the man himself and to voice (privately) the criticisms that would, if voiced publicly, have led to vicious abuse from the Corbynite grassroots. What is depressing is how far the movement’s ‘outriders’ and grassroots activists chose to make Corbyn untouchable. Paul Mason is one of the only prominent fellow travellers who refused to bet all their desires for social and political change on the political survival of one individual.

It is only by understanding the warped effects that love can have that we can truly understand what happened to the Labour Party under Corbyn. There’s a lot of loose talk amongst critics of Corbyn that the party became a ‘cult’. To a degree, there’s something to this: It’s hard to view memes celebrating Corbyn’s ‘Nobel prize’ and crediting him for the Good Friday Agreement, without seeing something culty. But the problem with this perspective is that it assumes that Corbyn was not just fundamentally unlovable, he was positively and deviously malign. The point about a cult leaders like Jim Jones is that, while followers love them, they are actually evil charlatans.

I don’t think Corbyn is an evil charlatan. In fact, the mistake that many anti-antisemitism campaigners often make is to see the hate that undoubtedly mushroomed under Corbyn as a reflection of the man himself. In other words, they accuse Corbynites of loving a man with nothing to love about him.

One of the great strengths of Left Out is that, however devastating a picture the authors paint of Corbyn, they also detail his good qualities: He is clearly devoted to his constituency, is capable of great kindness to friends and strangers and has endless empathy for the poor and marginal. These are prosaic and relatable good qualities: not those of a hero but of an everyday decent person.

Corbyn’s worst qualities are similar: mundane and a bit pathetic rather than evil. He is peevish, has gigantic blindspots in his worldview, is not particularly bright, is often passive aggressive, is sometimes indolent, is largely incapable of dealing with people who don’t already agree with him, and is incapable of managing a team let alone a party.

Corbyn may have shared platforms with appalling haters, antisemites and friends of dictators, but he rarely joined in with and repeated their hatred; most of the time he simply stood by, deluding himself that the hate was a little bit of unfortunate excess. Even at one of the few times he explicitly repeated an antisemitic trope – the now-notorious comment that two particular Jews didn’t understand irony despite living here all their lives – seems to have been as much as anything, a way of honouring the urbanity of his Palestinian co-panelists, rather than a vicious attack. To accuse him of hating Jews (or, at least, Zionist Jews), as some have done, is to misunderstand how he works: I don’t think he hates anyone particularly, it’s just that he has no idea how to relate to those he cannot understand and that leaves the door open to tacitly colluding with those who have much more hateful feelings towards them.

It is extraordinary that a man of such regular and ’normal’ good and bad points should be the focus of such extreme love and hate. It is bizarre that this was the man over whom so many people fought, hurt and abused; the man who twisted so many decent people on both the left and right of the party, and on the inside and the outside of the Jewish community, into becoming obsessive haters.

Corbynite readers of Left Out will take comfort in the stories of shoddy behaviour of Tom Watson and the Labour right. Certainly, there is a culture of factionalism and mutual abusiveness that dates back to long before 2015. But whereas in previous eras, this tendency was held in check to the extent that it did not permeate across the party, in the Corbyn years people across the Labour spectrum into performing their worst selves. It is to Labour’s and Corbyn’s shame that so many people fell into the abyss.

Perhaps the story of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is ultimately a cautionary tale of what happens when the image of a person becomes completely disconnected from the actual person. Corbyn could never square accusations of tolerance for antisemitism with his self-image as a lifelong anti-racism. He made the mistake in thinking that good intentions are enough; that if you understand yourself as working for good, if bad things follow then it is not your responsibility.

Pogrund and Maguire argue at the end of Left Out, that ‘on no subject was he more stubborn than his own sense of identity’. As they conclude:

When it came to Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community, the failure was his. The empathy that defined him as a man and politician escaped him. In the face of accusations of racism, he too often empathised with himself. It might reasonably be argued that here was a leader whose preference was to split his own party, rather than apologise.

All of us have sometimes faced a situation when someone accuses us of being something other than who we feel we are. It’s disorienting, hurtful and even scary. Sometimes facing up to such accusations, when they are made in good faith, can allow us to grow as people, to incorporate new elements into one’s self-identity. Sometimes such accusations are purely malign gaslighting. But you can never know which is which without at least allowing for the possibility that who you think you are is not all that you are.

Years ago, when he was a marginal MP, and in the right private circumstances, perhaps Jeremy Corbyn might have been able to open himself up to a serious dialogue about the blindspots in his identity. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he would always have been someone who would countenance no discussion of his self-identity, regardless of whom he had become in life. We will never know. But as head of the Labour Party, as someone the continual eye of the political storm, there was never any prospect that he could have seriously engaged with the limitations of his anti-racist identity and the unintended consequences of his good intentions. When there are people who have constructed you as a uniquely loveable figure, would any of us listen to those who say we are uniquely hateful? That’s not narcissism so much as simple human weakness – it’s nicer to be validated than challenged.

So love was always the problem. Unloveable – but not unhateable – politicians may be healthiest for democracy. In Keir Starmer we have an unloveable Labour leader. While my politics are further to the left than Starmer’s, I am more content with a leader of the opposition that sparks only tepid emotion. When the book is written on the Labour Party under Starmer, I hope that it will be intensely dreary. That Left Out is a page-turner isn’t a good thing. 

Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, runs the European Jewish Research Archive at the IJPR and is an Honorary Fellow of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College. His most recent book is Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity (Repeater 2019). This article was originally published at JewTh!nk

The Problem Of Love In Corbyn’s Labour Party: Reflections On Left Out

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