The crises that have already marked the 21st century, from 9/11 to the coronavirus pandemic, have given rise to numerous debates on the legitimacy of social criticism when it turns conspiratorial. In this text, Balázs Berkovits contributes to this discussion by questioning the unthought of those who excuse conspiracy theory: is antisemitic criticism like any other criticism?
The event commonly referred to as 9/11 as well as the context of subsequent American military interventions were a sort of catalyst for a new wave of conspiratorial thinking, the beginning of a period which has seen an exponential growth in conspiracy theories (at first based on 9/11 itself), closely related to the expansion of social media, the spread of anonymous unfiltered information and the faded role of professional journalistic gatekeeping. Many people argue that the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, which fabricate “alternative realities” and expand to assume the form of “world views”, has degraded the conditions of free and rational discussion and fragmented the public sphere.
The political defense of conspiracy theories
At the same time, it has to be noted that conspiracy theories have a very strong connection to the idea of social critique and critical social science as such, which is attested by those debates in which they are talked about in relationship with free speech and the proper functioning of democracy, as opposed to secrecy and the rule of an antidemocratic elite[1]. Indeed, there are a lot of defenders of conspiracy theories among social scientists and political theorists. On the one hand, they affirm that those are part and parcel of a democratically functioning public sphere (notwithstanding their possible cognitive shortcomings), epitomizing anti-hegemonic discourse, as well as the mistrust in official and authoritative interpretations, let them be governmental or scientific[2]. For some, conspiracy theories are just an extreme although understandable outgrowth of radical critique on the part of the oppressed: “grasping all the facts of power as conspiracies, should above all be read as the pathological drift of a movement to put an end to dispossession, of an effort by ordinary individuals to reappropriate the thought of their situation, the thought of the world in which they live, confiscated by rulers separated from them and surrounded by experts”[3].
On the other hand, defenders tend to emphasize that real conspiracies do exist. Therefore, for them, the mere form of the explanation, namely that it is conspiratorial, does not automatically mean that they are unwarranted[4]. This would mean that there can be a neutral, “descriptive” definition of conspiracy theories, which cannot be said to be false before empirical verification. Under this definition conspiracies merely involve a group of agents who act together in secrecy and consciously in order to promote a desired outcome, inspired by malevolent intention. In this case the term “theory” does not mean to discredit these conceptual edifices as imaginary and chimerical, but to signal something akin to a normal scientific theory: they are in fact in need of scientific confirmation or refutation. This amounts to a proposition to take conspiracy theories seriously, and particularly because they are supposed to be an important instrument of the critique of power. This is equally a criticism addressed to those, for whom conspiracy theories are always unwarranted, fictitious or phantasmagoric.
Some people even have recourse to a kind of dialectical reversal saying that it is the obsessive chasing after conspiracy theories that is paranoid and conspiratorial, characterizing those who occupy dominant positions in society. Dominators and mainstream media fear for their monopoly of interpretation of the world, which leads them to disqualify oppositional views by tagging them “conspiracy theories”. Therefore, the proliferation of “conspiratorial thought is decidedly insufficient to account for the obsession with conspiracy […]. The feeling of being attacked, the obsidional syndrome of the besieged fortress, plays a decisive role in a media universe whose denials of being the auxiliaries of a system of domination now only serve to accredit the thing further. […] The contemporary media crusade against fake news will have a hard time covering up the fact that the press itself is the most authorized place for the circulation of fake news”.[5]
When conspiracy theories become antisemitic
However, those who take conspiracy theories to be a tool for the critique of power structures and antihegemonic discourse, rarely mention those which clearly emanate from the right or even from people and governments in power (like Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán). Nowadays conspiracy theories no longer seem to have an exclusively fringe or “alternative” status, as they have made several inroads into mainstream political opinion, often professed from a position of power (for example, the recent QAnon movement in the US, the “deep state” theory, the allegations against George Soros in the US and Eastern Europe, or the “Israeli/Jewish lobby” in the US – although this latter discourse is equally coming from the left).
What the defenders of conspiracy theories equally fail to mention is that conspiracy theories are either antisemitic or have strong connections to world views which comprise antisemitism. Conspiratorial thought as a sort of anti-hegemonic attitude becomes especially hard to defend when we consider that conspiracy theories have always been mainly targeted at Jews. It is true that conspiratorial thinking and antisemitism are most of the time associated: one of the fundamental aspects of antisemitism is conspiratorial thinking, or (in the words of Adorno and Horkheimer) the “rumor about the Jews”. Moishe Postone takes conspiratorial thinking as the essence of antisemitism, since he understands this latter as something that stems from the incapacity for abstract thinking. Also, he is very much aware of the potential of seemingly anti-hegemonic expression in antisemitic conspiracy theories. “[T]he modern anti-Semitic worldview understands the abstract domination of capital—which subjects people to the compulsion of mysterious forces they cannot perceive—as the domination of International Jewry. Anti-Semitism, consequently, can appear to be antihegemonic”.[6] One important way of grasping modern antisemitism is pointing out the way it fetishizes, and personifies the complex processes and forms of modern capitalism and the type of social domination stemming from it. “It is Jews and only Jews who were perceived to allegedly stand behind abstract social processes and phenomena and thus viewed as distinctly conspiratorial and intangible.”[7]
Conspiracy theories have become the most characteristic antisemitic framework from the end of the 19th century on. In fact, one of the main traits of antisemitism (its “specific difference”) that firmly distinguishes it from racism is the belief in a Jewish conspiracy – “codified” in the most influential way by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a compilation from the beginning of the 20th century.
Therefore, if antisemitic criticism is reinterpreted as just another anti-hegemonic form of critique, in which the antisemitic element is insignificant or even imagined as it is frequently done in some critical interpretations[8], then something essential will be missed out. And conversely, if anti-hegemonic critique slips into antisemitism as a result of a conspiratorial framework, it is equally or even more problematic. When left-wing critics argue that “the Rothschilds symbolize in populist rhetoric the socio-economic domination of the ‘plutocrats,’ while the Jews as a people are not questioned or attacked at all for who they are or what they represent”[9], it cannot fail to evoke the words of a right-wing autocrat leader in the midst of his campaign conducted against George Soros. Just because Soros is a Jew, says he, he cannot make an “exception” for him in his efforts of protecting the nation: “against those who threaten the security of Hungary, we will use the political and legal power of the Hungarian state, regardless of origin, religion or wealth”[10].
Social science and conspiratorial explanations
Since the work of the philosopher of science Karl Popper there has been ample discussion about critical social science potentially becoming conspiratorial, due to the way they explain social phenomena. Some theoreticians nowadays, criticizing Popper, even argue that critical social science is by nature “conspiratorial” and “paranoid”, as suspicion lies at its essence; furthermore, it necessarily treats collectives as if they had agency, because there is hardly any other way to talk about those[11]. This would mean that the presupposition of conspiracies cannot and need not be avoided. Is it to say that there cannot be a clear-cut distinction between conspiracy theories and social critique, neither on epistemological nor other normative grounds?
However, Popper did not advance a blanket denunciation of social science or even critical social science as such, which is obvious when we consider what he had to say about Marx in his Conjectures and Refutations. What is the “conspiracy theory of society” according to Popper? “It is the view that whatever happens in society–including things which people as a rule dislike, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages–are the results of direct design by some powerful individuals or groups”[12]. So, the conspiracy view of society is looking for a determining cause in individual behavior: that everything has to have a good sufficient reason anchored in the conscious action of conscious agents and their collaboration based on their common “interests”. According to Popper “the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all events, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results. It should be mentioned in this connection that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences, of these unintended consequences. (…) The capitalist is not a demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than is the proletarian.”[13] But of course, by focusing on negative developments that are always supposed to be the fruit of an evil will, the conspiratorial vision of society simplifies the critical task in an extreme fashion. However, this does not prevent many people from endorsing it as such. In contrast to Marx, Popper faults “vulgar Marxism” for introducing conspiratorial explanations to social theory, for straying away from the original intentions and careful method of Marxian theory, which may be interpreted as a pathology of critique, a critique that misunderstands itself.
Antisemitism as anti-hegemonic critique
Presumably, this self-misunderstanding of critique resulting in vulgarized forms, has perpetuated itself in our epoch. It has to do with epistemological superficiality, the poverty of reasoning, dichotomous and even Manichean thinking working with essentialized and clear-cut categories, and the urge of radicalism. Radical critique often appears in the form of essentialized categories and also “methodological dualism”[14]. While the categories of critique are increasingly dichotomous in their nature (oppressor-oppressed, native or settler-colonialist, indigenous/racialized or member of the dominant white class), peculiarities, ambivalences, contradictions, and ambiguities are overlooked, ignored, flattened.
“Methodological dualism” can be observed in several, partially interconnected sites of radical critique of society, and in close relationship to it, in certain forms of criticism of Jews. It can be detected in contemporary “critical race theory”, as well as in the rigid opposition between antisemitism and racism, which relegates antisemitism to a bygone era and/or takes it to be superseded by anti-Muslim racism or Islamophobia. Within the dichotomous categories of critique, both as minority (in the West) and as majority (in Israel), Jews appear on the side of the oppressors rather than the oppressed. It is said that they are not being “racialized” or discriminated against: there is no anti-Jewish “racism”, at least not in an “institutionalized” form, only as a fringe phenomenon. When binary terms of race and “color” are applied in the discourse on domination and “privilege”, Jews are placed on the “white” side and antisemitism is removed from the list of current issues[15].
Antisemitism as a generic term is recoded in the language of racism, while political antisemitism in its conspiratorial form will not be considered as something significant. This theoretical neutralization of antisemitism makes conspiratorial explanations even more legitimate, and vice versa, the acceptance of conspiratorial explanations as anti-hegemonic critique further qualifies cases hitherto considered antisemitic as a non-issue. This means that the critique of Jews in Western societies passes for a legitimate social critique, stemming not from hostility to Jews, but from a political position, susceptible to being bolstered by rational arguments (the same way as antizionism is taken as just a political position, which has nothing to do with antisemitism). The easiest shortcut to “critique” is certainly conspiratorial reasoning; or, the conspiratorial form of reasoning emerges from an impoverished variant of social critique. It is true that antisemitism even in its “classical” formulation by Wilhelm Marr and especially Otto Glagau at the end of the 19th century, explicitly equated antisemitism with social critique, by asserting that “the social question is the Jewish question”[16]. However, the difference is that at that time the Jewish referent was not only explicit, but primordial, which came to be filled up with a social-political content by professional agitators: Judaism became the metaphor of all perceived detrimental effects of modernization. In our day, in contrast, the Jewish word is seemingly relegated to the background and substituted by quasi-sociological and political qualifications.
Transposed into the vocabulary of social critique, the critique of Jews seemingly becomes legitimate: it passes as social scientific explanation with an anti-hegemonic thrust. This is the case when Jews are being perceived as part of the power elite, let it be financial or political; or when they become the epitome of the privileged classes, “betraying” their original position of outcasts (as we can frequently observe in every context when there is question of “Jewish whiteness”, see below); or again, when they are pictured as being favored by the state and its apparatuses to the detriment of other groups or minorities (which is often termed critically as “state philosemitism”). The conspiratorial nature of the explanation also doesn’t automatically discredit it for the reasons mentioned above, on the contrary, it is susceptible to strengthening its critical stance.
“State philosemitism”
Jews as a minority came to be criticized in some discourses through the concepts of “postcolonial indigeneity” and “state philosemitism”. “Indigenous” is understood here not as native, but in the sense created by the “Indigenous movement” (and later on party, the P.I.R) founded in 2005 by Houria Bouteldja. It designates the “postcolonial” subjects living in the French metropole, but still under the domination of the heirs of their colonizers, expressing a racial and a political identity at the same time[17]. It is as if the colony had been displaced to the metropole itself, where the same type of relationships has allegedly been reproduced between indigenous and colonizer. Now, how did this signifier come to be used relative to Jews in this context? The Indigenous movement presents us with a case of radical critique, in which the role ascribed to Jews, siding with the colonizers, constitutes an important aspect.
The notion of “state philosemitism”, particularly wide-spread in France (and not only in the “Indigenous movement”), expresses the idea that Jews constitute a minority protected and valued by the Republic, while other minorities lack this kind of protection, or are even attacked and stigmatized by the state and state institutions, just like in a variety of social contexts. Jews are considered by Bouteldja and some other minority spokespersons as a minority that has become part and parcel of the dominant majority by voluntarily abandoning their original place / being coopted by the majority. An important element of “state philosemitism” would be the privileged treatment of the repression of antisemitism over other racisms. According to Bouteldja, and also others[18] “state philosemitism” is instrumental for the stigmatization of Arabs and Blacks for their alleged antisemitism, in view of reinforcing the existing racial hierarchies. There is an essential connivence between Jews and state apparatuses, since Jews, in spite of their history as a persecuted minority, bear a certain responsibility in the construction of the new “identity order” in France. In the meantime, Bouteldja interprets antisemitism coming from minority groups as being just a reaction to “state philosemitism”, in fact, a political response on the part of the oppressed against the Jewish contribution to state oppression. [19]Thereby, antisemitism (in contrast to racism, which is genuine and directed against the racialized and oppressed populations emerging from French colonial history) is reinterpreted as just a form of the critique of power, a political response to Jewish domination.
The same kind of arguments can be found in many authors regarding the antisemitism scandal in the British Labour Party. Defenders of the Corbyn left were quick to denounce a conspiracy against the Labour leader, a defense, which later on gained a certain theoretical systematicity, like in the following: “[…] the narrative against Jeremy Corbyn is not merely against the left. It constructed a new politics of Jewish interest, re-aligning a British state around a definition of Jewish identity. […] While Jews may have once been essentialized as a marginalized population associated with communism and usury, they have now been essentialized rather as gatekeepers of Western legitimacy at home and abroad”[20]. The writer alleges that Jewish middle and upper classes willingly identify and collude with power elites, since they have common interests in maintaining the economic and social status quo. At the same time, they are attacking left-wing and working-class Jews, which is demonstrated for example by the fact that Jewish members of the Labour Party were disproportionately targeted for alleged antisemitism, and then suspended or excluded. Another author holds that Jews are “increasingly cast, by Western states, as the defenders of the legitimacy of the Western world when facing the Global South, as well as Black and Asian populations at home”[21]. And then he continues to affirm that the British “Jewish leadership” has accepted the offer as a way to better integrate into elite circles.
Once again, class struggle and racial oppression are supposed to demonstrate the emptiness of the concept of antisemitism, which dissipates under the materialist gaze; in turn, this interpretation strives to legitimize attacks and critiques conducted against Jews or certain Jewish groups in a conspiratorial vein, as something that is just targeting power elites. How is the argument constructed? First, it is said that power elites, Jews included, attack left-wingers with the antisemitism smear, therefore it is legitimate to call the trick (this is the well-known “Livingstone-formula”[22]); second, prominent Jews objectively do collude and conspire with the British elite to maintain the existing hierarchical social order; and third, “a war on antisemitism means, then, a war on working-class, left-wing Jews”, along with other progressives, and this would be the only “real” antisemitism in our present, emanating from the state. The concept of antisemitism is hollowed out, instrumentalized in an absurd fashion, and turned into its opposite: ”the Corbyn Affair is our postmodern, Twenty-First Century Dreyfus Trial”[23].
The authors cited intend to prove that antisemitism is just a sham in a double sense: it not only masks class struggle, but it is an instrument for conducting it, against the oppressed and the “progressive” left, and to silence criticism addressed to the dominators. It is by this move, by the neutralization of antisemitism, that conspiratorial explanations involving Jews, and asserting their collaboration on the basis of a common class interest strives to become a respectable explanation armed with an anti-hegemonic edge.
“Critical whiteness studies” and Jewish conspiracy
As we have seen, besides the methodological elements that incite critique to become conspiratorial, in certain critical discourses Jews are also frequently and explicitly designated as dominators, in the nowadays fashionable vocabulary, “whites”, as actively taking part in the oppression of people of color. This is the kind of approach that characterizes most analyses dealing with Jews within “critical whiteness studies”. By purportedly using some social-scientific concepts and procedures, whiteness and race scholars frequently implicitly, but occasionally even directly, support a number of anti-Jewish stances that are presented as anti-hegemonic positions.
The critique of “Jews becoming white” in the United States is formulated in terms of unmerited advantages, privilege resulting in integration into majority society, or even “overrepresentation” in certain domains (like the media, film industry, or among public intellectuals, etc.). The general contention of whiteness studies is that white people (or the groups, and among them Jews, who “became white” during a socio-historical process) have benefitted from the “system of oppression” of non-whites[24]. However, from here, the explanation bifurcates, following either a “collectivist” or an “individualist” path.
One of the pillars of “whiteness studies” and “critical race theory” and the gauge of their radicality is the conception of “systemic racism”, which is the basis of the “collectivist” interpretation. It works with monocausal assumptions, “attributing every instance of racial disparity to white privilege […] at work in any given social interaction”[25], while it fails to describe its concrete mechanisms, and ignores every other factor contributing to the system of inequalities. However, the conception of “systemic racism” doesn’t require that white people be individually and consciously racist, since racism is built into the “system”. Still, there is also the parallel, individualist, assumption according to which Jews as whites have in fact espoused and exploited this racial structure of their own free will.
In fact, the story of Jews becoming white is told twice. First, the structural interpretation: the achievements in social mobility and acculturation gradually attained after WWII are not attributed to Jews themselves as actors, but to the social conditions favoring them (while being disadvantageous for others). There is no way around racial hierarchy, which fatally regulates the system of inequalities. In other words: it is a “myth that Jews pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps”[26]. So seemingly, they have achieved those positions not as Jews, but as whites, not as actors, but as a group favored by structural forces. Jews are diluted in the white group, as the particular social-historical characteristics of Jews are not considered.
However, at the same time, for whiteness scholars, Jews’ social mobility signals also a “betrayal” of an authentic minority position along with the alliance with the capitalist system deemed essentially racist. Jews are accused of helping to maintain white supremacy in both racial and economic terms by following their own interests, not just by proving that it is possible for a minority to succeed, but also by subtly embracing racism.
In fact, the simplest way of reinvigorating critique in a “structuralist” framework is introducing some conspiratorial elements in the explanation. True, in this case the structural explanation (when Jews are supposed to be favored by racialized structural forces, and they are not actors), is completed by an apparently contradictory critical edge. Of course, there is already a seed of (non-conspiratorial) criticism in the structural part of the explanation: if Jews didn’t rise to their position because of their own merits but rather because they were favored by outside factors, they shouldn’t have done so in the first place. But there’s more, since in the “whiteness” framework Jews are supposed to have a vested interest in maintaining the racial hierarchy of American society, while remaining willfully ignorant of the “realities” of race and racism[27]. According to this view, Jews “embraced a U.S. identity that made them sentimentally fond of a polity that created unique life chances for them and were therefore disinclined to grapple with historical policies and patterns that made the United States that blacks inhabited very different”[28].
Jews will be accused of actively seeking out white privilege, and collaborating with white elites, which turns them back into actors — as long as they advance their own interests at the expense of other minority groups. Negatively connoted action is achieved by them as Jews (concerning their identification with the white majority and their purported racism), as conscious traitors of their minority position; while, as we saw, positively connoted actions are attributed to structures, and not to their “merits” (their upward social mobility).
This means that agency is becoming synonymous with conspiracy, first, because it has to fulfill the normative expectations of the theory, namely to become critical of the supposed group of dominators within which now the Jews are comprised. But second, agency is taken to be conspiratorial, because it is presupposed that only those groups can possess it, who are already in a dominant position, and who will use it consciously to the detriment of dominated/oppressed groups. Conspiracy is the other name of action in a framework where there is supposed to be no action, because the goals of the dominant groups are perceived as being achieved anyway, in a mechanic manner.
It seems that the critique of Jews in their Western societies is legitimized more and more as social critique, as if it was originating in a reasoned political position, far removed from any antisemitic intentions or consequences. However, it is rather the case that Jews and antisemitism (and even Holocaust memory) constitute an obstacle to a vulgarized type of criticism at large, which is why they are being vigorously fought in certain quarters of contemporary mainstream critique. Since antisemitism cannot be captured in the language of racism (based on prejudice, and discrimination), it is considered as non-existent, and further, as a concept weaponized merely to suppress rebellion and social change. However, this requires the systematic recoding of Jews as dominators, and the acceptance of conspiratorial explanations as a tool for (an impoverished and vulgarized) critique, which even have the “advantage” of being able to point to the “culprits”, reinforcing thereby the anti-hegemonic posture.
The author would like to thank Cédric Cohen-Skalli for his comments on an earlier version of this article.
Balázs Berkovits was born in Budapest and lives in Tel Aviv. He is a sociologist with a PhD in philosophy, pursuing research in the Comper Center at the University of Haifa, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) and MEMRI (Jerusalem). He is also the book review editor of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. At present, his work concerns the re-emergence of the “Jewish problem” in contemporary works of philosophical, social and political criticism. Occasionally, he also writes on the political and social situation in contemporary Hungary.
Notes
| 1 | Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories : Secrecy and Power in American Culture, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1999 ; David Coady, What to Believe Now : Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, Malden, MA : Wiley- Blackwell, 2012 ; Matthew R. X. Dentith, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 ; Julien Giry, « Archéologie et usages du style paranoïaque’. Pour une épistémologie critique « , Critica Masonica, Les amis de Critica, 12, 2018. |
| 2 | Jaron Haramban, and Stef Aupers, “Contesting Epistemic Authority: Conspiracy Theories on the Boundary of Science”, Public Understanding of Science, 24 (4), 2014. |
| 3 | Frédéric Lordon, « Le complotisme de l’anti-complotisme. Disqualifier pour mieux dominer ». Le monde diplomatique, 3 octobre 2017. |
| 4 | See, for example: M R. X. Dentith, “Les théories suspicieuses du complot”, Synthèse, Vol. 200, n° 243, 2022. |
| 5 | Lordon, op. cit. |
| 6 | Moishe Postone, “History and Powerlessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism”, Public Culture Vol. 18, No.199, 99. |
| 7 | Lars Rensmann and Samuel Salzborn, “Moishe Postone’s Theory and its Historical and Contemporary Relevance”, Antisemitism Studies Vol. 5, No. 1, 2022, 62-63. |
| 8 | Giry, op. cit. and Lordon, op. cit. |
| 9 | Giry, op. cit. 7. |
| 10 | András Király, “Pont a zsidóktól inkább egy kis segitségre számitott volna Orbán” [From the Jews, Orbán would have liked a little help], 444.hu, July 7, 2017. |
| 11 | Luc Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2014. |
| 12 | Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, New York – London, Basic Books, 341. |
| 13 | Ibid. 342. |
| 14 | Robert Fine and Philip Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left. On the Return of the Jewish Question, Manchester University Press, 2017. |
| 15 | See, for example, Cousin, Glynis and Robert Fine, “A common cause.” European Societies. 14:2, 2012; Balázs Berkovits, “What color are the Jews?” K., June 16, 2021. |
| 16 | See Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites. Trials in Emancipation, Cambridge University Press, 2006. |
| 17 | Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us. Towards a politics of revolutionary love, Semiotext(e), 2017. |
| 18 | Eric Hazan, “En descendant la rue Ramponeau”. Lundi matin, February 2. |
| 19 | Houria Bouteldja, “State racism(s) and philosemitism or how to politicize the issue of antiracism in France?”, 2015, |
| 20 | Benjamin Balthaser, “The New Anti-Dreyfusards. Zionism and State Antisemitism in the West”, Spectre, April 16, 2023. |
| 21 | Sai Englert, “Recentring the State: A Response to Barnaby Raine on Anti-Semitism”, Salvage, Dec. 17, 2019. |
| 22 | David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism, Routledge, 2017. |
| 23, 24 | Benjamin Balthaser, op. cit. |
| 25 | Jonathan David Church, Reinventing Racism, 2020. |
| 26 | Karen Brodkin: How Jews Became White Folks?, 50. |
| 27 | Balázs Berkovits, “Critical Whiteness Studies and the Jewish Problem.” Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie 5(1), 2018. |
| 28 | Jane Anna Gordon, “What Should Blacks Think When Jews Choose Whiteness? And Ode to Baldwin”, Critical Philosophy of Race, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2015, 231. |
