‘Who remembers all the German victims?’ Resistance to contemporary and historical Jewish victimhood in the AfD’s Facebook community
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Abstract
Burchett's article sheds light on the community of Facebook users who interact with posts by the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and how they respond to the AfD’s contradictory narratives regarding Jews and antisemitism. The AfD uses its online space to construct an everyday reality of victimhood for its political community, which conditionally includes Jews. Jewish victimhood and inclusion are emphasized by the AfD when they fit its political aims, such as focusing on ‘Muslim-Arab’ antisemitism to underline an anti-immigration stance, but are minimized when Jewish victimhood is perceived to threaten non-Jewish German victimhood, as it is seen to do in the context of Holocaust remembrance. Burchett compares comment threads from these two thematic streams and finds that, regardless of the difference in victimhood framing by the AfD, users in both streams react with similar narratives of defensive, competitive and rejective victimhood, as well as a reluctance to include Jews in their in-group of victims, even when the AfD explicitly includes them. Her paper argues that so-called ‘secondary’ antisemitism, Jewish exclusion as a result of resistance to Holocaust guilt, also has an effect on contemporary Jewish victimhood.
Topics
Antisemitism: Right-Wing Antisemitism: Online Antisemitism: Secondary Antisemitism Main Topic: Antisemitism Social Media Holocaust Commemoration Politics: Political Parties
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Copyright Info
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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Volume/Issue
39(4-5)
Page Number / Article Number
293-393
DOI
Bibliographic Information
‘Who remembers all the German victims?’ Resistance to contemporary and historical Jewish victimhood in the AfD’s Facebook community. 2025: 293-393. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/0031322X.2025.2597651
