On the evening of December 9, 1948, at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Afterward, when the hall had emptied and the lights were down, a young New York Times reporter named A. M. Rosenthal went looking for the man whose word had just entered international law and found him sitting alone in the dark, weeping. Raphael Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who had lost 49 relatives in the Shoah and who had introduced the term genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944, after a decade of trying to persuade international lawyers that a crime without a name could not be prosecuted. Days later he checked himself into a Paris hospital. He gave his own diagnosis: genociditis.
The following afternoon, in another session of the same Assembly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. Seven months earlier, on May 14, in a museum on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion had read out Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
1948 produced two answers to Auschwitz.
One was particular and national: a people destroyed for lacking a state would acquire one.
The other was universal and legal: the destruction of peoples would be named, criminalized, and made the business of all nations.
Both were drafted by Jews reasoning from the same catastrophe.
The universal answer, ironically, has since become the primary instrument for prosecuting the particular one.
On December 17, 1951, three years and eight days after the Convention was adopted, William Patterson walked into the Palais de Chaillot with a petition. Patterson was a Black communist lawyer who ran the Civil Rights Congress, and the petition was called We Charge Genocide. It applied Lemkin’s three-year-old category directly to the treatment of Black Americans across two hundred and fifty pages of lynchings, killings, and mortality statistics. Paul Robeson, the singer and activist, delivered a copy to a UN official in New York the same day. W. E. B. Du Bois, then in his early eighties and the most eminent Black intellectual in America, had been scheduled to travel with Patterson and was prevented from leaving the country; four years earlier he had edited an NAACP petition, An Appeal to the World, asking the UN to treat American racial discrimination as a matter of international concern.
Lemkin objected. He told reporters the petition was a Soviet maneuver, that his concept was being abused, that the destruction of a people was not the same thing as its oppression.
But Lemkin had spent fifteen years insisting that genocide was a generalized phenomenon, that the lesson of the Holocaust was not about Jews only, that a universal law was needed because a particular one would protect nobody. Having won that argument, in principle, he could not then complain that his own ideas were finding application beyond his own intent.
Meanwhile, in French, the substantive philosophical claim that would undergird Third Worldism for decades, was being assembled.
Aimé Césaire, a Martinican poet and deputy who had helped invent négritude (the movement affirming Black cultural particularity against French assimilation), published Discours sur le colonialisme in 1950. It contains the sentence around which the next seventy years organize themselves. What the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for, Césaire wrote, is the crime against the white man, the application to Europe of colonial procedures that had until then been reserved for Africans, Arabs, and the coolies of India. Hitlerism before Hitler. The camps as a technology repatriated.
A year later Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt, a German Jewish refugee who had reached New York in 1941 devoted the middle third of the book to imperialism. Race-thinking joined to bureaucracy, administration by decree, populations governed as objects rather than citizens: these elements were assembled first in Africa and imported afterward.
Then the psychology. Jean-Paul Sartre had published Réflexions sur la question juive in 1946, whose central claim is that the anti-Semite makes the Jew, that a persecuted identity is constituted by the gaze of the persecutor rather than by any content of its own. The argument holds for a certain kind of secular Jew. It erases the possibility of defining Jewishness positively, from the inside. Jewishness is reduced to ethnicity.
In 1952 Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist trained in Lyon, transposed Sartre’s argument onto race in Peau noire, masques blancs. He kept the structure and marked the difference: the Jew can sometimes pass unseen, while the Black man is fixed from outside, overdetermined, in Fanon’s word epidermalized. He also recorded the instruction he had received from a teacher, that when you hear a man attacking Jews you should listen carefully, because he is talking about you. Antisemitism enters the canon as a cipher for racism, emptied of its content.
Albert Memmi was a Tunisian Jew, colonized as a Tunisian and excluded as a Jew, who published Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur in 1957 with a preface by Sartre. It is a founding text of the field and it is still assigned. Memmi then wrote Portrait d’un Juif in 1962 and Juifs et Arabes in 1974, and in them he reached a conclusion the field could not metabolize: that Zionism was the national liberation movement of a colonized people, and that the Jews of the Arab world had been, in the relevant sense, colonized subjects. The discipline kept the 1957 book and dropped the man.
Which brings us to the issue of a journal that appeared in Paris in the last days of May 1967, a week before the Six-Day War.
Les Temps modernes, edited by Sartre and Claude Lanzmann, devoted a double number to the Arab-Israeli conflict, with contributions from both sides arranged for balance. The essay that opened it ran to seventy pages and was titled “Israël, fait colonial?” Its author was Maxime Rodinson, a French orientalist and Ge’ez scholar, a communist for two decades until his expulsion in 1958, whose parents had been deported from Paris and murdered at Auschwitz in 1943. Rodinson answered his own question in the affirmative. Zionism, for all its peculiarities, belonged to the general pattern of European settlement colonialism. That essay, translated into Arabic and later published in English as a book, is the bedrock of the settler-colonial reading of Israel. Everything the field now says on the subject descends from it.
Rodinson refused the conclusions. He argued in the same body of work that Israel should be neither delegitimized nor dismantled, that what was required was reconciliation and rights for Palestinians. When the 1967 essay was reissued as a volume he complained that it had been read in the Arab world with blinders on, by readers pleased to have their accusations confirmed by a “Jew.”
A pattern emerges. The lawyer who coined genocide watched his category applied to the United States within three years and was told, correctly, that he had built it for exactly that use. The founder of colonial-subject theory concluded that Zionism was national liberation and was quietly excised. The author of the settler-colonial thesis spent the rest of his life explaining that his thesis did not license the conclusion his readers drew from it.
The field’s arrival at anti-Zionism can be dated.
In 1961 Sartre had written the preface to Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, the most notorious defense of anti-colonial violence in the canon. In late May 1967 he signed a manifesto of French intellectuals supporting Israel’s security and sovereignty. In June, Josie Fanon, Frantz’s widow, sent an urgent telegram from Algiers to the Paris office of François Maspero, her husband’s publisher, instructing him to omit Sartre’s preface from all future editions on the grounds of the author’s pro-Zionist position. Maspero complied with the letter of it and printed the preface as a poster, folded and slipped into the book as a supplement. French editions have appeared without it ever since. English editions kept it, which is why most American readers have never heard of the excommunication.
Twenty-two years from Réflexions sur la question juive to the removal, and the offense was Israel.
What followed was consolidation. Third Worldism was a political movement before it was anything academic: Bandung in 1955, the Tricontinental in Havana in 1966, the Non-Aligned summit in Algiers in 1973. It had governments, guerrilla armies, and an economics called dependency theory, whose central proposition was that Northern development and Southern underdevelopment were the same process observed from two ends.
On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, determining that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. It passed seventy-two to thirty-five with thirty-two abstentions, carried by the Soviet, Arab, and Non-Aligned blocs. Chaim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador and a former head of military intelligence, tore the text in half at the podium and observed that the vote had fallen on the thirty-seventh anniversary of Kristallnacht. The resolution was revoked in 1991 and reanimated at the Durban conference in 2001.
This is the point at which the two answers of 1948 formally collided.
Third Worldism lost its political battles, but found a haven in academia. By the late 1970s the national liberation states had produced, with few exceptions, one-party rule, expropriation, and stagnation. Dependency theory could not explain East Asia and was abandoned as economics. The Soviet sponsor was exhausted.
It was not finished as sentiment. Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978 and “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” in 1979, and the field that grew from them exchanged Lenin and Amílcar Cabral for Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Ranajit Guha, an Indian historian trained in the communist historiography of Bengal, launched Subaltern Studies in 1982. Gayatri Spivak, a comparatist at Columbia, and Homi Bhabha, a literary theorist then at Sussex, supplied the theoretical apparatus.
What Third Worldism retained from Marxism is one structural move, made explicit by Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man in 1964. Marcuse was a Berlin-born Jewish philosopher of the Frankfurt School who had fled Germany in 1933 and spent the war years at the Office of Strategic Services analyzing Nazi propaganda. His move: when the Western working class declines to be revolutionary, the revolutionary role transfers to the outcasts and outsiders, to racial minorities and the colonized. Class was replaced by race and geography, but the eschatology stayed.
Said called Orientalism and anti-Semitism secret sharers, two branches of a single discourse on the Semite. His method came from Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, German Jewish philologists who wrote in Istanbul exile, and he made exile itself into a scholarly virtue on their model. The Jew is virtuous in this scheme, and only as a figure of speech. Hence Said’s line that today the Palestinians are the Jews. The Jew, for Said, just as for Sartre, has no positive content - he is simply a social position.
“Intersectionality,” named by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, a leading founder of Critical Race Theory, supplied the warrant for treating all the struggles as one struggle.
Critical race theory and Third Worldism arrived at similar places via different roads. CRT emerged out of critical legal studies, which is American legal realism with some continental seasoning. Its founding text is Derrick Bell’s 1980 article in the Harvard Law Review on the interest-convergence dilemma, which argued that Brown v. Board was decided when it was because desegregation served the Cold War interests of white elites, and that racial progress occurs only when it coincides with white advantage. Bell had litigated school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He was reporting a practitioner’s disillusionment. The first workshop under the name was held in Madison in 1989. The ancestors named in the standard primers are Gramsci, Derrida, Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, Black Power, and the Chicano movement.
What the two streams shared was a structure and an adversary. Both hold that the liberal order’s professed universalism is the disguise of a particular domination. Both hold that the crime is constitutive of the West rather than incidental to it. Both hold that neutrality is complicity. Given those commitments, convergence was available whenever an event made it useful, and in the 1990s and 2000s it happened. By the 2010s the merger was complete enough that a domestic American racial vocabulary and a Middle Eastern territorial conflict could be described in the same sentence without anyone feeling that a translation had occurred.
The American racial schema sorts populations into white and non-white and assigns moral position accordingly. Jews were sorted into whiteness.
Ironically, the instruments that did the sorting were built, in significant part, by Jews studying their own destruction.
The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950, was the work of Theodor Adorno and three Berkeley psychologists, funded by the American Jewish Committee as part of a five-volume series called Studies in Prejudice, commissioned in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah to understand what produces men capable of it. Its innovation was to treat prejudice as a structural property of persons formed by family and social order rather than as a false belief correctable by evidence. Nearly everything in the contemporary apparatus of implicit bias descends from that book. The UNESCO statements on race of 1950 and 1951, which made the social construction of race something like international doctrine, were drafted explicitly against Nazi race science by a committee that included the anthropologists Ashley Montagu and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
A framework built substantially by Jewish refugees, funded by a Jewish defense organization, and modeled formally on the analysis of anti-Semitism matured into a schema that places Jews on the beneficiary side of its central binary and then supplies the vocabulary in which Jewish national existence is described as a colonial crime.
The vocabulary is now the operating language of American institutions.
It arrived there through the parts of the university that touch every student and every administrator. Schools of education train the people who write curricula. Deans of students, residence life staff, and the whole apparatus of campus climate are drawn disproportionately from the fields where settler colonialism, indigeneity, coloniality, racialization, and epistemic violence function as sacraments. American universities added administrators at roughly four times the rate they added faculty between the mid-1970s and the mid-2010s, and the moral vocabulary of the humanities migrated into that layer, where it hardened into procedure. A theory that began as a way of reading novels ended as a set of forms to fill out.
From there it went into human rights reporting, into the grant language of the nonprofit sector, into K-12 curricular frameworks, and then, compressed to the length of a caption, onto TikTok.
The vocabulary is moral before it is analytic. It sorts before it explains. Once a conflict has been described as colonial, the parties have been assigned and the remaining work is elaboration.
Three things have to be kept apart here, and the genealogy above does not by itself join them. What the vocabulary descends from is one question. What its founders believed is a second, and the founders turn out to be poor witnesses for the prosecution, since Lemkin, Memmi, and Rodinson each refused the use their categories were put to. What its current users believe is a third, and almost none of them have read Discours sur le colonialisme. A student who calls Israel a settler-colonial state has not thereby endorsed Césaire’s theory of Auschwitz, any more than a person who says genocide has endorsed Lemkin’s.
Third Worldism, however, cannot explain the content of Nazi anti-Semitism, in which the Jew figures as an occult world-conspirator, financier and Bolshevik at once, a metaphysical adversary rather than an obstacle to settlement. Colonial violence is instrumental. It is for land, labor, and resources, and it stops when it has them, which is why settler regimes negotiate, assimilate, and eventually issue apologies. Between the middle of May and early July 1944, with the Red Army approaching the Carpathians and the German rail network collapsing under the demands of a two-front retreat, roughly four hundred and thirty-seven thousand Jews were deported from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz, on trains the Wehrmacht urgently needed for other cargo. There was nothing to acquire. Hungary had already been occupied. The deportations cost the war effort and were carried out anyway, at speed, as the front closed.
Whatever that was, no colonial administration has ever done it.
Lemkin died in New York of a heart attack, a pauper, with the manuscript of an autobiography he had titled Totally Unofficial nearly finished on his desk. He is buried at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, under a stone that reads: Dr. Raphael Lemkin, 1900-1959, the Father of the Genocide Convention.