Major postwar anti-antisemitic thinkers invoked no predecessors of their struggle.

Evidence

These recent figureheads of the struggle against antisemitism are at once isolated and conspicuously discreet about their precursors, if there were any. Arendt does retrieve out of oblivion the idiosyncratic figure of Bernard Lazare; Horkheimer and Adorno rely, for their part, on Sigmund Freud (though not on his singular attempt to counter antisemitism in Moses and Monotheism); and whereas Fanon could complain about the inadequacy of his predecessors in the struggle against racism and colonialism (Maran, Mannoni), Sartre—who inspired Fanon before writing a preface for The Wretched of the Earth—makes no similar gesture in his famed attack on ‘the antisemite’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1200 (#expands, via linked claim)

In this fragmented and seemingly tenuous struggle, no tradition, no antecedents, appear to have been claimed, none seem to be found-not even an ‘invented’ or an ‘imagined’ tradition. There are the survivors, of course (I will have to return to that), but the history of the Holocaust is not the whole, only the culmination, of the history of antisemitism, and it does not seem to teach us much about the struggle against it. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1199 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Anti-antisemitic thinkers conspicuously avoided invoking any predecessors — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1200; No invented tradition has been claimed for anti-antisemitic struggle — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1199; The anti-antisemitism movement lacks self-knowledge of its own history — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1224 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-antisemitic thinkers conspicuously avoided invoking any predecessors #expands (0.98) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1200
• No invented tradition has been claimed for anti-antisemitic struggle #corroborates (0.92) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1199