Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: This article sets out to discuss the emergence of (anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of governance, and particularly as a field of racial governance. Romeyn’s interest is not so much in the ‘facts’ of antisemitism or ‘new’ antisemitism, but in the ways in which it functions as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors—global governance actors, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, experts and scholars, and politicians—set out to define, invent measuring tools and technologies, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes, and develop ‘interventions’ to address and redress (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Embedded in the new antisemitism as a field of governance are the assumptions that, ideologically, it is imbricated in the universalist anti-racism of the liberal left, and that, culturally, it emanates to a significant extent from within ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes peculiar to populations originating from Northern Africa, the Maghreb or, more specifically, from majority Islamic countries. With respect to the latter groups, global governance actors concerned with the fight against the ‘new antisemitism’ instate a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. This regime erects an interior frontier around culture/religion that effectively externalizes and racializes antisemitism.
Abstract: In this contribution, Topolski argues that the erasure and denial of Europe’s race–religion constellation can help us understand how it has been possible to resurrect the divisive, exclusionary and problematic myth of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition in Europe. While this term can be, and has been, used in diverse and contradictory ways in the past few decades, Topolski is most interested in how it masks Islamophobia. To do this, she turns to Europe’s denied race–religion constellation. She contends that we cannot understand European racism, past or present, without making the race–religion constellation visible, and that its invisibility today is not accidental. Next, Topolski wants to show how the current resurrection of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ serves to mask and conceal the race–religion constellation. The focus is thus on the exclusion of religions that have not assimilated to the accepted secularized norms of white Christianity, particularly its Aryan/Protestant form, and how this exclusion is connected to the race–religion constellation. In the final part, Topolski explains how the latter might serve the collapsing European project, as well as struggling nation-states, as a scapegoat mechanism to blame Europe’s Others for problems Europe has itself created. This leads to their further exclusion and a lack of tolerance in terms of practice and rituals (which might be connected). For these reasons, Topolski argues we need to reject the use of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ and make visible the hidden race–religion constellation.
Abstract: In this article, Jansen attempts to demonstrate that addressing the religious practices of Jews and Muslims from the perspective of a religio-secular framework in today’s European context underestimates the complexity of semiotic relations between Muslims, Jews and other Europeans. She discusses this complexity in terms of ‘intercultural semiotics’ between the three groups. In particular, she focuses on what she calls ‘mirroring relations’, drawing on an expression from Yirmiyahu Yovel about a ‘crooked, passion-laden mirror’ characterizing the ways in which modern Europeans imagined their Jewish neighbours in early twentieth-century Europe. In order to further explain this, Jansen analyses a passage from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which concerns a group of people in late nineteenth-century France, following the Dreyfus Affair, who are perceived by the narrator as Jewish. Thereafter, drawing on Gil Hochberg’s notion of the ‘re-membering’ of the Semite, Jansen analyses semiotic mirroring in the work Projet Deburkanisation (2017) by the Belgian author Rachida Lamrabet, which she reads as a contemporary meta-reflection, involving Muslims, on the mirroring relations between Jews and other Europeans first discussed via her reading of Proust.
Abstract: The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union in recent years have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit the public racist, xenophobic and ultra-nationalist urges of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hingeS on disassociating ethno-religious hatred, which Islamophobia is, from its most stigmatized example in Europe: antisemitism. Nowhere has this process been clearer than in Hungary, infamous for ‘solving’ the migration crisis by erecting a wire fence along its borders. Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have stolen the racist thunder of the far-right Jobbik party, but without the latter’s once open antisemitism. Jobbik has responded by also seemingly renouncing antisemitism, ignoring the protests of its more die-hard neo-Nazi supporters. Kalmar’s article focuses on the government’s use of a conspiracy theory about the Jewish financier George Soros as an example of exploiting antisemitism while claiming to oppose it. It suggests that the process of rejecting antisemitism, if disingenuously, in order to legitimize Islamophobic racism in Hungary is a useful model for examining similar processes in much of the Euro-Atlantic world.
Abstract: In the improvised Paris memorials to the murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, Jewishness was largely occluded, Christianity was naturalized (and denigrated in so far as it overlapped with ‘religion’) and Islam functioned as the icon of acute religious sensitivity and zealotry: the religion that cannot tolerate blasphemy, specifically the Muhammad cartoons, for which the martyrs of free speech were killed. In this study Sherwood looks at the Paris memorials (blasphemy ACH = after Charlie Hebdo) alongside two far less well-known cases of blasphemous cartoons from the period that I term BSV (=before The Satanic Verses). The latter include Bible cartoons from the 1880s, for which the freethinker George Foote was prosecuted for blasphemy, and the (as far as I know) first accidentally blasphemous Muhammad cartoon in Europe from 1925. In both cases, the spectral figures of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Muslim’ are differently tangential, and are used to divert controversy away from the Christian. The deeper history of blasphemy controversies BSV helps us to articulate a darker history of the ‘secular’, secular freedoms and religion/race. Islam and Judaism continue to suffer from the old symbolic disabilities, and the disabilities of minority, whereas a certain deference to Christianity, and an ongoing use of Christian structures, is assumed.
Abstract: In this paper, Vollebergh investigates the commitment to establishing intercultural encounters by so-called ‘active’ white Flemish residents in Antwerp, and their perpetual disappointment with the responses of their neighbours of orthodox Jewish and Moroccan backgrounds. Instead of viewing these relationships either as a product of culturalist social cohesion policies, or as a vernacular ethical achievement that escapes culturalist politics, she argues that we should understand them through the figure of the Neighbour. Combining the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, she suggests that the neighbourly relation is a paradox in which the Neighbour as a nearby Other induces both an ethical desire for total openness in the engagement with this Other, as well as the uncanny sense that his/her Otherness haunts and makes impossible such an engagement. When viewed in this way, vernacular intercultural relationships, and the fantasies and frustrations surrounding them, emerge as the site where residents of multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in postcolonial Europe engage and struggle with existential and ethical questions of human interconnection and, especially, the effects of the culturalist inflection that these questions have gained.
Abstract: Judaken discusses the various strands that constitute the so-called ‘new antisemitism’. He argues that this is not the first time a new crisis of antisemitism has been heralded. Indeed, in the wake of every major struggle in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six Day War, prominent scholars and advocates have sounded the alarm about a crisis resulting from the rise of what they designated a ‘new antisemitism’. Moreover, what writers point to as the vectors of the new antisemitism—Holocaust denial, the antisemitism of the extreme left, antisemitism in the Islamic world, anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even anti-racism as antisemitism—all have a fairly long history. What has changed are the role of information technologies and the geo-global context in which they function. These technologies have both facilitated the global dissemination of antisemitism as well as furnishing new means of combatting it. At bottom, this electronic warfare is both a symptom and a cause of the global forces at work in antisemitism today. After delineating the constellation of factors in the rise of global antisemitism post-September 2000, Judaken then draws on the work of Léon Poliakov, Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School, among others, to assess what Pierre-André Taguieff most aptly calls the ‘new Judaeophobia’.
Author(s): Erb, Rainer; Graml, Hermann; Kovács, András; Mihok, Brigitte; Pelinka, Anton; Reiterer, Albert F.; Schmidt-Hartmann, Eva; Sekelj, Laslo; Stern, Frank; Varga, Lazlo; Bergmann, Werner
Author(s): Bauer, Yehuda; Benz, Wolfgang; Cała, Alina; Jelinek, Yeshayahu A.; Krzeminski, Ireneusz; Lerman, Antony; Löwe, Heinz-Dietrich; Pulzer, Peter; Vago, Raphael; Yukhneva, Natalia; Karady, Viktor
Author(s): Beloff (Lord); Benz, Wolfgang; Billig, Michael; Cesarani, David; Cohn-Sherbok, Dan; Cruise O'Brien, Conor; Elazar, Daniel J.; Dinerstein, Leonard; Fein, Helen; Gebert, Konstanty; Glazer, Nathan; Gould, Julius; Jakobovitz, Immanuel (Lord); Kushner, Tony; Leibler, Isi; Lerman, Antony; Marrus, Michael R.; Mitten, Richard; Pelinka, Anton; Pouakov, Leon; Raab, Earl; Rotensreich, Nathan; Roth, Stephen J.; Schnapper, Dominique; Strauss, Herbert A.; Wisse, Ruth R.; Wistrich, Robert; Wodak, Ruth
Abstract: We recently addressed the following statement and questions on the strength and nature of anti-Semitism in the 1990s to a number of Jews and non-Jews throughout the world:
Talk of a ‘revival’ or ‘resurgence’ of anti-Semitism is now commonplace. This seems to be the result of developments in the former USSR and in Eastern and Central Europe since 1989, but also of increasing reports of anti-Semitic incidents taking place throughout Western Europe and similar problems emerging in North America, South America, Australia and South Africa.
1) How serious is the recent ‘resurgence’ of anti-Semitism? Is this in any sense a global phenomenon? Is talk of a ‘revival of antisemitism’ justified?
2) What are in your view the most important contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism? Should anti-Semitism still mainly be seen as a phenomenon of extreme right- and left-wing politics and ideology, or is contemporary anti-Semitism more seriously present in popular culture, within political and social élites, in the school playground?
3) What role, if any, do you think the conflict between Israel and the Arab world is playing in fostering anti-Jewish sentiment? How important is the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism in this context? To what extent is anti-Semitism today taking the guise of anti-Zionism?
4) Finally, if there is indeed an upsurge in antiswemitism, what do you think are its major causes? What part is nationalism, particularly in the Commonwealth of Independent States and in Eastern and Central Europe, playing in causing or exacerbating contemporary anti-Semitism? Do you agree that there was until recently a post-Holocaust taboo on anti-Semitism that has now been lifted?
Abstract: The recent discourse on ‘new antisemitism’ and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sometime gives the impression that Europe is fundamentally and irredeemably antisemitic. Klug maintains that, while there is a persistent vein of antisemitism in the culture, and while there is evidence of an increase in anti-Jewish attacks since 2000, this perception of Europe is exaggerated. He argues that it is part of a mindset that tends to overstate hostility towards Israel and Jews, or to assume that this hostility is antisemitic, or both. Often this goes along with a tendency to connect antisemitism, via anti-Zionism, with anti-Americanism. Klug believes that notion of a mindset, Klug turns to the question of definition, examining the view that antisemitism is indefinitely mutable. Invoking recent work on the subject, he suggests that at the core of antisemitism is the stock figure of the ‘Jew’. This gives us a criterion with which to judge whether or not a given text—including an attack on Israel or Zionism—is antisemitic. On the basis of the analysis so far, Klug critiques the view that hostility to Israel in general is a new twist on an old antisemitic theme. In this connection, he discussed a 2003 Eurobarometer opinion poll in which 59 per cent of respondents said that Israel is a ‘threat to peace in the world’. Some see this as proof that Europe is antisemitic; Klug rejects this interpretation and traces it back to the mindset he has describing. He argues that people in the grip of this mindset tend to take a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This can lead to ‘antisemitism in reverse’: projecting the figure of the antisemite on to someone who does not fit the bill. Klug concludes that the prospects for the European debate on antisemitism are poor unless it can be disentangled from partisan Middle East politics.
Abstract: Beller's review article takes as its starting point the essays published in a recent collection exploring the question of a ‘new antisemitism’. He claims that this debate has generated more heat than light. Warnings about the rise of a new antisemitism in Europe, especially on the left, are greatly exaggerated, largely unjustified and approach a form of psychological ‘projection’. Anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism. Zionism is an ethnonationalist ideology and, as such, contradicts the universalist logic of the socialist and liberal left; the enthusiastic support for Israel by European socialist parties from 1948 until the 1970s was anomalous. Nevertheless, the recent critical approach taken by the liberal European media to Israeli policy is not usually anti-Zionist, but rather holding Israel to its own high moral standards. If there is conflation between anti-Zionist and antisemitic attitudes this reflects the similarly conflating Zionist belief that Israel is the expression of the Jewish people's right to national self-determination. Some manifestations of Arab/Muslim anti-Zionism do indeed exhibit the worst forms of antisemitism. However, there are reasons for this hostility. Heated assertions decrying the denial of the right of Israel to exist are distractions from the very problematic issues raised by Arab grievances. A deeper question here involves the conflict between the Muslim world and two forms of western modernity: neo-conservative, uniform, nationally based rationalism; and the more ‘postmodern’, critical and pluralist tradition of European (and American) left/liberal intellectuals. Ironically, current American and Israeli policy now represents the former ‘modernity’, while the latter, critical tradition derives to a great extent from the experience of the Jewish diaspora. The diasporic Jewish tradition is the model to which Israel and its supporters should look to secure Israel's peaceful, sustainable future.
