thenation--2020-12-10--The British Labour Party’s Anti-Semitism Problem

ondon—Earlier this fall , the British Labour party announced it had suspended its former leader , Jeremy Corbyn , over his response to a finding by the United Kingdom ’ s equality watchdog that the party ’ s handling of complaints of anti-Semitism had broken the law .
Corbyn , a veteran left-wing member of Parliament , was elected as the Labour head in 2015—a surprise victory that spurred a record surge in party membership .
He successfully defended his premiership when his own MPs challenged him a year later , took the party to a historic vote increase in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ led it to a catastrophic defeat in December 2019 , giving Boris Johnson ’ s Conservatives five more years in power .
Corbyn ’ s shock suspension was eventually rescinded .
But party leader Keir Starmer refused to fully undo his predecessor ’ s banishment : Corbyn was back in the party but could not sit as a Labour MP .
This ridiculous halfway house prompted motions by local Labour groups , resignations by local councilors , and a joint call from major UK trade unions , all demanding Corbyn ’ s full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Starmer had won the leadership contest on a unity ticket .
But like gunslingers at a Western shootout , Labour ’ s current and former leader had both dug in on positions leading to this showdown .
And , as had been the case so many times before , the whole furor revolved around the party ’ s handling of anti-Semitism .
How did we get here ?
Rewind to late October , when the Equality and Human Rights Commission ( EHRC ) published its inquiry on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2019 , after accusations of Labour anti-Semitism had— entirely avoidably—spiraled out of control .
Under Corbyn , Labour was seen as dismissive or slow to investigate complaints .
Foot-dragging responses to instances when Corbyn had gotten it wrong , such as his support for an anti-Semitic mural in 2012 , unearthed six years later , effectively licensed more abuse , as some supporters refused to acknowledge the mural ’ s anti-Semitism in their attempts to defend Corbyn .
October ’ s EHRC report was a sobering verdict for a party that not only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ very law it was now deemed to have broken .
While noting there had been improvements to processing complaints , the report concluded that anti-Semitism in the party “ could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.
” It described a culture in Labour that “ at best did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and , at worst , could be seen to accept it.
” Where Now for Britain ’ s Labour Party ?
It ’ s a Race Against Time for Labour in Next @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sentiment Is Still Strong in a Region That Stands to Lose the Most From It At a press conference by Starmer responding to the report , the media kept returning to his predecessor .
This might have happened anyway—but it was made inevitable by a statement Corbyn had just released .
He said that anyone claiming there was no anti-Semitism in Labour was wrong .
But , he added , “ the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.
” Since Starmer said those claiming that anti-Semitism in the party was exaggerated were part of the problem , journalists wondered what he was going to do about Corbyn .
“ You need to throw him out of the party , don ’ t you ?
” one demanded .
Starmer stressed that he hadn ’ t seen Corbyn ’ s statement and , in any case , it wasn ’ t about the former head : The EHRC report described a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of leadership .
Yet within a few hours , Corbyn had been suspended—and stunned left-wing Labour MPs and party members rallied to his defense .
Corbyn ’ s suspension was a divisive overreaction , which his supporters are reasonably contesting .
And the Labour leadership ’ s response , including barring local party meetings from discussing the issue , is both disturbing and counterproductive .
The muzzling of meetings and suspensions of party members looks suspiciously like an attempt to banish the left—and has only sown more confusion about anti-Semitism itself .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this whole scenario .
It isn ’ t just the interminable factionalism of it all , which has paralyzed the party for years and poisoned its handling of the anti-Semitism crisis in the first place .
Some in the left camp are not just protesting Corbyn ’ s suspension but also deflecting criticism of the way he responded to the EHRC and the issue itself .
This dynamic of denying or downplaying anti-Semitism in the service of defending Corbyn has characterized the whole sorry story .
That the issue turned into an unedifying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the headlines of a conflict-obsessed and Corbyn-hostile media , while the drama has obscured a wider picture of hurt and prejudice—and silenced the actual victims of anti-Semitism .
The dispute continues to exert a crippling effect on the party and on a wider fight against racism , not just inside Labour but in Britain .
The claim that “ Jeremy did nothing wrong !
” in his response to the EHRC report is worth examining .
A majority of Labour MPs opposed Corbyn ’ s leadership from the outset .
Do political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Of course .
This is how politics works .
It is unspeakably grim that anti-Semitism was used in this way , perhaps worst of all by a Conservative government that is eye-wateringly mired in Islamophobia , anti-Black racism , and indeed , anti-Semitism .
There is something particularly noxious about a nativist right government denouncing the very idea of structural racism—and then gleefully attacking Labour over anti-Semitism .
Nonetheless , it would be better for leftists to deal with this particular weakness by closing the breach instead of reacting with outrage when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
However , when Corbyn pointed out that Labour ’ s anti-Semitism problem had been overstated , he was telling the truth .
Surely anyone can recognize right-wing newspaper columnist Simon Heffer ’ s claim that Corbyn was “ a man who wants to reopen Auschwitz ” as a gross exaggeration .
When , during last year ’ s election , the UK ’ s chief rabbi , Ephraim Mirvis , said Corbyn was “ unfit for high office ” and the “ poison ” of anti- Semitism had been sanctioned from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dubs said that the rabbi had “ gone a bit far.
” It should not be controversial to point this out .
But the Jewish Labour members who spoke about the anti-Semitism they experienced were not exaggerating .
One woman who tweeted about an anti-Semitism complaint she had filed to the party not being dealt with was called “ disgusting ” and a “ piece of shit , ” was told she was being paid to lie , and was sent cartoon depictions of Jews , which , she noted , “ my @ @ @ @ @ @ @ content.
” A young activist with the Jewish Labour Movement—a group whose affiliation with the Labour Party dates back to 1920—was yelled at during the party ’ s annual conference and accused of being a racist and secretly working for the Israeli government .
He wrote that online he was “ compared to Goebbels , called a ‘ cockroach ’ ( a theme from Nazi propaganda ) and generally accused of being an enemy from within.
” Many members faced abuse online and at Labour ’ s local meetings , only to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Luciana Berger , who faced hideous abuse , including death threats , is one of two Jewish MPs who , along with three Labour members of the House of Lords , left the party because of it .
So when Corbyn , on the very day of the release of the EHRC report , commented that the issue had been overstated for political reasons , what does that say to the victims of anti- Semitism ?
And what about those leftists who dismissed the entire problem as a smear campaign ?
Wouldn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ denialism and direct abuse yet again to those who dared to mention it ?
When it comes to racism , language has a toxic agency , regardless of intention , which is something that Corbyn should have considered .
But he didn ’ t .
This is why his statement was not just ill-advised or badly timed .
It was wrong .
Jeremy Corbyn and the Crisis of Anti-Semitism To read the report ’ s full 130 pages is to comprehend both the scale of the problem and Labour ’ s culpability .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ claim , circulating widely on some left media outlets , that the EHRC found just two instances of “ unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination ” ; the report states that these two cases were “ the tip of the iceberg.
” Using a sample of 70 complaints , the EHRC could identify only two cases involving individuals acting as agents of the party , making Labour itself legally culpable .
But it cites an additional 18 cases as borderline not because of the scale of the harassment but because the EHRC could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Labour representatives .
Add to that the “ many more files ” containing evidence of anti-Semitic conduct by regular party members , and the true scale of the problem emerges .
Still , this numbers game is nothing if not consistent .
From the very top to parts of the grass roots , the Corbyn left has protested that the cases of anti-Semitism in Labour ’ s disciplinary process are minuscule : around 0.3 percent of a 500,000-strong membership .
But the leadership set the bar for what was counted , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before 2018 .
And as academics from the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck , University of London , pointed out in an article titled “ Labour Antisemitism : A Crisis Misunderstood , ” “ The one thing we know about reported hate crime figures in general is that they represent the tip of an iceberg.
” It ’ s also a misunderstanding of anti-Semitism to focus on individual acts of bigotry rather than a permeating culture .
Racial prejudice is better understood as an ever-present , easily animated force @ @ @ @ @ @ @ via a disciplinary process can itself become hostage to political abuse .
But it also does little to tackle a culture in which the circulation of anti-Semitism has spread , even while the number of certifiable anti-Semites is small .
Meanwhile , the coverage of Labour anti-Semitism has focused on Corbyn , with repeated accusations followed by a rush of defenders pointing out his lifelong history of fighting apartheid , Islamophobia , and anti-migrant fearmongering .
His track record on such issues is rightly part of Corbyn ’ s appeal—not least among minority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ racism and everyday discrimination .
But in the context of his handling of anti-Semitism , the effect of foregrounding these credentials is surely to cast anti-Semitism as a lesser prejudice—or to locate it outside the category of racism .
Corbyn ’ s accomplishments are real , but as Labour ’ s leader his faults also mattered .
That he is not personally anti-Semitic but still mishandled the issue tells us something about those flaws and potential blind spots within the left more generally .
Yet amid the valorizing or demonizing of the former @ @ @ @ @ @ @ allow such reflection is precisely what is missing .
It is , in this context , telling that examples of leftist politicians dealing effectively with anti-Semitism are not part of this conversation : Both Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar and UK Labour MP Naz Shah have demonstrated that it is possible to drop offensive terminology in criticisms of Israeli aggressions without diluting or altering their principles .
Meanwhile , the toxic effect of Labour factionalism on this miserable affair can not be ignored .
The incompatibility of Labour ’ s warring camps has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voting system that forces these groups , electorally , to sit in the same party .
This sort of fractious accommodation between progressives and the center-left is one that US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently commented on in relation to the Democratic Party .
Corbynites who claim that Labour ’ s failings on anti-Semitism were caused by factionally driven heel-dragging shouldn ’ t expect the EHRC to mediate in internal spats ; its job was simply to investigate discrimination within the party .
Its report does note an improving situation after 2018 , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ previously hostile party machine .
But it would be a more than a stretch to pretend that the leadership was rigorously tackling anti-Semitism before that date or that problems disappeared beyond it .
Earlier this year a leaked internal document claimed that hostile party officials , mostly Labour right factionalists , were running a secret parallel campaign to undermine the Corbyn leadership and the management of anti-Semitism .
A Labour inquiry into all those allegations is underway , but the shocking claims have understandably sparked frustration within the Corbyn left .
Sadly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leftists active here since the 1980s recall that anti-Semitism was viewed as a distraction from “ real ” racism .
An activist who did not want to be named said , “ In the left spaces I was part of , even to mention anti-Jewish racism felt like you were taking up too much space and often led to a direct telling off.
” The left sometimes struggles to critique capitalism or Israel without slipping into prejudicial tropes , often around Jewish power .
Nor does it help that defenders of an expansionist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Israel .
Yet even now , elements of the left favor betrayal narratives over doing the work to avoid repeatedly aggravating this persistent wound .
“ To the barricades !
” has become the response , fueled by the sense that whatever Corbyn had done would never have been enough , since his opponents were always out to get him .
But to view Labour ’ s anti-Semitism crisis purely in terms of a power struggle is to misconceive what the issue means for the left , beyond the moral imperative to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s attempts to derail a genuinely radical Labour leadership were hardly surprising .
Corbyn ’ s popular ideas for economic redistribution , public ownership of utilities and railways , and a green industrial revolution were relentlessly ridiculed , while he faced constant and sometimes surreal personal attacks .
This is not a question of stopping attacks against the left , because they will never stop .
The real task is to build a strong enough base for the left so that it can win despite such attacks—and to do so with inclusive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stronger , wider support .
In downplaying or ignoring anti-Semitism in its ranks , the left compromises its moral authority on other issues , from the devastating consequences of Britain ’ s Middle East policy to the effects of structural racism and economic austerity .
Casting anti-Semitism as a separate or lesser issue renders the left incapable of truly grasping how racism is constructed and deployed as a tool of white supremacy .
Britain ’ s media and political environment is totally incapable of treating different forms of racism fairly or equally , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anti-Semitism crisis while other prejudices fall off the radar .
A recent study showed that over half of Labour ’ s Muslim members did not trust the party to tackle Islamophobia .
This year Labour was also reported to be losing members over anti-Black racism , some of it revealed in those leaked Labour documents that cataloged insults privately made by party officials and directed at its Black MPs .
Earlier this year , the EHRC decided not to even investigate widespread Islamophobia in the Conservative Party , and a parliamentary report has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Black people .
And more evidence accumulates each day of the terrible impact of structural racism and racist government policies on all areas of life—including health , education , and employment—for British people of color .
Jewish people did not ask for prejudice against them to be given precedence or addressed at the expense of others .
Pitting minorities against one another is toxic , yet unsurprising behavior in a country that ran its empire on the basis of divide and rule .
But the progressive response is surely to leverage the gains @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for others .
The EHRC describes its recommendations as “ a foundation to assist all politicians and political leaders in adhering to equality law.
” Labour is legally bound to implement them , but nothing prevents the party from using similar processes and principles to tackle other forms of racism in its ranks .
The EHRC report has shown that anti-Semitism can be addressed in the context of racism and equality law .
Rather than get lost in the weeds of betrayal narratives , the left should see this as a positive step @ @ @ @ @ @

EDITOR’S NOTE: A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in The Nation print issue of December 28-January 4.
This article appears in the December 28, 2020/January 4, 2021 issue.
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L ondon—Earlier this fall, the British Labour party announced it had suspended its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over his response to a finding by the United Kingdom’s equality watchdog that the party’s handling of complaints of anti-Semitism had broken the law. Corbyn, a veteran left-wing member of Parliament, was elected as the Labour head in 2015—a surprise victory that spurred a record surge in party membership. He successfully defended his premiership when his own MPs challenged him a year later, took the party to a historic vote increase in the election of 2017, and then led it to a catastrophic defeat in December 2019, giving Boris Johnson’s Conservatives five more years in power.
Corbyn’s shock suspension was eventually rescinded. But party leader Keir Starmer refused to fully undo his predecessor’s banishment: Corbyn was back in the party but could not sit as a Labour MP. This ridiculous halfway house prompted motions by local Labour groups, resignations by local councilors, and a joint call from major UK trade unions, all demanding Corbyn’s full reinstatement. Quite an achievement, given that Starmer had won the leadership contest on a unity ticket. But like gunslingers at a Western shootout, Labour’s current and former leader had both dug in on positions leading to this showdown. And, as had been the case so many times before, the whole furor revolved around the party’s handling of anti-Semitism. Looking for holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your gift list.
How did we get here? Rewind to late October, when the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published its inquiry on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. This investigation had begun in May 2019, after accusations of Labour anti-Semitism had— entirely avoidably—spiraled out of control. Under Corbyn, Labour was seen as dismissive or slow to investigate complaints. Foot-dragging responses to instances when Corbyn had gotten it wrong, such as his support for an anti-Semitic mural in 2012, unearthed six years later, effectively licensed more abuse, as some supporters refused to acknowledge the mural’s anti-Semitism in their attempts to defend Corbyn.
October’s EHRC report was a sobering verdict for a party that not only established the commission but also introduced the very law it was now deemed to have broken. While noting there had been improvements to processing complaints, the report concluded that anti-Semitism in the party “could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so.” It described a culture in Labour that “at best did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.” Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung More From Rachel Shabi Can the British Labour Party Win Power Without a Left Wing? May 24, 2023 Where Now for Britain’s Labour Party? December 17, 2019 It’s a Race Against Time for Labour in Next Week’s Momentous UK Elections December 5, 2019
At a press conference by Starmer responding to the report, the media kept returning to his predecessor. This might have happened anyway—but it was made inevitable by a statement Corbyn had just released. He said that anyone claiming there was no anti-Semitism in Labour was wrong. But, he added, “the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media. That combination hurt Jewish people and must never be repeated.” Since Starmer said those claiming that anti-Semitism in the party was exaggerated were part of the problem, journalists wondered what he was going to do about Corbyn. “You need to throw him out of the party, don’t you?” one demanded. Starmer stressed that he hadn’t seen Corbyn’s statement and, in any case, it wasn’t about the former head: The EHRC report described a collective, not an individual, failure of leadership. Yet within a few hours, Corbyn had been suspended—and stunned left-wing Labour MPs and party members rallied to his defense.
Corbyn’s suspension was a divisive overreaction, which his supporters are reasonably contesting. And the Labour leadership’s response, including barring local party meetings from discussing the issue, is both disturbing and counterproductive. The muzzling of meetings and suspensions of party members looks suspiciously like an attempt to banish the left—and has only sown more confusion about anti-Semitism itself. But there’s a depressing familiarity to this whole scenario. It isn’t just the interminable factionalism of it all, which has paralyzed the party for years and poisoned its handling of the anti-Semitism crisis in the first place. Some in the left camp are not just protesting Corbyn’s suspension but also deflecting criticism of the way he responded to the EHRC and the issue itself.
This dynamic of denying or downplaying anti-Semitism in the service of defending Corbyn has characterized the whole sorry story. That the issue turned into an unedifying war of competing narratives ensured its place in the headlines of a conflict-obsessed and Corbyn-hostile media, while the drama has obscured a wider picture of hurt and prejudice—and silenced the actual victims of anti-Semitism. The dispute continues to exert a crippling effect on the party and on a wider fight against racism, not just inside Labour but in Britain. Current Issue View our current issue
The claim that “Jeremy did nothing wrong!” in his response to the EHRC report is worth examining. A majority of Labour MPs opposed Corbyn’s leadership from the outset. Do political opponents exploit the weaknesses of their adversaries? Of course. This is how politics works. It is unspeakably grim that anti-Semitism was used in this way, perhaps worst of all by a Conservative government that is eye-wateringly mired in Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, and indeed, anti-Semitism. There is something particularly noxious about a nativist right government denouncing the very idea of structural racism—and then gleefully attacking Labour over anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, it would be better for leftists to deal with this particular weakness by closing the breach instead of reacting with outrage when opponents try to make the hole bigger.
However, when Corbyn pointed out that Labour’s anti-Semitism problem had been overstated, he was telling the truth. Surely anyone can recognize right-wing newspaper columnist Simon Heffer’s claim that Corbyn was “a man who wants to reopen Auschwitz” as a gross exaggeration. When, during last year’s election, the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said Corbyn was “unfit for high office” and the “poison” of anti- Semitism had been sanctioned from the top, the Jewish Labour peer Alf Dubs said that the rabbi had “gone a bit far.” It should not be controversial to point this out.
But the Jewish Labour members who spoke about the anti-Semitism they experienced were not exaggerating. One woman who tweeted about an anti-Semitism complaint she had filed to the party not being dealt with was called “disgusting” and a “piece of shit,” was told she was being paid to lie, and was sent cartoon depictions of Jews, which, she noted, “my grandparents would readily recognise as Nazi in content.” A young activist with the Jewish Labour Movement—a group whose affiliation with the Labour Party dates back to 1920—was yelled at during the party’s annual conference and accused of being a racist and secretly working for the Israeli government. He wrote that online he was “compared to Goebbels, called a ‘cockroach’ (a theme from Nazi propaganda) and generally accused of being an enemy from within.” Many members faced abuse online and at Labour’s local meetings, only to be gaslit and harassed when they complained. Luciana Berger, who faced hideous abuse, including death threats, is one of two Jewish MPs who, along with three Labour members of the House of Lords, left the party because of it.
So when Corbyn, on the very day of the release of the EHRC report, commented that the issue had been overstated for political reasons, what does that say to the victims of anti- Semitism? And what about those leftists who dismissed the entire problem as a smear campaign? Wouldn’t Corbyn’s statement fuel such denialism and direct abuse yet again to those who dared to mention it? When it comes to racism, language has a toxic agency, regardless of intention, which is something that Corbyn should have considered. But he didn’t. This is why his statement was not just ill-advised or badly timed. It was wrong. Related Article Jeremy Corbyn and the Crisis of Anti-Semitism D.D. Guttenplan
To read the report’s full 130 pages is to comprehend both the scale of the problem and Labour’s culpability. Yet bad-faith interpretations abound, including the claim, circulating widely on some left media outlets, that the EHRC found just two instances of “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”; the report states that these two cases were “the tip of the iceberg.” Using a sample of 70 complaints, the EHRC could identify only two cases involving individuals acting as agents of the party, making Labour itself legally culpable. But it cites an additional 18 cases as borderline not because of the scale of the harassment but because the EHRC could not categorically define the guilty individuals as Labour representatives. Add to that the “many more files” containing evidence of anti-Semitic conduct by regular party members, and the true scale of the problem emerges.
Still, this numbers game is nothing if not consistent. From the very top to parts of the grass roots, the Corbyn left has protested that the cases of anti-Semitism in Labour’s disciplinary process are minuscule: around 0.3 percent of a 500,000-strong membership. But the leadership set the bar for what was counted, and the party did not do any comprehensive counting before 2018. And as academics from the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London, pointed out in an article titled “Labour Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood,” “The one thing we know about reported hate crime figures in general is that they represent the tip of an iceberg.” It’s also a misunderstanding of anti-Semitism to focus on individual acts of bigotry rather than a permeating culture. Racial prejudice is better understood as an ever-present, easily animated force in society. A zero-tolerance policy enforced via a disciplinary process can itself become hostage to political abuse. But it also does little to tackle a culture in which the circulation of anti-Semitism has spread, even while the number of certifiable anti-Semites is small.
Meanwhile, the coverage of Labour anti-Semitism has focused on Corbyn, with repeated accusations followed by a rush of defenders pointing out his lifelong history of fighting apartheid, Islamophobia, and anti-migrant fearmongering. His track record on such issues is rightly part of Corbyn’s appeal—not least among minority communities at the sharp end of structural racism and everyday discrimination. But in the context of his handling of anti-Semitism, the effect of foregrounding these credentials is surely to cast anti-Semitism as a lesser prejudice—or to locate it outside the category of racism. Corbyn’s accomplishments are real, but as Labour’s leader his faults also mattered. That he is not personally anti-Semitic but still mishandled the issue tells us something about those flaws and potential blind spots within the left more generally. Yet amid the valorizing or demonizing of the former leader, the critical space that would allow such reflection is precisely what is missing.
It is, in this context, telling that examples of leftist politicians dealing effectively with anti-Semitism are not part of this conversation: Both Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar and UK Labour MP Naz Shah have demonstrated that it is possible to drop offensive terminology in criticisms of Israeli aggressions without diluting or altering their principles.
Meanwhile, the toxic effect of Labour factionalism on this miserable affair cannot be ignored. The incompatibility of Labour’s warring camps has been portrayed as the product of a first-past-the-post voting system that forces these groups, electorally, to sit in the same party. This sort of fractious accommodation between progressives and the center-left is one that US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently commented on in relation to the Democratic Party. Corbynites who claim that Labour’s failings on anti-Semitism were caused by factionally driven heel-dragging shouldn’t expect the EHRC to mediate in internal spats; its job was simply to investigate discrimination within the party. Its report does note an improving situation after 2018, at which point Corbyn had control of the previously hostile party machine. But it would be a more than a stretch to pretend that the leadership was rigorously tackling anti-Semitism before that date or that problems disappeared beyond it. Earlier this year a leaked internal document claimed that hostile party officials, mostly Labour right factionalists, were running a secret parallel campaign to undermine the Corbyn leadership and the management of anti-Semitism. A Labour inquiry into all those allegations is underway, but the shocking claims have understandably sparked frustration within the Corbyn left.
Sadly, none of this is new. Jewish leftists active here since the 1980s recall that anti-Semitism was viewed as a distraction from “real” racism. An activist who did not want to be named said, “In the left spaces I was part of, even to mention anti-Jewish racism felt like you were taking up too much space and often led to a direct telling off.” The left sometimes struggles to critique capitalism or Israel without slipping into prejudicial tropes, often around Jewish power. Nor does it help that defenders of an expansionist Israel routinely conflate anti-Semitism with valid criticisms of Israel. Yet even now, elements of the left favor betrayal narratives over doing the work to avoid repeatedly aggravating this persistent wound. “To the barricades!” has become the response, fueled by the sense that whatever Corbyn had done would never have been enough, since his opponents were always out to get him.
But to view Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis purely in terms of a power struggle is to misconceive what the issue means for the left, beyond the moral imperative to deal with racism. The right-wing media’s attempts to derail a genuinely radical Labour leadership were hardly surprising. Corbyn’s popular ideas for economic redistribution, public ownership of utilities and railways, and a green industrial revolution were relentlessly ridiculed, while he faced constant and sometimes surreal personal attacks. This is not a question of stopping attacks against the left, because they will never stop. The real task is to build a strong enough base for the left so that it can win despite such attacks—and to do so with inclusive, progressive left values that can attract stronger, wider support. In downplaying or ignoring anti-Semitism in its ranks, the left compromises its moral authority on other issues, from the devastating consequences of Britain’s Middle East policy to the effects of structural racism and economic austerity. Casting anti-Semitism as a separate or lesser issue renders the left incapable of truly grasping how racism is constructed and deployed as a tool of white supremacy.
Britain’s media and political environment is totally incapable of treating different forms of racism fairly or equally, with bandwidth given to Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis while other prejudices fall off the radar. A recent study showed that over half of Labour’s Muslim members did not trust the party to tackle Islamophobia. This year Labour was also reported to be losing members over anti-Black racism, some of it revealed in those leaked Labour documents that cataloged insults privately made by party officials and directed at its Black MPs. Earlier this year, the EHRC decided not to even investigate widespread Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, and a parliamentary report has criticized the commission for failing to protect Black people. And more evidence accumulates each day of the terrible impact of structural racism and racist government policies on all areas of life—including health, education, and employment—for British people of color.
Jewish people did not ask for prejudice against them to be given precedence or addressed at the expense of others. Pitting minorities against one another is toxic, yet unsurprising behavior in a country that ran its empire on the basis of divide and rule. But the progressive response is surely to leverage the gains of one group to press for progress for others. The EHRC describes its recommendations as “a foundation to assist all politicians and political leaders in adhering to equality law.” Labour is legally bound to implement them, but nothing prevents the party from using similar processes and principles to tackle other forms of racism in its ranks. The EHRC report has shown that anti-Semitism can be addressed in the context of racism and equality law. Rather than get lost in the weeds of betrayal narratives, the left should see this as a positive step and then build on it.


thenation--2020-12-10--The Vanishing Queer Underground of Los Angeles

Before the Covid-19 pandemic forced it to be temporarily shuttered , La Plaza was one of the oldest running gay bars in Los Angeles .
A fixture in the city for over four decades and serving a mainly Latino clientele , the club was a favorite of the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz , who described it in his book Cruising Utopia as having a “ kind of gay Mexican cowhands feel.
” When he visited , Muñoz took in the spirited , folksy drag shows that were staged at the bar .
The Spanish-speaking performers , running through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pop songs , helped transform the dingy space .
Their songs and the bar conjured stories of “ migratory crossings , both legal and illegal , ” where the sea of bodies onstage and in the audience , so often in the process of flux , finally seemed on the cusp of belonging .
By Reynaldo Rivera ; Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler Another audience member was photographer Reynaldo Rivera .
Charmed by La Plaza ’ s atmosphere and its two-for-one margaritas , he was a habitué of the club @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its culture and those of other underground drag bars throughout the city ’ s Eastside in photographs from 1989 to the start of the new millennium .
Little seen or exhibited since their making , his artful and accomplished black-and-white images conjure a shimmering , emotive world of performance and communion achieved against a backdrop of modest means .
While they occasionally present recognizable figures such as the musician Alice Bag and the performance artist Ron Athey , the pictures document lesser-known subjects for posterity .
The photographs affectionately observe people—from performers whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impeded onerous circumstance to Rivera ’ s group of vibrant young friends—whose lives don ’ t often find this level of representation and close attention .
Given that gap , it ’ s predictable that Rivera ’ s work is emerging only now , when so much of the environment it portrays has fractured and faded away .
This year Rivera ’ s photos appear in the Hammer Museum Biennial , “ Made in LA , ” and 200 pictures from his vast archive are collected for the first time in a monograph @ @ @ @ @ @ @ edited by the exhibition ’ s cocurator Lauren Mackler and Semioxtet ( e ) ’ s Hedi El Kholti .
The book is interspersed with essays and stories by the writers Chris Kraus and Luis Bauz and the multi-hyphenate performance legend Vaginal Davis , all of whom knew Rivera when he took the pictures in the collection .
It was a moment , the book stresses , when LA was different : a halcyon city of cheap rents and cultural multiplicity that is little remembered or memorialized , in part because—whether in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of collective memory—there are so few traces of it left .
Born in Mexicali in 1964 , Rivera was brought to Los Angeles by his mother at the age of 5 .
He spent his youth shuttling between the borderlands of Mexico and Southern and Central California .
As a young teenager , he followed his father ’ s map of itinerant work , joining him in Stockton to pick cherries in the orchards during the spring and some years later at a Campbell Soup cannery job .
Another way Rivera ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ goods between Stockton , LA , and Mexico , and it was in a pile of fenced merchandise that Rivera found his first camera .
Barely in his 20s , he got his start professionally as a chronicler of LA ’ s live music scene , selling concert photos of bands like Sonic Youth , Depeche Mode , and Siouxsie and the Banshees to LA Weekly , where he once worked as a janitor .
But he was discouraged by some of the homophobia and monochromatic hue of the punk and rock scenes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unrepentant , outsize glamour of the drag bars , which friends introduced him to , proved more compelling .
He began to photograph the performers of La Plaza ( the majority of whom lived as women ) in the late 1980s .
In his book they appear gliding spotlit through the seated crowd , with fans of dollar bills swirling at their hips , or illumined on stage mid-song , enveloped by a cool darkness .
Rivera befriended many of the performers—like Miss Alex , a boy from Veracruz turned “ It ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a column on an exalted version of her life in Hollywood for the newspaper La Jornada back home—and offered them copies of his black-snd-white prints .
Eventually they granted him access to La Plaza ’ s dressing room : a bustling space , fertile not just with the drama of primping and quick changes ( as well as a pleasant jumble of costumes , mirrors , and oblique angles ) but also with the sense of emergence .
Rivera captures the quiet interlude of becoming as the performers put on their faces and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and perhaps , in some way , their lives ) .
He tells Kraus , for her introductory essay , “ The stage…was almost like a come down [ after that ] … .
the dressing room—that ’ s where you heard all the gossip and the fights.
” As a photographer , Rivera is partial to the portrait .
His tight frame focuses on the interior life of the individual , dispelling any sense of critical remove or irony .
Indeed , his closeness to his subjects is literal : He often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , his willowy frame leaning in to take the shot .
A student of old Hollywood films and golden age Mexican cinema , he has a preternatural ability to make people look like movie stars , which is part of what drew the performers of La Plaza to him .
His pictures are replete with a warm , untroubled intimacy .
In one photo , friends gather , their arms draped across one another at a candlelit dinner party .
In others , bodies braid and enmesh in dressing rooms and pack tightly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We see Athey , known for his extreme , endurance-based body art , tenderly embrace the artist Elyse Reger on her wedding day , holding her hand to his chest .
In another picture , two young women lean close at a bar , their faces meeting in a crescent moon of shadow .
Whereas other documentarians of nightlife such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans often portray the scene as a debauched form of dissolution , with blurry focus , trailing light , and hollowed-out , ghostly looks , Rivera is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in soft , contrasting tones .
The people in his photographs project attitude more than oblivion , and the emphasis falls on a distinct sense of joy and the seductive power of fantasy .
In his photographs , whether his partiers are posing in a toilet stall , a makeshift dressing room that resembles a utility closet , or even in one case with what look like bloodstains on the floor of a club , nearly everyone is smiling .
Drag , of course , takes from a pantheon of female icons , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sequins , wigs , and feathers—have been fairly unchanged over at least the past century .
This lends a timeless quality to Rivera ’ s work .
Muñoz detailed his experience at La Plaza as one of temporal displacement , as if he had been transported to “ Guadalajara in the 1950s , ” and Kraus smartly compares Rivera ’ s scenes of the backstage life there to Paris music halls described by the Colette in her novel The Vagabond .
At the same time , Rivera ’ s images document a specific @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Of all the clubs he photographed in the 1990s , La Plaza happens to be the only one that hasn ’ t closed or completely changed demographics .
The Silverlake Lounge ; the Filipino-owned Little Joy ; Mugy ’ s , whose proprietor , Yoshi , was known for the flamenco-kabuki routine he performed ; the kitsch paradise that was El Conquistador Mexican restaurant , with its gay folk paintings on the walls and giant paper flowers hanging from the ceiling ; and even the house parties in Echo Park that Rivera @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the city that was once defined by ethnic diversity , a queerness that was sometimes in harmony or at odds with it , and inexpensive rents .
In the intervening years , these areas have become a few of the most expensive to live in LA .
“ It ’ s amazing how many of these neighborhoods that now look so chic , were once , not that long ago , Latino , ” Rivera tells Kraus .
“ They completely wiped us clean.
” The story of erasure is not new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of poor and Black and brown people have been readily bulldozed in the name of office buildings , freeways , and stadiums .
But in the case of the Eastside neighborhoods where Rivera lived and photographed , the change has been more insidious .
“ We were never seen as a multicultural city , ” Rivera writes in an essay included in the book .
“ It seems that everyone that came here or critiqued the city always did by the west side or the white folk they met without acknowledging that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and was not here to be a star… .
The majority of us were either born into this dream world or ended up here for other reasons.
” This type of oversight must be a part of why the enormous shifts that have taken place in the city over the past 20 years have never quite registered on the scale of those in New York or San Francisco , where a lost , mostly white bohemianism regularly finds eulogy .
Even as rents have increased 65 percent over the past decade , according @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Angeles Times , and as LA has ascended to the third-most-rent-burdened market in the country , the fantasy of it as a cheap , open haven for artists and creatives of all types—as opposed to a town where longtime residents can no longer afford to stay in their homes—has taken too long to expire .
( Though the comment was instantly derided , the assertion in 2018 of the curator Klaus Biesenbach when he took his post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles that the city was “ becoming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has recently been remade by gentrification , seems indicative of the way many still view LA , or at least did pre-pandemic . )
The lack of awareness makes the mournful note of Rivera ’ s book and the bread crumbs that his pictures provide all the more vital .
The work is also haunted by the knowledge that many of the performers Rivera photographed are no longer alive .
While his project seems , in part , about returning to a more carefree and integrated , if perilous era ( he writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little longing , of the Suki Suki club in Echo Park , which “ served murder like margys on tap ” ) , he is less nostalgic for the plight of people like Miss Alex , who , for lack of better options , engaged in prostitution and became addicted to drugs .
“ They couldn ’ t get a job pumping gas , ” Rivera tells Kraus .
“ It was their inability to get financial stability that was the tragedy .
It made for a very unstable life.
” Then there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a stunning , daring young woman , also from Mexico , who introduced him to a fashionable milieu of other photographers and record industry types , as well as cocaine , speed , and heroin .
“ She ended up killing herself at the turn of the Century , ” Rivera writes .
“ I don ’ t think she would have been able to deal with getting old ; I don ’ t think she knew how to do old and ugly.
” Rivera seems to see a photograph as a small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of us face during our lifetimes , and this extends to places as much as people .
His work joins that of other artists who in the past few years have sought to record ephemeral spaces of belonging in LA , such as Wu Tsang ’ s film Wildness , on the Westlake trans bar the Silver Platter ; Leilah Weinraub ’ s documentary about a Black lesbian strip club , Shakedown ; and Guadalupe Rosales ’ s Instagram archive Veteranas and Rucas , which collects pictures of Latina party crews from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his images , Rivera extends this map of the no longer visible through a memoir in e-mails with Davis that is included in the text .
Full of gossip and recollection , beyond Davis ’ s especially colorful storytelling , the exchange broadens the context of Rivera ’ s work , filling it out with an impossible register of other clubs , bathhouses , delis , zines , stores , bands , gangs , boys , galleries , musicians , and artists .
Davis and Rivera share many things : an alienation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ youth , when bars in West Hollywood would ask for three forms of identification “ to keep out women , femmes , blacks , Latinos , and Asians.
” They were both autodidacts who learned rather than trained to be artists .
They also share a sense of shock over what LA has become , and who could blame them when confronting the depth of the city ’ s inequity ?
When Davis returns to her old neighborhood , she doesn ’ t recognize it .
“ The people I passed were either @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ragged and bedraggled , worn down by the harshness of what is life now in Los Angeles , ” she writes to Rivera .
A rising tide of evictions has produced an alarming increase of homelessness in the city , with tent encampments ringing around new development .
Then there ’ s the threat of Covid-19 to minority-owned businesses , the recent indictment of one City Council member who worked in the pocket of developers for years and remade downtown in the process—a displacement problem so pronounced that certain activist groups have dedicated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in some neighborhoods , regardless of whom they serve or their history or ownership .
Looking at Rivera ’ s pictures at the moment of pandemic makes the pleasure and community they portray seem that much more remote .
And yet the horizon of inspiration remains .
Davis decamped to Berlin in 2006 and writes that she could never move back to the States .
Rivera still lives in Los Angeles .

Before the Covid-19 pandemic forced it to be temporarily shuttered, La Plaza was one of the oldest running gay bars in Los Angeles. A fixture in the city for over four decades and serving a mainly Latino clientele, the club was a favorite of the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, who described it in his book Cruising Utopia as having a “kind of gay Mexican cowhands feel.” When he visited, Muñoz took in the spirited, folksy drag shows that were staged at the bar. The Spanish-speaking performers, running through lip-synched routines of Latin anthems and English-language pop songs, helped transform the dingy space. Their songs and the bar conjured stories of “migratory crossings, both legal and illegal,” where the sea of bodies onstage and in the audience, so often in the process of flux, finally seemed on the cusp of belonging. Books in Review Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City By Reynaldo Rivera; Edited by Hedi El Kholti and Lauren Mackler Buy this book
Another audience member was photographer Reynaldo Rivera. Charmed by La Plaza’s atmosphere and its two-for-one margaritas, he was a habitué of the club for years, all the while documenting its culture and those of other underground drag bars throughout the city’s Eastside in photographs from 1989 to the start of the new millennium. Little seen or exhibited since their making, his artful and accomplished black-and-white images conjure a shimmering, emotive world of performance and communion achieved against a backdrop of modest means. While they occasionally present recognizable figures such as the musician Alice Bag and the performance artist Ron Athey, the pictures document lesser-known subjects for posterity. The photographs affectionately observe people—from performers whose notoriety was limited to that moment and impeded onerous circumstance to Rivera’s group of vibrant young friends—whose lives don’t often find this level of representation and close attention. Given that gap, it’s predictable that Rivera’s work is emerging only now, when so much of the environment it portrays has fractured and faded away.
This year Rivera’s photos appear in the Hammer Museum Biennial, “Made in LA,” and 200 pictures from his vast archive are collected for the first time in a monograph published by Semiotext(e) and edited by the exhibition’s cocurator Lauren Mackler and Semioxtet(e)’s Hedi El Kholti. The book is interspersed with essays and stories by the writers Chris Kraus and Luis Bauz and the multi-hyphenate performance legend Vaginal Davis, all of whom knew Rivera when he took the pictures in the collection. It was a moment, the book stresses, when LA was different: a halcyon city of cheap rents and cultural multiplicity that is little remembered or memorialized, in part because—whether in the physical city or in the narrow confines of collective memory—there are so few traces of it left.
Born in Mexicali in 1964, Rivera was brought to Los Angeles by his mother at the age of 5. He spent his youth shuttling between the borderlands of Mexico and Southern and Central California. As a young teenager, he followed his father’s map of itinerant work, joining him in Stockton to pick cherries in the orchards during the spring and some years later at a Campbell Soup cannery job. Another way Rivera’s father made money was by moving stolen goods between Stockton, LA, and Mexico, and it was in a pile of fenced merchandise that Rivera found his first camera. Barely in his 20s, he got his start professionally as a chronicler of LA’s live music scene, selling concert photos of bands like Sonic Youth, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees to LA Weekly, where he once worked as a janitor. But he was discouraged by some of the homophobia and monochromatic hue of the punk and rock scenes. The balance of immigrants and the unrepentant, outsize glamour of the drag bars, which friends introduced him to, proved more compelling. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
He began to photograph the performers of La Plaza (the majority of whom lived as women) in the late 1980s. In his book they appear gliding spotlit through the seated crowd, with fans of dollar bills swirling at their hips, or illumined on stage mid-song, enveloped by a cool darkness. Rivera befriended many of the performers—like Miss Alex, a boy from Veracruz turned “It” girl in Mexico City, who penned a column on an exalted version of her life in Hollywood for the newspaper La Jornada back home—and offered them copies of his black-snd-white prints. Eventually they granted him access to La Plaza’s dressing room: a bustling space, fertile not just with the drama of primping and quick changes (as well as a pleasant jumble of costumes, mirrors, and oblique angles) but also with the sense of emergence. Rivera captures the quiet interlude of becoming as the performers put on their faces and style their expressions for the stage (and perhaps, in some way, their lives). He tells Kraus, for her introductory essay, “The stage…was almost like a come down [after that]…. the dressing room—that’s where you heard all the gossip and the fights.”
As a photographer, Rivera is partial to the portrait. His tight frame focuses on the interior life of the individual, dispelling any sense of critical remove or irony. Indeed, his closeness to his subjects is literal: He often turns up in the mirror alongside them, his willowy frame leaning in to take the shot. A student of old Hollywood films and golden age Mexican cinema, he has a preternatural ability to make people look like movie stars, which is part of what drew the performers of La Plaza to him. His pictures are replete with a warm, untroubled intimacy.
In one photo, friends gather, their arms draped across one another at a candlelit dinner party. In others, bodies braid and enmesh in dressing rooms and pack tightly into the hallway of a house party. We see Athey, known for his extreme, endurance-based body art, tenderly embrace the artist Elyse Reger on her wedding day, holding her hand to his chest. In another picture, two young women lean close at a bar, their faces meeting in a crescent moon of shadow. Whereas other documentarians of nightlife such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans often portray the scene as a debauched form of dissolution, with blurry focus, trailing light, and hollowed-out, ghostly looks, Rivera is more formally restrained, composing his work in soft, contrasting tones. The people in his photographs project attitude more than oblivion, and the emphasis falls on a distinct sense of joy and the seductive power of fantasy. In his photographs, whether his partiers are posing in a toilet stall, a makeshift dressing room that resembles a utility closet, or even in one case with what look like bloodstains on the floor of a club, nearly everyone is smiling.
Drag, of course, takes from a pantheon of female icons, and the elements of showgirl glamour—taffeta, sequins, wigs, and feathers—have been fairly unchanged over at least the past century. This lends a timeless quality to Rivera’s work. Muñoz detailed his experience at La Plaza as one of temporal displacement, as if he had been transported to “Guadalajara in the 1950s,” and Kraus smartly compares Rivera’s scenes of the backstage life there to Paris music halls described by the Colette in her novel The Vagabond. At the same time, Rivera’s images document a specific moment of Los Angeles’s history. Of all the clubs he photographed in the 1990s, La Plaza happens to be the only one that hasn’t closed or completely changed demographics. The Silverlake Lounge; the Filipino-owned Little Joy; Mugy’s, whose proprietor, Yoshi, was known for the flamenco-kabuki routine he performed; the kitsch paradise that was El Conquistador Mexican restaurant, with its gay folk paintings on the walls and giant paper flowers hanging from the ceiling; and even the house parties in Echo Park that Rivera threw and attended all represent an area of the city that was once defined by ethnic diversity, a queerness that was sometimes in harmony or at odds with it, and inexpensive rents. In the intervening years, these areas have become a few of the most expensive to live in LA. “It’s amazing how many of these neighborhoods that now look so chic, were once, not that long ago, Latino,” Rivera tells Kraus. “They completely wiped us clean.”
The story of erasure is not new in Los Angeles, where entire neighborhoods of poor and Black and brown people have been readily bulldozed in the name of office buildings, freeways, and stadiums. But in the case of the Eastside neighborhoods where Rivera lived and photographed, the change has been more insidious. “We were never seen as a multicultural city,” Rivera writes in an essay included in the book. “It seems that everyone that came here or critiqued the city always did by the west side or the white folk they met without acknowledging that the majority of the city was not white and was not here to be a star…. The majority of us were either born into this dream world or ended up here for other reasons.” This type of oversight must be a part of why the enormous shifts that have taken place in the city over the past 20 years have never quite registered on the scale of those in New York or San Francisco, where a lost, mostly white bohemianism regularly finds eulogy.
Even as rents have increased 65 percent over the past decade, according to one study published by the Los Angeles Times, and as LA has ascended to the third-most-rent-burdened market in the country, the fantasy of it as a cheap, open haven for artists and creatives of all types—as opposed to a town where longtime residents can no longer afford to stay in their homes—has taken too long to expire. (Though the comment was instantly derided, the assertion in 2018 of the curator Klaus Biesenbach when he took his post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles that the city was “becoming the new Berlin,” which itself has recently been remade by gentrification, seems indicative of the way many still view LA, or at least did pre-pandemic.) The lack of awareness makes the mournful note of Rivera’s book and the bread crumbs that his pictures provide all the more vital.
The work is also haunted by the knowledge that many of the performers Rivera photographed are no longer alive. While his project seems, in part, about returning to a more carefree and integrated, if perilous era (he writes, for instance, not without a little longing, of the Suki Suki club in Echo Park, which “served murder like margys on tap”), he is less nostalgic for the plight of people like Miss Alex, who, for lack of better options, engaged in prostitution and became addicted to drugs. “They couldn’t get a job pumping gas,” Rivera tells Kraus. “It was their inability to get financial stability that was the tragedy. It made for a very unstable life.” Then there is Rivera’s cousin Patricia, a stunning, daring young woman, also from Mexico, who introduced him to a fashionable milieu of other photographers and record industry types, as well as cocaine, speed, and heroin. “She ended up killing herself at the turn of the Century,” Rivera writes. “I don’t think she would have been able to deal with getting old; I don’t think she knew how to do old and ugly.”
Rivera seems to see a photograph as a small defense against the torrents of loss most of us face during our lifetimes, and this extends to places as much as people. His work joins that of other artists who in the past few years have sought to record ephemeral spaces of belonging in LA, such as Wu Tsang’s film Wildness, on the Westlake trans bar the Silver Platter; Leilah Weinraub’s documentary about a Black lesbian strip club, Shakedown; and Guadalupe Rosales’s Instagram archive Veteranas and Rucas, which collects pictures of Latina party crews from the 1990s. In addition to the wealth of his images, Rivera extends this map of the no longer visible through a memoir in e-mails with Davis that is included in the text. Full of gossip and recollection, beyond Davis’s especially colorful storytelling, the exchange broadens the context of Rivera’s work, filling it out with an impossible register of other clubs, bathhouses, delis, zines, stores, bands, gangs, boys, galleries, musicians, and artists.
Davis and Rivera share many things: an alienation from the dominant gay culture of their youth, when bars in West Hollywood would ask for three forms of identification “to keep out women, femmes, blacks, Latinos, and Asians.” They were both autodidacts who learned rather than trained to be artists. They also share a sense of shock over what LA has become, and who could blame them when confronting the depth of the city’s inequity? When Davis returns to her old neighborhood, she doesn’t recognize it. “The people I passed were either these well-off clueless types or the very ragged and bedraggled, worn down by the harshness of what is life now in Los Angeles,” she writes to Rivera. A rising tide of evictions has produced an alarming increase of homelessness in the city, with tent encampments ringing around new development. Then there’s the threat of Covid-19 to minority-owned businesses, the recent indictment of one City Council member who worked in the pocket of developers for years and remade downtown in the process—a displacement problem so pronounced that certain activist groups have dedicated themselves to harassing all the art spaces in some neighborhoods, regardless of whom they serve or their history or ownership.
Looking at Rivera’s pictures at the moment of pandemic makes the pleasure and community they portray seem that much more remote. And yet the horizon of inspiration remains. Davis decamped to Berlin in 2006 and writes that she could never move back to the States. Rivera still lives in Los Angeles.


thenation--2020-12-10--A Very Trumpian Christmas Surprise? Signs Point to a Possible US Attack on Iran

On November 12 , President Trump reportedly asked his top national security advisers to prepare plans for attacking nuclear processing facilities in Iran after Tehran announced its intent to accelerate its uranium enrichment activities—a step taken in response to Trump ’ s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and his imposition of crushing economic sanctions .
According to White House sources , Trump was talked out of launching an attack on that date by some of his top advisers , including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo , who claimed it would ignite an eruption of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But Trump never pledged to refrain from ordering strikes on Iran at some future time and there is growing evidence that he is preparing to initiate such an assault before his term ends .
Indeed , it is entirely conceivable that he will give the go-ahead for an attack now that his legal options for preventing Joe Biden ’ s inauguration on January 20 appear to be vanishing and he gropes for a way to create pandemonium at home or , at the very least , punish his enemies abroad .
Looking for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation ’ s journalism while you complete your gift list .
Plans for such a desperate move may have been set in motion as early as November 18 , when Secretary Pompeo arrived in Israel for a three-day visit to US allies in the region .
While in Jerusalem , Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , with Iran a major topic of conversation .
By this point , Israeli plans to assassinate Iran ’ s top nuclear scientist , Mohsen Fakhrizadeh , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well developed .
Given the bond between the two and their shared hatred of the Iranian leadership , it is reasonable to assume that Netanyahu informed Pompeo of the planned strike and that the two then discussed how their countries would respond to any Iranian retaliation .
Trump Is Leaving Us With a New Cold War Is It Mere Spite—or Something More Sinister ?
In the days that followed , senior officers of the Israeli Defense Forces ( IDF ) began communicating with their counterparts at the US Central Command ( Centcom ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to likely Iranian retaliatory moves .
Meanwhile continued on to Qatar , Saudi Arabia , and the United Arab Emirates to discuss greater regional collaboration in combating Iran ’ s “ malign influence ” in the region ; whether this included discussion of specific plans for attacks on that country can not be known with any certainty , but surely the general notion of a conflict with Iran was on the agenda .
In the days following Pompeo ’ s visit to Israel and Gulf kingdoms , a series of subsequent events suggest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) military action against Iran : • On November 21 , two US Air Force B-52 heavy bombers from the 5th Bomb Wing , based at Minot Air Force base , N.D. , flew on a round-trip flight to the Persian Gulf in what was described as a test of America ’ s ability to project additional firepower into the region on very short notice .
• On November 25 , Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller made an unannounced visit to US forces in Bahrain , his first trip overseas after being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , after Trump fired Mark T. Esper ( who was deemed insufficiently loyal to the president ) .
Although Miller ’ s Thanksgiving visit was said to be a morale-boosting event for US troops stationed abroad , he also met with senior officers at Centcom , whose forces would play a key role in any military action taken against Iran .
• On November 27 , just hours after the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh , the aircraft carrier Nimitz , along with its 70 or so combat aircraft and accompanying cruisers and destroyers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Although the move was said to be related to US troop withdrawals from the region , it was seen by some as unusual , as the Nimitz had been at sea for several months and was scheduled to return to its homeport in Bremerton , Wash. • At about this time , the IDF went into their highest state of readiness in anticipation of revenge strikes by Iran in retaliation for Fakhrizadeh ’ s assassination .
• On December 2 , the State Department began reducing staff at the US Embassy in Baghdad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the embassy by Iraqi-based militias loyal to Tehran .
It is possible , of course , to overstate the significance of one or more of these events or to misread their intent .
Nevertheless , they suggest a pattern of coordinated steps that would allow President Trump to order multiple strikes on military and nuclear facilities in Iran at any point , whether following some act of retribution for Fakhrizadeh ’ s assassination or a new report of accelerated Iranian uranium enrichment—or at his own whim .
A US attack on Iran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most likely would involve air and missile strikes on the Iranian centrifuge facility at Natanz—the epicenter of Iranian enrichment activities—and on other nuclear-related laboratories and processing facilities .
Other targets would in all likelihood include Iranian anti–air attack radars and missile batteries , key air and naval bases , and the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps .
Given the generally poor condition of Iranian defenses—because of the sanctions , Tehran has not been able to purchase new weapons or obtain spare parts for its old ones—a US assault of this sort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , should result in few if any American casualties .
But any such attack would surely spark significant Iranian retaliation of some sort , and Tehran possesses a variety of means for punishing the United States and its allies .
These include , for example , attacks on US and allied forces by pro-Iranian militias scattered throughout the region , such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shiite militias in Iraq .
Other Iranian retaliatory options include disrupting the global economy through attacks on oil tankers and oil-processing facilities in the Gulf and along @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turn , would spur additional US military action , along with countermoves by the IDF and the Gulf kingdoms .
Although the United States is certain to prevail in any such contest , the outcome may not prove as satisfying as Trump and his most ardent supporters , both here and in Israel , may assume .
Yes , Tehran ’ s efforts to produce a nuclear weapon ( even assuming that is its objective ) would be set back a few years , but the Iranians will almost certainly rebuild their enrichment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ less vulnerable to air attack .
More importantly , the chaos unleashed by such a move could result in widespread harm to American soldiers still serving in the region and to the civilian populations of friendly countries ; of course , many civilians in Iran would suffer as well .
In Iran itself , hatred of the United States would reach a new peak of frenzy and the country ’ s hard-line clerical leadership would surely strengthen its grip on power .
Presidential elections are scheduled there for June 2021 , and Iran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Council , is bound to limit the candidate list to hard- liners who eschew any intention of negotiating with the United States .
Under these circumstances , it will prove almost impossible for a Biden administration to restore the 2015 nuclear deal ( officially , the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ) , as the president-elect has said he wishes to do .
We might also ponder the domestic consequences of an attack on Iran at this turbulent final stage of Trump ’ s presidency .
Certainly the destruction of Iran ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Washington , if all goes well and the United States suffers few if any casualties .
This could embolden Trump to take a variety of disruptive measures , such as a further purge of the federal bureaucracy and a further flurry of last-minute efforts to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election .
If things turn out badly , however—as well they might—Trump could take even more extreme measures , such as trying to declare martial law and void the election .
All this should tell us : Don ’ t wait @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a US military strike on Iran , protest now .
Public protest activity may have to be curtailed in this time of Covid , but there is much else that can be done—especially in Congress and via the media .
Peace and anti-war groups like CODEPINK , Peace Action , and Win Without War should alert their members about these risks and urge them to take immediate action .
Most importantly , members of Congress should be urged to speak out against a possible military strike on Iran , demand answers from top @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move , and adopt resolutions prohibiting presidential action without congressional consultation and approval .
Call or write your representatives to Congress , insisting that they take these steps .
Readers with ties to the media should ask editors to address similar questions to the Pentagon leadership and to write editorials condemning precipitous military action against Iran .
Once the bombs start falling , it may prove impossible to prevent another deadly US entanglement in the Middle East—the time to prevent that is now .

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On November 12, President Trump reportedly asked his top national security advisers to prepare plans for attacking nuclear processing facilities in Iran after Tehran announced its intent to accelerate its uranium enrichment activities—a step taken in response to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and his imposition of crushing economic sanctions. According to White House sources, Trump was talked out of launching an attack on that date by some of his top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who claimed it would ignite an eruption of violence all across the Middle East.
But Trump never pledged to refrain from ordering strikes on Iran at some future time and there is growing evidence that he is preparing to initiate such an assault before his term ends. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that he will give the go-ahead for an attack now that his legal options for preventing Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20 appear to be vanishing and he gropes for a way to create pandemonium at home or, at the very least, punish his enemies abroad. Looking for holiday gifts with a conscience? Check out The Nation Shop and help support The Nation’s journalism while you complete your gift list.
Plans for such a desperate move may have been set in motion as early as November 18, when Secretary Pompeo arrived in Israel for a three-day visit to US allies in the region. While in Jerusalem, Pompeo met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Iran a major topic of conversation. By this point, Israeli plans to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on November 27—nine days later—must have been well developed. Given the bond between the two and their shared hatred of the Iranian leadership, it is reasonable to assume that Netanyahu informed Pompeo of the planned strike and that the two then discussed how their countries would respond to any Iranian retaliation. More From Michael T. Klare When AI and Robotics Combine August 9, 2023 The Future of AI Is War July 17, 2023 The US Versus China June 14, 2023
In the days that followed, senior officers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) began communicating with their counterparts at the US Central Command (Centcom) headquarters in Bahrain about coordinating their responses to likely Iranian retaliatory moves. Meanwhile continued on to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to discuss greater regional collaboration in combating Iran’s “malign influence” in the region; whether this included discussion of specific plans for attacks on that country cannot be known with any certainty, but surely the general notion of a conflict with Iran was on the agenda.
In the days following Pompeo’s visit to Israel and Gulf kingdoms, a series of subsequent events suggest further planning for US (or US/Israeli) military action against Iran:
On November 21, two US Air Force B-52 heavy bombers from the 5th Bomb Wing, based at Minot Air Force base, N.D., flew on a round-trip flight to the Persian Gulf in what was described as a test of America’s ability to project additional firepower into the region on very short notice.
On November 25, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller made an unannounced visit to US forces in Bahrain, his first trip overseas after being appointed to that position on November 9, after Trump fired Mark T. Esper (who was deemed insufficiently loyal to the president). Although Miller’s Thanksgiving visit was said to be a morale-boosting event for US troops stationed abroad, he also met with senior officers at Centcom, whose forces would play a key role in any military action taken against Iran.
On November 27, just hours after the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the aircraft carrier Nimitz, along with its 70 or so combat aircraft and accompanying cruisers and destroyers, sailed into the Persian Gulf. Although the move was said to be related to US troop withdrawals from the region, it was seen by some as unusual, as the Nimitz had been at sea for several months and was scheduled to return to its homeport in Bremerton, Wash.
At about this time, the IDF went into their highest state of readiness in anticipation of revenge strikes by Iran in retaliation for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination.
On December 2, the State Department began reducing staff at the US Embassy in Baghdad, supposedly in anticipation of possible attacks on the embassy by Iraqi-based militias loyal to Tehran.
It is possible, of course, to overstate the significance of one or more of these events or to misread their intent. Nevertheless, they suggest a pattern of coordinated steps that would allow President Trump to order multiple strikes on military and nuclear facilities in Iran at any point, whether following some act of retribution for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination or a new report of accelerated Iranian uranium enrichment—or at his own whim. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. My Homeland Is Being Ruled by Terror. The World Must Pay Attention. Manny Maung
A US attack on Iran could take several forms, but the most likely would involve air and missile strikes on the Iranian centrifuge facility at Natanz—the epicenter of Iranian enrichment activities—and on other nuclear-related laboratories and processing facilities. Other targets would in all likelihood include Iranian anti–air attack radars and missile batteries, key air and naval bases, and the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Current Issue View our current issue
Given the generally poor condition of Iranian defenses—because of the sanctions, Tehran has not been able to purchase new weapons or obtain spare parts for its old ones—a US assault of this sort, limited to air and missile strikes, should result in few if any American casualties. But any such attack would surely spark significant Iranian retaliation of some sort, and Tehran possesses a variety of means for punishing the United States and its allies. These include, for example, attacks on US and allied forces by pro-Iranian militias scattered throughout the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shiite militias in Iraq. Other Iranian retaliatory options include disrupting the global economy through attacks on oil tankers and oil-processing facilities in the Gulf and along its shores. Such moves, in turn, would spur additional US military action, along with countermoves by the IDF and the Gulf kingdoms.
Although the United States is certain to prevail in any such contest, the outcome may not prove as satisfying as Trump and his most ardent supporters, both here and in Israel, may assume. Yes, Tehran’s efforts to produce a nuclear weapon (even assuming that is its objective) would be set back a few years, but the Iranians will almost certainly rebuild their enrichment facilities, no doubt in underground facilities less vulnerable to air attack. More importantly, the chaos unleashed by such a move could result in widespread harm to American soldiers still serving in the region and to the civilian populations of friendly countries; of course, many civilians in Iran would suffer as well.
In Iran itself, hatred of the United States would reach a new peak of frenzy and the country’s hard-line clerical leadership would surely strengthen its grip on power. Presidential elections are scheduled there for June 2021, and Iran’s constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council, is bound to limit the candidate list to hard- liners who eschew any intention of negotiating with the United States. Under these circumstances, it will prove almost impossible for a Biden administration to restore the 2015 nuclear deal (officially, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), as the president-elect has said he wishes to do.
We might also ponder the domestic consequences of an attack on Iran at this turbulent final stage of Trump’s presidency. Certainly the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities would solicit widespread applause in Washington, if all goes well and the United States suffers few if any casualties. This could embolden Trump to take a variety of disruptive measures, such as a further purge of the federal bureaucracy and a further flurry of last-minute efforts to negate the results of the 2020 presidential election. If things turn out badly, however—as well they might—Trump could take even more extreme measures, such as trying to declare martial law and void the election.
All this should tell us: Don’t wait until the bombs start dropping to protest a US military strike on Iran, protest now. Public protest activity may have to be curtailed in this time of Covid, but there is much else that can be done—especially in Congress and via the media. Peace and anti-war groups like CODEPINK, Peace Action, and Win Without War should alert their members about these risks and urge them to take immediate action.
Most importantly, members of Congress should be urged to speak out against a possible military strike on Iran, demand answers from top Pentagon officials about planning for such a move, and adopt resolutions prohibiting presidential action without congressional consultation and approval. Call or write your representatives to Congress, insisting that they take these steps. Readers with ties to the media should ask editors to address similar questions to the Pentagon leadership and to write editorials condemning precipitous military action against Iran. Once the bombs start falling, it may prove impossible to prevent another deadly US entanglement in the Middle East—the time to prevent that is now.