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In the recent U.K. elections, voters widely rejected the currently ruling Labour Party. Commentator Aditya Chakrabortty credited Labour’s resounding loss to three things: “Gaza … racist [anti-Muslim] Home Office policies, and then finally housing and cost of living.” Some voters swung their support to the far right Reform Party, led by Donald Trump ally Nigel Farage. But the U.K. Green Party, which opposes the genocide and promotes economic and social justice, overperformed expectations.

It could not be a more appropriate time in the Jewish calendar for economic justice and cultural pluralism to triumph — both, and their interrelation, are the core message of this holiday and its central text, the Book of Ruth.

Like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, U.K. Green Party head Zack Polanski faced hostile questions posed by journalists accusing him and his party of antisemitism by pointing to his anti-Zionism and opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, escalating settler violence in the West Bank, and the illegal U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Unlike Mamdani, however, Polanski is Jewish.

Because he is Jewish, Polanski’s political commitments provide a sharp contrast to the alliance of centrist and right-wing Jewish billionaires who oppose Polanski’s and Mamdani’s shared political program and are often the most vocal about being persecuted as Jews, and are the least persecuted in every other respect. Theirs is a noxious conflation of Judaism, Zionism, and capitalism. In one particularly ridiculous recent example, real estate developer Steve Roth claimed the phrase “tax the rich” was “hateful,” comparing it to “racial slurs” and “from the river to the sea.”

Centrists and those further to the right frame this stance as “protecting Jewish safety” — as if many other communities are not also afraid, as if they have not feared both the state and their neighbors for decades or centuries — when the dangers that most Jews face have more to do with other aspects of our identities: being LGBTQ, women, people of color, immigrants, or all of the above.

During the High Holidays This Year, We Are Reaching Toward an Abolition Judaism

“All of capitalism is racial,” sociologist Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us in Abolition Geography, “so all aspects of the social reality are part of what has to change.”

Bad-faith accusations of antisemitism are used to oppose such change and undermine broadly popular left-wing leaders and torpedo the holistic, expansive solutions they propose in opposition to both the right’s ethnonationalist appeals and the inadequate status quo advocated by centrist standard bearers such as Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer.

Opposing such change is baked into “Fortress Judaism” — religious institutions designed to wage the politics of capital against social democracy. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove recently said on Peter Beinart’s podcast, “I don’t pay for everyone’s education, I pay for my own children’s education” as a metaphor to explain why he supports a Jewish state over other states. That’s not Judaism — that’s just capitalism.

But just because capitalists misuse allegations of antisemitism doesn’t mean the left can ignore the real antisemitism of figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Farage, and others in their orbit. Right-wingers will use the real, majoritarian concern about the genocide in Palestine to twist legitimate opposition to Israel into the “socialism of fools.” We must take seriously the danger posed by such an argument to true participatory,........

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