Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination

Outcast is an exploration - and explanation - of how the very possibility of recognising anti-Jewish racism has been displaced by the commonplace leftist belief that when Jewish people cry 'antisemitism!' their true intent is to cover up the real racism propagated by Israel against the Palestinians. This has come about through the academic notion that racism is exclusively a colonial phenomenon of 'white over black' domination, as well as the antisemitic idea of 'the Jewish question': that something must be done about the harm Jews pose to humanity. Outcast shows that when both are translated into an understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Zionism and all associated Jews become the representation of racism incarnate, demanding the unprecedented wipe-out of Israel. As a route forward, Camila Bassi offers an analysis of the conflict through the wider historical context of European antisemitism, colonialism and nationalism, and free from 'the Jewish question'. Escaping the confines of identity politics, including 'racial' identity politics, based on the idea that there are intrinsic differences dividing and excluding humanity, Outcast makes the case for a genuinely universal politics of human liberation.