JCA 8.1 Stoegner_Robert Fine Lecture_V2

JCA 2025

(DOI: 10.26613/jca/8.1.181)

Antisemitism and Sexism after October 7—the Intersectionality of Ideologies Robert Fine Memorial Lecture 2024 Karin Stögner

It is a great honor for me to be invited to give this year’s Robert Fine Memorial Lecture. I met Robert more than fifteen years ago when I discovered the research network on antisemitism and racism which he had founded in the European Sociological Association—a group of scholars that has since become my academic home. I miss Robert as a friend. He was a mentor to many of us. And in the field of antisemitism critique, especially after October 7, we desperately need the theoretical and political clarity, but also prudence, he embodied.

Delivering this year’s Robert Fine Lecture is also a special challenge. We look back on a year of rising antisemitism around the world. We were dismayed to see how the terror of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including the sexual violence, was framed as legitimate resistance in considerable parts of the Left and of intersectional and queer feminism. As a feminist I am still shocked by this. Many of these discourses are trapped in a simplistic Manichean worldview that divides the world into good and evil and identifies Israel with all that is despicable in Western modernity. Perhaps more than ever, we are confronted with the hatred of Israel as a new manifestation of antisemitism, one that differs considerably from racism. More than a decade ago, Robert Fine and Glyn Cousin were explicit about what characterized this new form of antisemitism: “Israel is depicted as a uniquely illegitimate state, Zionism as a uniquely noxious ideology, supporters of Israel as a uniquely powerful lobby, and memory of the Holocaust as a uniquely self-serving

reference to the past.”1 This characterization applies perfectly to the current situation.

In this talk I want to elaborate on how antisemitism and sexism intersect, permeate and reinforce each other in the hatred of Israel, especially after October 7. I will first address the problem of antisemitism hardly being recognized in the intersectionality framework, as I think this is one of the major reasons for Western feminists blinding out antisemitism in their reactions to the massacres of Hamas, reactions that I will address in my second point. In my third point I will present an intersectional critique of antisemitism, focusing on how antisemitism and sexism intersect in the Islamist ideology of Hamas. In conclusion, I would like to make four brief points about what needs to be done in order to bring about a counter-development in the academic world.

ANTISEMITISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY Many years ago I started to view the complex interplay between antisemitism and sexism as a form of intersectionality.2 I often discussed this with Robert, who was critical of intersectionality because it mostly left out antisemitism and was sometimes even open to an antisemitic drift. But I wanted to reclaim the intersectionality frame for a critique of antisemitism intertwining with sexism, racism, and nationalism, and so I proposed the term “intersectionality of ideologies.”3 This implied a new focus on intersectionality as a tool for criticizing multidimensional power relations: namely, to

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abandon identity politics and instead focus on the ideological dimensions of domination. This is because identity politics merely illuminates the subjective side of power relations based on exclusion, oppression, and inequality—the side of lived experience. This side is important, but it does not explain the economic, political, social, and historical process of excluding whole groups of people—women, Jews, those marginalized on racial grounds. One reason for this is that the motive for oppression has nothing to do with the experiences of the oppressed, but with the structures of society in which oppression takes place.

While identity politics gives a voice to the marginalized, it also tends to isolate individual victim groups from each other. And because all this takes place in a society characterized by the capitalist mechanism of competition, identity politics all too often leads to victim competition.

Hence, the ideologies that legitimize oppression, exclusion, and exploitation further divide those affected by them.

Things would be easier if the intersection of ideologies also led to solidarity between victim groups, as intersectionality promises. As a woman, intersectionality says, you cannot close your eyes to the oppression of other groups, simply because women are not a homogeneous collective, but have different, even conflicting, socio-economic interests and different identity orientations. Recognizing difference is thus a prerequisite for solidarity.

But antisemitism has consistently been a notable gap in the concept of intersectionality since the 1970s. It was not only overlooked analytically, receiving little attention within the triad of race, class, and gender, but it was also excluded from identity politics. Antisemitism was often dismissed as a prejudice between White people, the Shoah being viewed as a White-on-White crime and thus not part of the problem that intersectionality copes with.

One reason for this is that intersectionality was originally developed in order to understand the specific situation of Black women in the United States. It therefore focused on the racism 2

that divides society along color lines. That does not mean that there aren’t any other forms of racism, but these are seldomly recognized in intersectionality. Antisemitism is hardly included in the framework of intersectionality because the relationship between antisemitism and racism is indeed complex. Antisemitism is not a mere form of racism, but an ideology of its own kind that intersects with racism. The difference can be put briefly: While racism legitimizes the over-exploitation or surplus exploitation of racialized people beyond bourgeois contractual relations, antisemitism, on the other hand, is not about the exploitation of Jews, but about blaming Jews for all the evils of capitalism and modernity. Antisemitism projects the injustices of capitalist society onto the Jews—they would be the masterminds behind the exploitation of racialized people and would profit from it. Thus, antisemitism can even be viewed as an outcry of the oppressed.

Intersectionality follows this characteristic of antisemitism when it excludes Jews.

Intersectionality explains why and how people are pushed into a position of inferiority and how this affects their lives. Jews, however, are not seen as inferior, but as superior, as the elite, so they are not part of the intersectionality frame. The reasons why Jews are denied solidarity in many intersectional approaches therefore lie in antisemitism itself. This is clear from the reactions of many Western feminists to the horrors of October 7, who in one way or another legitimized Hamas’s atrocities and denied Israeli women solidarity.

FEMINIST REACTIONS TO THE OCTOBER 7 MASSACRES Immediately after October 7 many feminists demanded in statements and open letters to “contextualize” the Hamas massacres, and in doing so ignored antisemitism as an essential ideological driver of Hamas.4 Instead, they delegitimized Israel as settler colonialism, accused Israel of genocide, and called for boycott of Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism

Antisemitism and Sexism after October 7—the Intersectionality of Ideologies

Israeli academics and artists. Hardly any letter openly mourned the Israeli victims or demanded that all hostages be released unconditionally. In face of the lack of grief and solidarity for the Israeli victims, the Austrian writer Doron Rabinovici spoke of “a process of de-realisation.

What happened to the victims is not recognised.

This is the second erasure of their existence.”5 According to Theodor W. Adorno, derealization and victim-perpetrator reversal were characteristic of post-Shoah antisemitism, an antisemitism that sought to defend itself against the guilt of National Socialism.6 In the aftermath of 10/7, various strategies of derealization have taken place, from silence to denial to outright legitimization of the massacres. Feminists are widely represented in these strategies. To mention just the most prominent example: Judith Butler, whose prominence and influence in international feminist and queer communities can hardly be overvalued.

Speaking in Paris in March 2024, Butler legitimized the Hamas terror as act of resistance, while openly denying its antisemitic character.7 A “commitment to a phantasy of Jewish suffering” would obscure the entire history of power. “It is not a terrorist attack and it is not an antisemitic attack, it was an attack on Israelis,” they added, thereby declaring irrelevant both the Jewish identity of the majority of those attacked and the antisemitic ideology of Hamas, well documented in its own charter, rather than recognizing these two moments as an essential context.8 Since then, contextualization has become a buzzword and the framework within which antisemitism has consistently been ignored since October 7, while in fact it increased massively on a global scale. In this way, contextualization has become a mode of legitimizing antisemitism.

At the same event in Paris Butler also doubted the rape of Israeli women by Hamas and demanded to see the evidence, in stark contrast to the otherwise widely accepted feminist definitional power of rape victims. It is also an open and deliberate rejection of perception, because JCA | Vol. 8 | No. 1 | Spring 2025

the Hamas rapes are among the most documented crimes in history. As early as October 7, pictures of obviously raped women were circulated in online forums by the perpetrators themselves.

Butler’s position divided feminists. While many applauded, others were shocked. The latter position was shared by Eva Illouz, who put it succinctly: “The fact that Judith Butler was born Jewish and a woman should not prevent us from recognizing two forms of denial here: the denial of the slaughter of women and the denial of moral guilt for the slaughter of Jews.”9 However, the ignoring and active concealment of antisemitism began long before October 7 and went hand in hand with the legitimization of radical Islamism. As early as 2006, in a discussion at the UC Berkeley, Butler said that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”10 They distanced themselves from the use of violence, but not from the political goal of Hamas and Hezbollah to eradicate Israel as a Jewish state.

This implies acceptance of Hamas’s will to replace Israel with an Islamist theocracy based on exterminatory antizionism and gender apartheid.

Another pioneer of such an alliance between the Left, feminism, and radical Islamism was Susan Buck-Morss, a feminist critical theorist renowned for her scholarly work on Walter Benjamin, Hegel, and universalism. In the aftermath of 9/11 she wrote a book entitled Thinking Past Terror, first published in 2003, in whose preface she wrote: “The book’s central proposal is that Islamism as a political discourse can be considered together with Critical Theory as critiques of modernity in its Western-developed form.”11 After 9/11, Buck-Morss saw the Western critique of modernity in crisis and hoped for support from Islamists, and thereby positively referred to Sayyid Qutb, one of the masterminds of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose rejection of Western modernity was explicitly antisemitic and misogynist. In his 1950 propaganda text 3

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entitled Our Struggle with the Jews he created crude antisemitic conspiracy myths about Jews doing evil and about Allah sending Hitler and the Muslims to save the world from the Jews.12 He accused the Jews of being behind all those things that he abhorred: “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a ‘Jew’; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society [. . .] was a Jew.”13 This quote highlights the strong connection between antisemitism, antifeminism, and the opposition to sexual self-determination that is so prominent in Islamism (just as in far-right extremism).

The question now is how and why an avowed feminist like Susan Buck-Morss can build an argument on Sayyid Qutb. The precondition, of course, is that antisemitism is excluded. And indeed, Buck-Morss fails to mention Qutb’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s rabid antisemitism throughout the book. But the left-feministIslamist alliance proposed by Buck-Morss and Butler requires not only ignoring antisemitism but also blanking out antifeminism. This is achieved through a form of cultural relativism that frames women’s autonomy in postcolonial contexts as resistance to so-called “Westoxification.”14 In this view, women’s freedom is interpreted as liberation from Western dominance, rather than from tribal, cultural, or religious systems of patriarchal oppression.

Buck-Morss explicitly calls for the recognition of non-Western patriarchal gender relations as a critique of the Western commodification of the female body.15 Similarly, Butler expressed concern that the Western gaze was destroying Islamic culture, referring approvingly to a description of “the important cultural meanings of the burka, the way in which it signifies belonging-ness to a community and religion, a family, an extended history of kin relations, an exercise of modesty and pride, a protection against shame, and operates as well as a veil behind which, and through which, feminine agency can and does work.”16 4

It is deeply disturbing to see feminists, in an anti-Western rage, legitimizing an Islamism that is antisemitic, anti-emancipatory, anti-feminist, misogynist, and homophobic. What has happened to this kind of feminism that something like this is possible? How can antisemitism, misogyny and homophobia be legitimized as an act of resistance? Why is the West only seen as oppressing and not also as emancipating? The answer is that the concept of emancipation itself is sometimes viewed as repressive.

One reason for this development is a cultural relativism that emerged in the aftermath of a critique of the universal concepts of Enlightenment. Already in the 1940s, in their seminal book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno criticized that the universal was repressive against the particular.17 However, their intention was not to discard the idea of the universal altogether, but to find ways of thinking the universal in mediation with the particular, and thus to deprive both the universal and the particular from their oppressive character. Their critique was a determinate negation of the oppressive moments of the universal, aimed at rescuing its liberating moments that enable solidarity across narrow boundaries.

In most strands of intersectional feminism, on the other hand, the idea of the universal has been dismissed altogether as merely repressive, and instead the particular has been reinforced to the point of mere particularism. As a result, women’s universal interest in liberation from patriarchal domination was fragmented. The demand for women’s emancipation in the Global South is less and less directed against patriarchal and sexist structures within the communities and societies in the Global South, but primarily against the influence of Western liberal concepts on the Global South. Susan Buck-Morss called this influence “Westoxification,” a term used already by supporters of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

In this perspective, even the demand for equal rights and sexual self-determination may be considered toxic if it contradicts cultural or religious Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism

Antisemitism and Sexism after October 7—the Intersectionality of Ideologies

norms. In this way, women disappear as autonomous subjects behind the hegemony of patriarchal religion and culture. Intersectional feminism has ultimately lost its unifying goal of liberating women and non-normative sexualities from patriarchal oppression on a global scale. Its new goal is the recognition of culture and religion. As a result, women in Iran who are fighting for their freedom and a Western lifestyle find comparatively little overt support from many Western feminists.

This is where it becomes clear what has happened: Intersectionality rightly emphasized that women are oppressed not only because of their gender, but also because of their race and class. Intersectionality sought to analyze the interconnectedness of these categories. However, during the broad political struggle of which intersectionality was a part, it was partly hijacked by anti-feminist reactionary forces, so that gender eventually lost out to religion and culture.

Instead of liberating women, intersectionality is now often used to keep women in the place that religion or culture assigns to them. Women’s liberation has become a side conflict subordinated to the main cause of liberating the Global South from Western influence.

But what does this have to do with antisemitism? Why are cultural relativist feminists often prone to antisemitism? It is because Jews and Israel are seen as representative of the very universalism identified with Western domination. In today’s cultural relativist theories, the universal has become a sign of white supremacy, responsible for racism. Overcoming racism is thus linked to ending universalism. The loss of feminist consciousness in cultural relativism creates an opening for antisemitism as an outlet.

The common goal—women’s liberation—has been replaced by a common foe—Israel and the West in general, which now fill the ideological void left by the erosion of feminist solidarity.

This is exactly what we have seen after October 7: the antisemitism and anti-feminism of Hamas is denied or even legitimized as resistance against an alleged colonial power and against Western imperialism. The ideological JCA | Vol. 8 | No. 1 | Spring 2025

delusion goes so far as to claim that, once Israel is destroyed, all other problems will be solved: from sexism to homophobia, even the climate crisis. The slogan “Palestine will set us free” is the motto of a political theology that expresses the desire for salvation in a post-factual age in which all the evil in the world is projected onto Israel. In this completely delusional world view, world peace depends on the solution of the “Israel question,” which is a new variant of the old “Jewish question.”

I often discussed this with Robert. In the Jewish question, he once said, Jews can personify whatever is wrong, be it the undesired particular, the false universal (sometimes equated with cosmopolitanism), or even universalism itself when it is deemed tyrannical and repressive of the particular.18

AN INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUE OF ANTISEMITISM AND SEXISM The German sociopsychologist Rolf Pohl pointed to the threefold hatred that can be depicted as motivational force in Hamas’s massacre: The victims were Israeli, this is hatred of the state of Israel; they were Jewish, which is antisemitism; and they were women, which is misogyny.19 Addressing the specificity of Hamas’s antisemitism requires us to see it as an intersectional ideology and thus to critically reflect on its intersections with sexism, anti-feminism and homophobia.

The theorists of the early Frankfurt School, particularly Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Adorno, and Horkheimer, can be very helpful in this multilayered analysis. For them, antisemitism was the central ideology of modernity, encapsulating a whole worldview that projected all that is deemed evil in modernity onto the Jews. They pointed to the particularly ambiguous character of modern antisemitism, which supposes that Jews would possess immense power and that they would secretly rule the world. In this conspiracy myth, antisemites see themselves as inferior to the Jews. At the same time, however, 5

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antisemitism also portrays Jews as weak and effeminate. This is the point where it overlaps with antifeminism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno elaborate on the affinities between hatred of women and hatred of Jews. The hatred of women, seen as weaker and marked by subjugation, stems from the same source as the hatred of Jews: “Women and Jews show visible evidence of not having ruled for thousands of years.”20 A common feature of antisemitism and sexism is that in feudal Europe, as well as in the premodern Islamic world, both women and Jews had no right to bear arms to defend themselves.

They depended on the protection of Christian and Islamic rulers. At the same time, the prescribed inferiority of women and Jews was reinterpreted in conspiracy myths—for example, that Jews were behind the plague, and that women were sorceresses who bewitched men with their unrestrained sexuality. In modern times, the antisemitic myth of a Jewish world conspiracy has become prominent. The antisemitic conspiracy theory incorporates antifeminism, as demonstrated by Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He claimed that the Western concept of gender justice would lead to the objectification of women and asserted that this was all part of a “Zionist plot to destroy human society.”21 The idea that, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, antisemitism and antifeminism are motivated by the prescribed weakness of Jews and women deserves another thought against the background of the October 7 massacre. The desire to see Israel and Israelis, and Israeli women in particular, as weak and defenseless is evident today in much of the West’s anti-Western support for Hamas. Israeli women as soldiers are seen as a specific narcissistic insult to masculinists. Seeing them defeated by the Hamas is what made Islamists around the world so happy. Take for example Joseph Massad, a Columbia University professor and legitimizer of Hamas terror, who wrote on October 8: “The sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating 6

Gaza from Israel was astounding. Perhaps the major achievement of the resistance in the temporary takeover of these settler-colonies is the death blow to any confidence that Israeli colonists had in their military and its ability to protect them.”22 Antisemites and sexists want to see Jews and women defenseless, which is another reason why the existence of the state of Israel so infuriates them.

But there are more connections between antisemitism and sexism than proscribed weakness and conspiracy. In the studies in the Authoritarian Personality, carried out by Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik in the 1940s in the United States, the strictly binary gender relations and the related images of pure femininity and ideal masculinity turned out to be crucial moments also in antisemitism. There was a significant correlation between the insistence on a strict gender binarity on the one hand, and other markers of authoritarianism, such as ethnocentric, nationalistic, and antisemitic attitudes, on the other.23 The strict separation of male and female and the intolerance of moments of the other gender in one’s own is a model for the very identitarian and stereotypical thinking that antisemitism also follows. It is therefore not surprising that antisemitism contains elements of a heterosexist, homophobic, and transphobic ideology, but turned upside down, as evidenced in the antisemitic figure of the effeminate Jew who would destabilize the well-established binary gender order. Throughout the long history of antisemitism Jews were imagined and feared as genderbenders, who were not clearly assignable to neither male nor female, but were placed outside the binary order and viewed as the total other.

Jews would undermine non-Jewish culture through their deviant gender order.

Heterosexism is therefore a major ideological component of antisemitism not only in Europe and the West, but also in the Middle East. This is evident when the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ali Khamenei, regularly blames Zionism and Israel as degenerate and destabilizing the holy Islamic gender order.

Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism

Antisemitism and Sexism after October 7—the Intersectionality of Ideologies

One of the most important discoveries of the Authoritarian Personality was that ideologies such as antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and the legitimation of class inequality rarely occur as isolated phenomena but develop within a broader framework—the authoritarian ideological syndrome. Ideologies are thus certainly intersectional: they permeate and reinforce each other. Antisemitism appears as a master ideology in the sense that it entails a whole world view that operates with moments that are sexist, homophobic, transphobic, nationalistic, or also post-nationalistic and which entail a personification of capitalist exploitation in Jews. Thus, antisemitism takes on and renews its specificity through the flexible interplay with other ideologies. This is why antisemitism is an intersectional ideology.

I want to elaborate a little on the ideological background of this intersection between antisemitism and sexism in Islamism. Already before modernization Islam had associated Jews with all sorts of supposedly evil behavior: envy, treachery, greed, cowardice, materialism, but also with preferring life in this world to life after death. With the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, also Islamic antisemitism began to identify Jews with those transformations of modernity that were rejected: abstract law, urbanization, emancipation, and the weakening of the patriarchal gender order. In contemporary Islamism, Israel and Zionism stand for individualism, secularism, the emancipation of women, and the demand for sexual self-determination, all of which are modern developments that are also within the Islamic world but that are nonetheless opposed as un-Islamic and as the result of a Westernization that must be undone.24 Antisemitism, exterminatory antizionism, and a regime of gender apartheid form the pillars of Islamist fundamentalist ideology. Its gender regime includes a repressive culture of honor and shame, which radically subordinates women and suppresses homosexuality. This oppressive gender system serves a stabilizing function in radical Islamic communities. These groups never JCA | Vol. 8 | No. 1 | Spring 2025

fully embraced the Enlightenment idea of the autonomous individual who internalized cultural norms to repress instincts. Rather, as Bassam Tibi argued, the Islamic world’s engagement with modernity has been fragmented, leading to significant rifts in the development of subjectivity.25 While modern scientific and technological advancements were embraced, the cultural, political and social dimensions of modernity were rejected—such as gender equality, individual autonomy, critical thinking, and sexual self-determination. As a result, technological progress failed to transform individuals into modern, reflective subjects capable of navigating complexity and ambiguity. Instead of fostering personal agency, curiosity, and independent reasoning, this incomplete embrace of modernity led to a widespread weakening of subjectivity, or even to authoritarian desubjectivization.

Bassam Tibi called this “the half-modernity in the Islamic world.” His diagnosis, however, corresponds to the insights of the studies in authoritarianism carried out by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. This parallel implies that what Tibi called half-modernity is not unique for the Islamic world. In Western societies as well, the process of autonomous subjectivation was a precarious balancing act between aspiration and reality within a hierarchical society. All too often this process has failed, as evidenced by the emergence of the authoritarian syndrome as an inability to integrate modernity into the psyche. This is not an individual failure, however, but, as Horkheimer and Adorno, among others, have shown, the result of the very contradictory nature of modernity itself, which implied political equality for citizens while maintaining radical economic inequality. Thus, modernity itself never became fully modern. After all, in the West, gender equality was introduced and upheld by law.

Discrimination still exists, but it is actually against the law. This is different in most Islamic societies in the MENA region, where, due to the rejection of modernity as a social framework, gender equality is not enshrined in law.

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This failure to adopt modernity has prevented the development of subjects who can balance the ambivalences of a modern world. True subjectivity requires the ability to mediate critically between personal autonomy and external pressures. Without a cultural, social, and political framework to support this kind of inner development of an autonomous subject, individuals in radical Islamic, but also other authoritarian, contexts remain unable to process the disruptive and often disorienting changes brought about by modernity. Instead of cultivating the capacity to tolerate ambiguity and conflict, individuals are left unprepared and exposed to these changes, resulting in feelings of instability, disconnection, and “anomie.” This comes close to what Freud called the discomfort in culture, and Leo Loewenthal the social malaise,26 that is deepening today in a nihilistic post-factual age of total relativism.

This makes the focus on subjectivity so important. If subjectivation fails and individuals are unable to internalize rules or develop selfregulation, they are also not able to develop a critical relationship to external authorities.

Instead, they rely on external authorities for direction. This is why the repressive gender order is ever more harshly enforced, the more subjectivation and internalization fails. The repressive gender order provides stability in an unstable world. Since the renunciation and sublimation of the drives is not rationally comprehended in the sense of an autonomous decision, anger arises, which is directed at the denied object (in this case, the woman) instead of the denying authority (in this case, the patriarchal order).

Projective envy is a strong motivation for antisemitism and antifeminism. Jews and women were kept out of the spheres of power for centuries. This fact is turned upside down in the cliché that they did not have to renounce the satisfaction of their drives. Thus, antisemitism and sexism are very much about unlived life being projected on the Jews and on women. In this half modernity, the renunciation from sexual satisfaction is transformed into the subjects’ 8

idiosyncratic abhorrence of anything that reminds them of unrestrained sexuality, seen as disgusting and inferior—and this disqualification extends to those who are associated with lust, decadence and an un-Islamic way of life.

As Else Frenkel-Brunswik has proved in the Authoritarian Personality, the fusion of repressed sexuality, radical masculinity, and nihilistic worship of death is a central socio-psychological pattern in extreme authoritarianism that links sexism, anti-feminism, homophobia or transphobia with antisemitism. Sexist antisemitism and antisemitic misogyny equally allow acting out repressed sexual desires in a sadistic manner.

The ambivalent hatred of self-determined sexual joy is manifest in the murder of Jews and the murder of emancipated women—since both stand for these hated ideals of individual joy and happiness. In antisemitism and sexism/antifeminism, the desire for freedom and emancipation itself is eradicated. It was no coincidence that Hamas attacked a music festival where young, left, secular, and emancipated Israelis were celebrating. They stand for modern life, freedom, equality, and free sexuality—and the Islamists hate all that.

LET ME CONCLUDE The German political scientist Samuel Salzborn gave a clear description of antisemitism as the inability to feel concretely and to think abstractly.27 That emotions become more and more abstract can be seen in the passion and excitement on the part of those who protest against Israel today. I dare say that this passion replaces the feeling for oneself, for one’s own body, whose limits and ambivalences have become intolerable. The boundaries of the body shall be undone, a demand that can lead to a nihilistic cult of death that many queer and feminist supporters of Hamas share with Hamas terrorists, despite all the other significant differences. The negative identification with Israel as an alleged Frankenstein state manifests a distorted desire for authenticity in a world Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism

Antisemitism and Sexism after October 7—the Intersectionality of Ideologies

experienced as utterly alienated and isolated.

From this point of view, the critique of antisemitism entails a critique of society as a whole. This is what Robert Fine has done explicitly and precisely in all his works.

What does this mean for us as feminists and critics of antisemitism? First, we need a feminist critique of antisemitism and a feminism that is critical of antisemitism—in other words: we need an intersectional critique of antisemitism.

This means, next, that we should reclaim intersectionality, starting from critical theory and the studies in Authoritarian Personality that critically

recognize the intrinsic connections between antisemitism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Third: We should maintain and critically realize the promise of intersectionality to provide us with a framework for comprehensive solidarity and insight into multilayered systems of domination. This demands a radical critique of cultural relativism. And fourth, the criticism of feminism that I gave here was meant to be a rescuing feminist critique. We should criticize antisemitism among feminists, queer, or trans people, but not turn against feminism, queer, and trans people altogether.

REFERENCES Glynis Cousin and Robert Fine, “A Common Cause. Reconnecting the Study of Racism and Antisemitism,” European Studies 14, no. 2 (2012): 177.

2 Karin Stögner, Antisemitismus und Sexismus. Historisch-gesellschaftliche Konstellationen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014).

3 Karin Stögner, “Intersectionality and Antisemitism. A New Approach,” Fathom Journal, May 2020, accessed December 16, 2024, https://fathomjournal.org/intersectionality-and-antisemitism-a-new-approach/.

4 See as just one example among many: Philosophy for Palestine (November 1, 2023), accessed January 27, 2025, https://sites.google.com/view/philosophyforpalestine/home.

5 Doron Rabinovici, “Im Morgengrauen,“ in Nach dem 7. Oktober. Essays über das genozidale Massaker und seine Folgen, ed. Tania Martini and Klaus Bittermann (Berlin: Edition Tiamat, 2024), 21.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past” [1959], in idem, Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 89–103.

7 “Judith Butler—Contre l’antisémitisme et pour la paix révolutionnaire en Palestine,” Paroles D’Honneur, March 03, 2024, accessed December 16, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlQNBJOq-0E&t=2s.

8 Ibid.

9 Eva Illouz, “Warum Judith Butler keine Linke ist,” Freitag, March 12, 2024, accessed December 16, 2024, https://www. freitag.de/autoren/eva-illouz/eva-illouz-warum-judith-butler-keine-linke-ist.

10 “Judith Butler on Hamas, Hezbollah & the Israel Lobby” [2006], Radical Archives, March 28, 2010, accessed December 16, 2024, https://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/.

11 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror. Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (New York: Verso, 2006), 12.

12 Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 259.

13 Cited in Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), 739.

14 Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, 22.

15 Ibid., 27.

16 Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 142.

17 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

18 Compare also Robert Fine and Philip Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left. On the Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

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Karin Stögner 19 Rolf Pohl, “Wo bleibt hier der Aufschrei?,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 6, 2023.

20 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88.

21 Jacob Magid, “Iran Leader Says Objectification of Women Zionist Plot,” Times of Israel, March 19, 2017, accessed December 16, 2024, https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-leader-blasts-objectification-of-women-as-zionist-plot/.

22 Cited in Alan Johnson, “‘Progressives’ and the Hamas Pogrom: An A-Z Guide,” Fathom Journal, October 2023, accessed December 16, 2024, https://fathomjournal.org/progressives-and-the-hamas-pogrom-an-a-z-guide/.

23 Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality [1950] (New York: Verso, 2019), 390–441.

24 See Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2024).

25 Bassam Tibi, Islam’s Predicament with Modernity: Religious Reform and Cultural Change (New York: Routledge, 2009).

26 Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator [1949] (London: Verso, 2021).

27 Samuel Salzborn, “Was ist moderner Antisemitismus?,” April 30, 2020, Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, accessed December 16, 2024, https://www.bpb.de/themen/antisemitismus/dossier-antisemitismus/307644/was-ist-modernerantisemitismus/.

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Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism