The New Racial Regime: Recalibrations of White Supremacy by Alana Lentin

Discussion Questions

• In what ways does the ‘war on critical race theory’ dovetail with the ‘war on antisemitism’?
  
• How have Zionists deployed diversity, equity and inclusion and other such ‘antiracist’ mechanisms to install ‘mandatory Zionism’ within universities and other educational institutions?
  
• How are the politics of Indigeneity and decolonisation instrumentalised in the interests of Zionism? How are Indigenous peoples resisting that? How might this look differently in Australasia and North America?
  
• What role do antisemitism and the figure of the Jew play in the history of European racial capitalism? How might this help us to understand the trope of ‘Jewish safety’ for western/Zionist imperialism?
  
• How have the politics of definitions of antisemitism impacted anti-Zionist organising and what is your assessment of the book’s abolitionist approach to definitions?

Supplementary Materials and Resources

Against ‘Jewish Safety’ by Alana Lentin for Mondoweiss

Claims that “antisemitism” is being weaponized to support Israel miss that its function has always been to bolster European supremacy. Today, the chimera of “Jewish safety” is used to justify Western dominance through Israel’s genocide in Palestine. | Read more

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Reading Cedric Robinson At a Time of Genocide by Alana Lentin for for Black Agenda Report

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism can be used as a tool to further expand our understanding of Israel’s settler colonial domination over Palestine. | Read more

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How White Folks Became Jews: The War on Black Antisemitism and the Recalibration of Racial Regimes

Matt Serrif-Cullick for the Journal of Critical Zionism Studies issue 2, 2026. | Read now

Abstract: In this article, I examine recent and historical deployments of what I call the “Black antisemitism as betrayal” trope, arguing that it plays two important roles: first, it authorizes a rightward turn in Zionist actors’ public political alignments; second, it facilitates white supremacy’s disavowal of historical responsibility for antisemitism by casting Black Americans as Jews’ oppressors. In recent years, Zionist actors have taken this trope a step further, to the point that all white people—not just Jews—are cast as the primary victims of racism. I argue that this development signals the ascendance of a new racial regime centered on a configuration I call the “white-as-Jew,” which allows white supremacy to claim antisemitism as a form of white grievance. Finally, I argue that these contributions to anti-Black racism are core features of the Zionist strategy of securing power via alignment with white supremacy.

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Alana Lentin on The New Racial Regime, De Facto podcast. | Listen/Watch

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The New Racial Regime with Alana Lentin, The Adnan Husain Show | Listen/Watch

For further resources, check out Alana Lentin’s website here

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