Carly Pildis, a political organizer, is a critic of the left from within. She has been doing the good work of pleading with her fellow progressives to stop tolerating anti-Semitism. She did so admirably in her widely-read piece for Tablet, “Jews Get to Define Anti-Semitism: Not Shaun King.” The kind of anti-Semitism to which Pildis objects has brought back the “Zionism is racism” slur. That is a paradigm through which Jews are judged unfit for social justice work and the deeply anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, is rehabilitated. Tamika Mallory, a co-chair of the Women's March, was happy to be present at a speech in which Farrakhan said, among many other equally anti-Semitic things, that “the powerful Jews are my enemy.”
Apart from a boilerplate assertion of her opposition to anti-Semitism, Mallory has not reckoned with her embrace of Farrakhan. Indeed, in the thick of the controversy, Mallory tweeted, “If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader.” Law professor and blogger David Schraub spoke for many Jews of various political persuasions when he described this comment as “less of anti-Semitic dog-whistle than a bullhorn.” Mallory has since focused on shifting attention from her downplaying of the virulent, naked anti-Semitism of Farrakhan, which is still a problem on the left, to her hatred of Israel, which mostly isn't.
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