Many of the individuals criticised here and many members of the organisations criticised here are ... Jewish. So Big Flame attempts to answer criticisms of its anti-semitism by asserting that its editorial board "comprises both Jews and non-Jews" (December 1982). However, this is tokenistic and naive if it is meant to 'prove' that Big Flame is not capable of anti-semitism. Obviously Jews, like everyone else, can internalise their own oppression. This, at one extreme, is what constitutes unconscious anti-semitism. At the other extreme, it is what constitutes the near-conscious self-hatred of Marx. None of this is to blame individual Jews in Big Flame. None of us could possibly claim to have a monopoly of wisdom in such hard circumstances and there are many routes to liberation. However, it is necessary to emphasise the very real existence of anti-semitism so that all of us as Jews have, at some level of consciousness, accepted certain anti-semitic attitudes as 'natural' and based on 'commonsense'.
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