Naomi Klein’s recent book Doppelganger is her working through the personal and political issues that arose for her when people started conflating her with Naomi Wolf, a former progressive who is now in the orbit of Bannon and Trump. She refers to several books which influenced her thinking. What I did not expect was an extended section on Abram Leon, a Belgian Trotskyist who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-six. He was the author of The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation and it was the book I returned to when it became apparent that the Israeli response to Hamas’ attack and hostage seizure was going to be genocide. It is a relatively little known work and Leon did not live to see it published. To see it acknowledged, its author and his ideas brought to the attention of new generations of activists by a best-selling author was thrilling.

This site’s motto “behind every reason for despair, one must find a reason for hope” is taken from Ernest Mandel’s introduction to Leon’s book. Mandel who was twenty-four at the time and had twice escaped from the Nazis, used the pen name Germain when he wrote those words in 1946. The irrepressible revolutionary optimism he expressed despite having had close comrades murdered and six million Jewish people slaughtered remains inspirational.

Klein briefly sets out Leon’s background. His family left Poland to participate in the Zionist colonisation of Palestine but left and settled in Belgium where he became a leading figure in Hashomer Hatzair, a leftist (sic) Zionist movement. He broke from Zionism and joined the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist Party. During the war he was involved in underground work, including propaganda aimed at German soldiers. He was arrested in summer 1944 and was sent to his death shortly after. Mandel’s 1947 tribute to his comrade is here.

It is easy to see why Leon is such an attractive figure for Klein. Like him, she is a Jewish anti-Zionist. Her internationalism has made her the target of abuse and attacks from the Israeli army, Zionists and their allies. Her views would have made her supremely eligible for expulsion from the British Labour Party. She is very definitely the “wrong sort of Jew”.

More important than that personal link is the contemporary relevance of Leon’s ideas and Klein points out his influence on her thinking. Leon set out to offer a Marxist, materialist history of Jews in Europe and the basis of anti-Semitic ideology. Where the Nazis used conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalism, Bannon, Trump, Farage make up stories about global elites, Muslims and migrants “to divert popular rage away from capitalism as a system and toward an imaginary cabal that can be cut out, leaving the structures that created and protect the global billionaire class intact.”

There are enough reviews of Doppelgänger floating around and I am sure you can find one to suit your ideological disposition, so I will leave the last words to Naomi Klein who has done her part to make sure that the name and ideas of Abram Leon endure and are relevant almost a century after his death.

“I think about Abram Leon, writing his book The Jewish Question as the Nazis closed in, carefully explaining how racist conspiracies change the subject from capitalism to cabals. He wrote those words in his mid twenties knowing that millions of his people had already died and that his ideas might soon be all that was left of him. But he believed in ideas enough to write them down—and that means they are still available to be picked up.”