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Reviews
Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism by Ben Lorber, Shane Burley
cebolla's review
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
I've read, respected, and loved both previous books and the many essays I’ve read by Shane Burley, so when I saw him post on Facebook asking for people to read and review his book that hasn't been released yet, I messaged him immediately. I was pleasantly shocked when he got back to me quickly and sent me an uncorrected advanced reader's copy of Safety Through Solidarity, a book I'd been hearing about for months. While I'd never heard of Ben Lorber, I did enough research to be excited about his potential contributions. Being a non-Zionist Jew isn't easy; people on the right (fellow Jews and others) call me a self-hating Jew at best, and question whether or not I'm a real Jew, while making threats at worst; and non-Jews on the left have let me down in the past when it's come to calling out antisemitism or checking in on me when something scary happens to Jews. Both Burley and Lorber can relate to this, which was a great starting point.
Whenever reading a book about antisemitism, or really anything “Jewish,” I nervously wait for talk of Israel and/or Palestine. Too many books either ignore the genocide and colonialism of Israel or cheer it on. This book does neither; it takes a hard look at what's happening, from a fairly unique point of view. They dive into the differences between principled criticism of Israel and straight up antisemitism from both sides of the political aisle, and they do it in a way that I was able to wholeheartedly relate to and learn from. They also do a wonderful job of not only noticing the antisemitism of Zionists (both Jewish and Christian) but also of the liberal and further left spaces.
After centuries of pogroms and other abuses, culminating in the Holocaust, many Jews (including members of my family) felt that the only chance of not being eventually wiped out was to have their own state. Many modern Jews believe that eventually they’re going to come for us again, and when they do we need a place to go. Burley and Lorber use their depth and way with words to unpack the reasonableness of these feelings while recognizing that genocide and colonialism are not the way to accomplish goals.
One of my favorite things about this book was the way they break down antisemitism and it’s uniqueness. Because Jewish people, especially in the US, aren’t obviously systemically held down, it’s not as glaring as most other forms of hate. And most antisemitism is based on the belief that Jews run the world (bankers, Hollywood, etc) and/or are secretly working behind the scenes to organize “illegal” immigration and things like Black Lives Matter to ensure that white people are made irrelevant. So, antisemitism is more about “punching up” than most or all other hateful beliefs, which in a lot of ways makes it more acceptable and harder to notice.
I also loved and respected how much they talked about the racism of Ashkenazi Jews towards Sephardic and Mizrahim. I didn’t know there were non-white Jews until I was in high school, which says a lot about how prevalent racism is, even amongst oppressed groups.
The name of this book is Safety Through Solidarity, so obviously there’s much talk of that. The way the 1 percent gets to keep power and, among many other atrocities, commit genocide in the name of all Jews, is by keeping us divided. The sooner the majority of us see the intersections between antisemitism and anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the others, the sooner we can rise up and topple this disgusting system.
I plan to write a longer review to submit to some publications, but let me finish this one off with a statistic that I read in the book. In NYC, 60 percent of the people arrested for committing antisemitic crimes were white, 33 percent were Black, and the remaining 7 percent were everyone else. The fact that so many Zionists equate Jewish hate with Islam goes against reality. The authors do a great job of proving that.
Whether you’re Jewish or not, I can’t recommend enough that you read this book when it comes out.
Whenever reading a book about antisemitism, or really anything “Jewish,” I nervously wait for talk of Israel and/or Palestine. Too many books either ignore the genocide and colonialism of Israel or cheer it on. This book does neither; it takes a hard look at what's happening, from a fairly unique point of view. They dive into the differences between principled criticism of Israel and straight up antisemitism from both sides of the political aisle, and they do it in a way that I was able to wholeheartedly relate to and learn from. They also do a wonderful job of not only noticing the antisemitism of Zionists (both Jewish and Christian) but also of the liberal and further left spaces.
After centuries of pogroms and other abuses, culminating in the Holocaust, many Jews (including members of my family) felt that the only chance of not being eventually wiped out was to have their own state. Many modern Jews believe that eventually they’re going to come for us again, and when they do we need a place to go. Burley and Lorber use their depth and way with words to unpack the reasonableness of these feelings while recognizing that genocide and colonialism are not the way to accomplish goals.
One of my favorite things about this book was the way they break down antisemitism and it’s uniqueness. Because Jewish people, especially in the US, aren’t obviously systemically held down, it’s not as glaring as most other forms of hate. And most antisemitism is based on the belief that Jews run the world (bankers, Hollywood, etc) and/or are secretly working behind the scenes to organize “illegal” immigration and things like Black Lives Matter to ensure that white people are made irrelevant. So, antisemitism is more about “punching up” than most or all other hateful beliefs, which in a lot of ways makes it more acceptable and harder to notice.
I also loved and respected how much they talked about the racism of Ashkenazi Jews towards Sephardic and Mizrahim. I didn’t know there were non-white Jews until I was in high school, which says a lot about how prevalent racism is, even amongst oppressed groups.
The name of this book is Safety Through Solidarity, so obviously there’s much talk of that. The way the 1 percent gets to keep power and, among many other atrocities, commit genocide in the name of all Jews, is by keeping us divided. The sooner the majority of us see the intersections between antisemitism and anti-Blackness, misogyny, transphobia, Islamophobia, and all the others, the sooner we can rise up and topple this disgusting system.
I plan to write a longer review to submit to some publications, but let me finish this one off with a statistic that I read in the book. In NYC, 60 percent of the people arrested for committing antisemitic crimes were white, 33 percent were Black, and the remaining 7 percent were everyone else. The fact that so many Zionists equate Jewish hate with Islam goes against reality. The authors do a great job of proving that.
Whether you’re Jewish or not, I can’t recommend enough that you read this book when it comes out.
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