Mike Marqusee was an acclaimed American-British Jewish writer, political activist, journalist, and cultural critic. Known for his deeply influential sociological analyses of sports and popular culture, he served as an editor for Labour Briefing and was a cornerstone organizer for the Stop the War Coalition in the UK. A fierce internationalist and anti-racist, Marqusee was a founding signatory of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), dedicating his intellectual life to decoupling Jewish identity from state chauvinism.
Born in New York in 1953 into a secular Jewish family with deep trade unionist roots, Marqusee’s worldview was shaped by the American Civil Rights Movement and anti-war mobilization. In 1971, in protest against the Vietnam War, he permanently relocated to London, embedding himself within the British socialist movement and the radical wing of the Labour Party.
An ardent sports fan, Marqusee won considerable renown for his work on cricket. War Minus the Shooting, his book on the 1996 Cricket World Cup, has been lauded as a “riveting, revelatory and largely run-free account”. Rob Steen wrote that, before it was published, “observations of subcontinental cricket emanating from Britain, and just about every other corner of the so-called old world, tended to be clichéd, wrongheaded, derisive, patronising or just plain racist. Small wonder, then, that it took a London-based American with a rucksack, a notebook and a CLR Jamesian yen for Marxism to supply an overdue corrective.” Duncan Campbell of The Guardian wrote: “One of the best books ever written on cricket, Anyone But England, is by an American writer, Mike Marqusee.”
Marqusee was a vital founding signatory of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) in 2007. He deployed his extensive experience in leftist publishing to formulate the linguistic and conceptual weapons used by the organization to challenge the British Zionist establishment, arguing that tying the global Jewish diaspora to the military actions of a nation-state was a profound democratic failure.
Regarding the fact that some politicians and institutions are biased towards Israel, he commented on it in his article, “If not now, when?” On BDS and ‘singling out’ Israel: There’s an implication in these arguments that Israel is really “not that bad” and somehow deserves a break from criticism. But just how “bad” does a regime have to get before it’s subject to penalties? The facts on the ground day-by-day show without doubt that Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians IS one of the world’s worst, most brutal, most racist, most oppressive regimes.