Abstract: Antisemitism has had a long and complex history in Russian intellectual life and has revived in the post-Communist era. In their concept of the identity of the Jewish people, many academics and other thinkers in Russia continue to cast Jews in a negative or ambivalent role. An inherent rivalry exists between "Russia" and "the Jews" because Russians have often viewed themselves-whether through the lens of atheistic communism or that of the most conservative elements of the Orthodox Church-as a chosen people whose destiny is to lead the way to world salvation.
In this book, Vadim Rossman presents the foundations and present influence of intellectual antisemitism in Russia. He examines the antisemitic roots of some major trends in Russian intellectual thought that emerged in earlier decades of the twentieth century and are still significant in the post-Communist era: neo-Eurasianism, Eurasian historiography, National Bolshevism, neo-Slavophilism, National Orthodoxy, and various forms of racism. Such extreme right-wing ideology continues to appeal to a certain segment of the Russian population and seems unlikely to disappear soon. Rossman confronts and challenges a range of disturbing, sometimes contradictory, but often quite sophisticated antisemitic ideas posed by Russian sociologists, historians, philosophers, theologians, political analysts, anthropologists, and literary critics.
Abstract: While Holocaust education has been mandatory in Romanian schools for over a decade, educators do not necessarily teach about it. Distortion and obfuscation of Romanian Holocaust crimes during the communist and transition periods means that teachers, like the majority of Romanians, know little about their country’s perpetration of genocides. From 1941 to 1944, the Romanian regime transported part of its Jewish and Romani populations to death camps in Transnistria, where over 200,000 Jews and over 10,000 Roma were killed. Under communism, blame for genocides was placed solely on Nazi Germany, thereby absolving Romanian perpetrators. Post-communism, the official narrative has slowly come under scrutiny, allowing for a restructuring of World War II history to incorporate the deportations and deaths of the country’s Jews and Roma. Ignorance about the Holocaust and prejudice about the minorities affected are at the root of non-compliance in teaching. This is especially the case for the Roma, who are the largest minority in Romania and face continued marginalization and discrimination. In this paper, I focus on cognitive barriers that many history and civics teachers have regarding teaching about the victimization of the Roma minority. These barriers are intrinsically tied to acceptance of new narratives of the Holocaust and reconfigurations of ethnic identities in post-socialist Romania where pressures from the European Union and the USA, among others, have pushed for critical examination of past atrocities in order to strengthen democratic processes.
Abstract: Racism and racial prejudice, considered a relic of obsolete and outdated social systems, is emerging in the depths of ultra-modern Western societies with different characteristics from the past but with a surprising and worrying virulence. These waves of prejudice and racism testify to the many fears that fill the horizons of advanced societies, undermining not only their internal reliability, but also just their democratic settings. This paper presents a critical review of Islamophobia as a racial prejudice, showing that two main definitions are at work: Islamophobia as xeno-racism or linked to the so-called clash of civilizations. Then, it presents the outcomes coming from a Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) survey led among a representative sample of the Italian population (n = 1,523) on Antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes. The cogency and structure of anti-Muslim public discourse and connected mass attitudes, revealed by our investigation, confirm the emergency of these two relevant dimensions of Islamophobia, which claim for a more accurate definition of Islamophobia. Moreover, the distribution of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic attitudes illustrate an interesting overlapping of Islamophobia and Antisemitism which claims that racism is multi-targeted and that there is not so much options between Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Finally, we use three main variables—anomie, ethnocentrism, and authoritarianism—as predictors of Islamophobia and Antisemitism. We tested the strength of these three predictors with the aid of path technique based on multiple regression analysis, which helps to determine the direct and indirect impacts of certain independent variables on dependent variables in a hypothetical causal system.
Abstract: Two years after the Tunisian people overthrew an entrenched dictatorship, the country seems to be definitively turning a new page in its history. Its diminutive Jewish community continues to fade away, a vestige from another time now remembered only through writing. This article analyses how four francophone Jewish writers of Tunisian origins, Catherine Dana, Colette Fellous, Corine Scemama-Ammar, and Brigitte Smadja ‘write/return’ to Tunisia in the 1990s and 2000s. Given their own interrupted experience in Tunisia, they end up remembering through and on behalf of others, including elders, grandmothers and mothers, and siblings. Along with (re)visiting the houses and graves of their elders during the last decades of Ben Ali's rule, they negotiate a role for themselves in the complex diasporic identity that emerged after Tunisian Jewry's post-independence migrations. Nevertheless, I argue that the writing of return provides no simple resolution for the rupture experienced by the last generation of Jewish women born in Tunisia before the great exile in the 1960s. Rather physical return to contemporary Tunisia and its inscription in French transforms these women into inadvertent mediators between the past and present, homeland and diaspora, oral history and writing.
Abstract: Michael Whine presents an overview of the participation of European Muslim organisations in Holocaust commemorations. The Holocaust is viewed by many Muslims, particularly Arabs, as a European tragedy which led to negative implications and suffering in the Arab world through the creation of the State of Israel. The Holocaust is therefore often related to the Nakba. Whine’s analysis focuses on Muslims’ participation in Holocaust commemoration on the Holocaust Memorial Day, local initiatives in schools and Jewish-Muslim dialogue and the reaction of Muslim students to Holocaust education in school. Whine acknowledges that Muslims played only a minor part as victims or perpetrators during the Holocaust, but he argues that the rejection of Holocaust commemoration as a form of Zionist propaganda adopts Islamist and Arab nationalist antisemitism. Whine presents a case study of the Muslim Council of Britain which illustrates this kind of reaction to the Holocaust Memorial Day. However, he discusses other smaller organisations, individual Muslims and approaches to education in the UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands in order to provide examples of a more constructive approach. Whine argues that Holocaust commemoration has become a defining aspect of European history and identity.
Abstract: In the past few decades, Poland has seen a growing number of attempts to reclaim its Jewish past through traditional forms such as historiographic revision, heritage preservation, and monument building. But a unique new mode of artistic, performative, often participatory “memory work” has been emerging alongside these conventional forms, growing in its prevalence and increasingly catching the public eye. This new genre of memorial intervention is characterized by its fast-moving, youthful, innovative forms and nontraditional venues and its socially appealing, dialogic, and digitally networked character as opposed to a prior generation of top-down, slow moving, ethnically segregated, mono-vocal styles. It also responds to the harsh historical realities brought to light by scholars of the Jewish-Polish past with a mandate for healing. This article maps the landscape of this new genre of commemoration projects, identifying their core features and investigating their anatomy via three case studies: Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You Jew!; Public Movement’s Spring in Warsaw; and Yael Bartana’s Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland. Analyzing their temporalities, scopes, modalities and ambiences, as well as the new visions for mutual identification and affiliation that they offer Poles and Jews, we approach these performances not as representations, but rather as embodied experiences that stage and invite participation in “repertoires” of cultural memory. Different from simple reenactments, this new approach may be thought of as a subjunctive politics of history—a “what if” proposition that plays with reimagining and recombining a range of Jewish and Polish memories, present-day realities, and future aspirations.
Topics: Antisemitism: Muslim, Anti-Zionism, Holocaust: Education, Holocaust: Legacies, Remembering and Attitudes Towards, Main Topic: Holocaust Legacies and Memorial, Jewish Relations With Non-Jews: Jewish - Muslim Relations, Antisemitism: Discourse and Tropes, Interviews, Schools: Non-Jewish, Schools: Seconday / High Schools
Abstract: In den meisten islamischen Ländern fanden - anders als in Europa - keine gezielten Ermordungen von Jüdinnen und Juden oder Deportationen in Todeslager statt. Dieser Band geht der Frage nach, wie Musliminnen und Muslime als scheinbar "Unbeteiligte" zum Holocaust stehen. Behandelt werden unter anderem die Teilnahme von Muslimen am Holocaustgedenken, die Wahrnehmung der Schoah im arabischen und türkischen Raum sowie unter muslimischen Jugendlichen und die wachsende Verwendung antisemitischer Parolen.
Die Einstellungen von Muslimen zum Holocaust reichen von Mitgefühl und Anteilnahme über Gleichgültigkeit und die Frage "Was hat das mit uns zu tun?" bis zu Verharmlosung oder List es, so das Fazit, in der schulischen und außerschulischen Bildung umfassend über die Geschichte aufzuklären und dabei Perspektiven von Migrantinnen und Migranten stärker zu berücksichtigen.
Mit Beiträgen von Joëlle Allouche-Benayoun, Rifat Bali, Georges Bensoussan, Mehmet Can, Monique Eckmann, Remco Ensel, Evelien Gans, Karoline Georg, Ruth Hatlapa, Günther Jikeli, Philip Spencer, Kim Robin Stoller, Annemarike Stremmelaar, Sara Valentina di Palma, Esther Webman, Juliane Wetzel und Michael Whine
