The splashy takeaway from Emily Lawford’s New Statesman cover story, “Meet the Angry Young Women: Across Britain a radical new feminism is rising,” is that the young women have gone right off men. The youths of today, in Britain and beyond, are socially and politically divided by gender, with the women and assigned-female-at-birth non-binary people veering left, the dudebros, right.

Lawford’s point was that it’s not just the men who are embracing extremist politics. The ladies are holding their own. The vibe may be omnicause, but a closer reading suggests something more monocausal. Words like left and feminist don’t exactly get at what’s animating these women: “When I asked women what specifically had radicalised them, the war in Gaza was the most common answer.” By the time Lawford spells this out, her individual case studies had already suggested as much. One woman she interviewed “‘told me she didn’t have any plans for her future. ‘I kind of put my personal life and personal goals and personal advancement on the side, because I’m involved with these Palestine things,’ she said.”

Sex strike for Palestine, or something. Sounds dreary, and I’m not sure any actual Palestinians were asking for this but also, just: why?

The question this ought to raise is not exactly why a sensitive young person, lacking broader context, might view Gaza as a simple matter of good guys versus bad and go with the side they view as the more oppressed. It’s rather the centrality. These are young women with, it is clear, material concerns in their own lives, in their own communities. How is everything now Palestine? Where did it come from that feminism would be so preoccupied with a topic so disconnected from women’s rights?  

There is an answer to this question, and it’s found in Kara Jesella’s remarkable forthcoming book, Feminist Antisemitism: An Intellectual History (Routledge). Among the questions addressed therein: “Why did so many women–particularly women in their twenties–seem to be leading this anti-Israel activism?”

Jesella herself has had an unusual trajectory. Now a fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, she started out as a New York Times editor and style reporter in the early 2000s and is co-author with Marisa Meltzer of 2007’s How Sassy Changed My Life, about a cult-classic teen magazine of the 1980s and 1990s. She has a doctorate from New York University (whomst amongst us…), from which she emerged with the knowledge and chops to question the ideologies of contemporary academia.

Feminist Antisemitism has the level of documentation and citation one would expect of a serious academic monograph (which it is), but comes from a vantage point you don’t much find in academia itself. Jesella is not some right-wing commentator who read some headlines about silliness in academia and declares the entire sector a cesspool. She is a self-described Jewish feminist trained in the very academic areas she’s writing about. Angela Davis, a prominent anti-Zionist feminist, was one of her Vassar professors. This is not a those feminists are the worst and antisemites to boot! sort of book, but rather one that comes from a place of knowledge and disappointment.

What Feminist Antisemitism demonstrates is not merely that there are, in feminism as elsewhere in society, antisemites sprinkled throughout. Rather, Jesella shows how antisemitism got woven into academic Women’s (later Gender) Studies itself, and into feminist activism. Anti-Zionism is feminism:........

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