I made an important note that is worth re-visiting in light of a larger debate that is ongoing within the University of Cape Town community. Specifically, I shared with the University of Cape Town faculty and students how my own yearnings as an African American for solidarity among Africans worldwide was inspired in part by the Jewish experience of exile from their homeland and the re-constitution of Israel as a sovereign and successful nation in our modern times.

Antisemitism always positions its own image of ‘The Jews’ at the centre of all this that is bad in the world. It is a terrible irony that in our time not the Jews but antisemitism is implicit within most of what is threatening to democracy. Antisemitism is not interesting and thinking about it is not what democratic people would like to spend their time doing. But we have no choice. The populist, that is the proto-totalitarian assaults on democracy which are mushrooming into mainstream politics are fundamentally conspiracy fantasies. And conspiracy fantasies are always pregnant with antisemitism, whether the fantasists know it or not.