Abstract: Religious spaces in the London borough of Barnet provide a lens through which to understand Muslim–Jewish encounters. This case study, pre-dating the 2023 escalation in the Israel–Gaza conflict, examines community relations in the context of the hegemonic discourses that play into racialisations, power dynamics and cultural connectedness through minority religious and ethnic identities in superdiverse urban centres. It focuses on a mosque’s application for planning permission in an area with a sizable Jewish population. Contestations and cooperation developed between the mosque and local Jewish communities, with some offering support while others mobilised, eventually successfully, to prevent planning permission being granted. Power differentials around race, class, religious affiliation and access to political power structures emerge in these instances, in which the impacts of racialisations, societal anxiety and communal hierarchy are sometimes overt and sometimes subtle. These complex and multifaceted events can be productively viewed through the narratives that circulate through local relations, social hierarchies, national discourses and culturally charged communal entanglements. This article draws on mixed methods of interviewing, press and social media analysis, and ethnographic observations to explore religious spaces as a lens to local encounters, in a manner that seeks to avoid direct involvement in an already complex incident.
Abstract: From an intercultural perspective, this article explores majority/minority and between minorities interactions, and revisits Allport’s contact theory, in a socially and ethnically diverse urban area hosting a large proportion of Jews and Muslims. The data comes from a telephone survey of a sample of inhabitants of the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Open and closed questions explore the symbolic social and political boundaries respondents construct between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and their patterns of sociability. Survey experiments with vignettes deal with more sensitive issues (reactions to circulating cartoons at school and police reactions to verbal assault, according to the ethnicity of the victim). The immediate social and ethnic surrounding of each respondent is reconstructed on the basis of census and ethnographic data. The results go against several common beliefs. Religion is not the only dimension of respondents’ identity; it intersects with social class, gender and generation. The relations between Jews and Muslims are not so much conflictual as ambivalent. Being minorities and feeling discriminated against as such brings them together. They both are more religious than the majority population, more traditional on sexual issues and more family-oriented, and most of them consider that Jews and Muslims have a common cultural heritage and should be united against discrimination. Nevertheless, there are friction points (Israeli-Palestinian conflict/the colonial past of France). Politically and socially Muslims are closer to the non-European immigrants, while Jews are closer to the French and the European-born ‘white’ population. Antisemitism is a clear taboo; anti-Jewish cartoons are seen as far more reprehensible than any other. But a majority of the sample, and Muslims a little more than average, see Jews as a ‘group apart’, and believe in the old stereotype about Jews having more influence, being more likely, for instance, to be helped by the police if needed.
Abstract: Commensality – eating together – is often understood by anthropologists and others as fundamental to human sociality, binding groups together and also creating bridges between groups. Consequently, sharing food or making food together has been emphasised in many policies to promote intercultural and interreligious contact. However, a more critical literature has emphasised how consuming the cultural produce of the other may also create opportunities for exploitative rather than meaningfully positive relations (at worst, in bell hooks’ evocative phrase, a way of ‘eating the other’). Eating the culture of the other has become a significant element in forms of gentrification that capitalise on exoticised difference, sometimes leading ultimately to the displacement of minoritised communities. More recently, an alternative approach to the role of food in intercultural encounters has emerged within the ‘conviviality’ and ‘super-diversity’ literatures, focusing on the convivial tools and somatic work of food entrepreneurs. This article, drawing on the author’s fieldwork in London and on fieldwork by colleagues in other European cities, builds on this literature to explore how forms of commensality, and the commercial transactions around them, play a unique role in generating Jewish-Muslim encounters in urban Europe, which are ambivalent, marked by power asymmetries, shadowed by securitisation and geopolitical conflict, but nonetheless fragile resources for hope.
Abstract: This article argues that the Parisian spheres of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music shape distinct Muslim-Jewish encounters for individuals involved in these practices, fostering a coexistence among artists from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds which involves carefully navigating tensions over geopolitical issues. Three key findings emerge from this study. First, respondents of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds shared a common Maghrebi heritage that was reappropriated by engaging in the practices of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music. Second, these artistic encounters were not immune to instances of stigmatization and tensions, particularly relating to geopolitical issues, which reactivated symbolic boundaries between artists of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds. Third, participants employed strategies to avoid conflict, explicitly separating art from politics, and fostered mutual respect for differing perspectives. Nevertheless, some respondents politicized Muslim-Jewish commonalities, notably by reaffirming their shared Maghrebi heritage.
Abstract: This special issue, based around the European Encounters project research carried out before October 2023, explores ambivalence and boundary work in Jewish and Muslim encounters across urban European contexts. Drawing on case studies in Frankfurt, London and Paris, it examines intercultural negotiations and identity constructions among minoritised groups. Contributors analyse diverse sites of encounter, from musical collaborations to more formal interfaith initiatives and everyday commercial spaces. Across these settings, the articles highlight complex layers of commonality and difference shaping boundary dynamics between Muslims and Jews. Analytically, this issue deploys central cultural studies concepts like symbolic boundaries, conviviality and superdiversity to elucidate lived realities. Empirically, grounded examination of understudied intercultural encounters advances cultural studies scholarship. The juxtaposition of the cities enables a relational understanding of how national repertoires of discourse shape boundary negotiations differently across contexts. Furthermore, analysis complicates assumptions of conflict, foregrounding marginalised perspectives on identity and power. Key findings demonstrate the ambivalence underpinning most Muslim-Jewish interactions. Structural inequalities, avoidance and indifference more frequently characterise encounters than outright hostility. Yet significations of difference still dominate, as groups navigate uneasy proximities. This special issue challenges essentialist portrayals of immutable intergroup divisions. Its nuanced analysis underscores the need to understand quotidian encounters relationally, as a multi-level interdependency, grounded in their socio-historical contexts across and within groups. This yields multifaceted insights into minority experiences of othering and belonging in Europe’s superdiverse cities.
Abstract: Introduction: Amid escalating global antisemitism, particularly following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, this study addresses critical gaps in understanding the psychosocial impact of antisemitism on Jewish communities worldwide.
Methods: Focusing on the Jewish community in Germany, we conducted a cross-sectional survey of 420 Jewish individuals (mean age = 40.71 years, SD = 15.90; 57% female). Participants completed measures assessing four distinct forms of perceived and experienced antisemitism: everyday discrimination, microaggressions (subtle antisemitism and collective experiences such as encountering antisemitic comments on social media), vigilance against antisemitism, and perceived prevalence of antisemitism. Psychosocial outcomes—including depression, anxiety, subjective well-being, and social participation—were also measured. Data were analyzed using correlation analyses and multiple linear regressions, and Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) identified distinct groups based on shared perceptions and experiences of antisemitism and levels of Jewish identification.
Results: Results indicate that experiences of antisemitism, particularly everyday discriminatory acts, were significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes and reduced social participation. The LPA revealed three distinct groups, with the high-identity, high-antisemitism group (53% of the sample) reporting significantly higher anxiety levels than those with average identification and more rare experience with antisemitism.
Discussion: These findings underscore the pervasive nature of antisemitism and its detrimental effects on the well-being of Jewish individuals. The study highlights the need for targeted interventions to promote resilience within Jewish communities and calls for broader societal efforts to combat antisemitism.
Abstract: In this article, I focus on Antwerp’s Hasidic male immigrants, who must not only apprentice themselves to a new language (Flemish) and career, but also accustom themselves to an unfamiliar country and governmental bureaucracy. They must learn the local habits and social mores of Antwerp’s Hasidic community. Moreover, they must contend with the afterlife of a classed association – wherein Jewish male workers actively tethered their classed identities and subjectivities to the diamond and to its status as a “luxury” commodity. In the wake of the diamond industry’s decline for the vast majority of Antwerp’s Jewish male workforce, I attend to this space of displacement, in which the diamond industry continues to exert itself, despite its diminished capacity, over these men. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted between 2015-2019 in Antwerp, in cooperation with a Hasidic non-profit focused on the economic revitalization of Antwerp’s Hasidic male workforce, I examine the intersection between class, masculinity, and piety, through an initiative within Antwerp to recreate a new Hasidic man and worker-citizen. In this space of reinvention, Hasidic men must contend with the spectral presence of the diamond industry and its association with Jews, as they seek integration into the local Flemish labor force and legitimacy in the eyes of Antwerp’s Hasidic community.
Abstract: Over half a century after the Holocaust, in Eastern European countries where the Jewish community remained only a small part of the population, products of Jewish culture (or what is perceived as Jewish culture), including music, have become vital components of the popular public domain. In Poland, there are festivals and concerts of Jewish music, more and more records with this music, Jewish museums, and renovated Jewish districts, with Jewish cuisine, and music that are offered to tourists visiting Poland as the main attractions. They attract enthusiastic – and often non-Jewish – crowds. I consider how non-Jews involved in this movement in Poland perceive and implement Jewish culture, why they do it, how much it involves the recovery of Jewish heritage, and how this represents the musical culture of Jews in museums and at events organized for tourists. I also consider the relation of non-Jews as a majority group to Jews as a minority group, as well as the impact of the musical actions of the former on the musical culture of the latter. The article is based on field research and observations I have made during more than twenty years, both among the remaining Jews in Poland and in mixed or non-Jewish communities where music perceived as Jewish is promoted.
Abstract: The article engages with institutionalized German anti-anti-Semitism in recent debates about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To elucidate Germany's raison d’état, current silencing of political dissent and drawing on Stuart Hall's notion of “conjuncture,” the first step is to sketch the dynamics of memory politics after the Holocaust: the silence of the postwar period, the student movement's struggle against bystanders and perpetrators, subsequent debates of representation, memorialization, trauma and finally the provincialization and nascent globalized memory (Conjunctures and the Politics of Memory). Articulating the aporias of current German (memory) politics between history and event, historical antecedents and singularity, particularity and universalism, in a second step the tensions between German raison d'état, anti-anti-Semitism and postcolonial perspectives are addressed that delimit the frameworks of negotiating anti-Semitism in the public sphere (Conjunctures and Aporias). In this sense, the remarks contribute to the critical debate on anti-anti-Semitism.
Abstract: On October 7, 2023, a Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 others. The almost immediate spread of news and images of the attack produced heavy emotional reactions in public opinion in many countries. The article analyzes data from a representative survey on the attitudes toward Jews and Muslims of Italian undergraduates conducted between late September and late October 2023, encompassing both those dramatic events and the war that followed. Four main findings emerge. First, Italian students tend to organize attitudes towards Jews around three main dimensions, those toward Muslims around one. Second, attitudes towards the two groups vary according to cultural values of reference, commitment to study, and political orientation. Third, negative attitudes towards Muslims are more prevalent than those toward Jews, but this difference narrows between center-left and left-leaning students and, in some cases, reverses. Finally, the analysis shows that one of the dimensions organizing unfavourable attitudes towards Jews experienced very substantial growth on the days immediately following October 7, that is, the date of the Hamas terrorist attack inside Israeli territory.
Abstract: In this paper, I focus on online and offline practices of community-building within two specific religious communities that remain active despite mass emigration. These communities are based in Derbent, Dagestan, and Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, with members located in Moscow and the North Caucasus. Both communities have formally accepted rabbis from Chabad-Lubavitch, who are likely to promote Chabad-Lubavitch values among community members. I investigate the strategies and methods used by Chabad emissaries in the region to facilitate the process of chabadization. In addition to outreach activities, the visual manifestations of chabadization are significant in this study, as they are presented across multiple online platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and other social forums, chats, and websites. My research combines online analysis with fieldwork conducted in Dagestan, Azerbaijan, and Moscow between 2018 and 2020.
Abstract: Jüdische Flüchtlinge aus der Gemeinschaft Unabhängiger Staaten (GUS) stellen eine stetig wachsende Minorität dar, über deren pflegerische Bedürfnisse in der Fachliteratur wenig bekannt ist. Weitaus besser untersucht sind die pflegerischen Bedürfnisse von Angehörigen des jüdischen Glaubens außerhalb der GUS, insbesondere von Personen aus den USA, Israel und Kanada. Im Rahmen eines von der Robert Bosch Stiftung geförderten Pilotprojekts zu den Versorgungsbedürfnissen jüdischer Flüchtlinge aus der GUS entstand die nachstehende internationale Literaturstudie. Ziel war es, bereits vorliegende Erfahrungen mit der Zielgruppe zu erheben. Dazu wurden unter den Stichworten «Juden», «jüdisch», «Migranten», «jew», «jewish» «migrants» und «nursing» insgesamt 67 Artikel verschiedener Datenbanken analysiert. Die Literaturstudie generierte folgende international bedeutsame Themen: – die psychosoziale Situation von und daraus resultierende Versorgungsaspekte bei zwei Generationen von Holocaust-Überlebenden, ihren Kindern sowie jüdischen MigrantInnen aus der GUS – die unterschiedlichen religiösen Orientierungen, die in die groben Kategorien orthodox, konservativ und Reformjudentum unterteilt werden, von denen jede spezifische Einstellungen beinhaltet, welche die Pflege beeinflussen – pflegerisch relevante ethisch-moralische Aspekte im Judentum – Besonderheiten bei der Pflege gerontologischer PatientInnen und – soziokulturelle Aspekte palliativer Pflege. Als eines der wichtigsten Ergebnisse zeigte sich, dass jüdische Flüchtlinge aus der GUS insbesondere das Merkmal der Verfolgungserfahrung mit Holocaust-Opfern und ihren Nachkommen teilen, woraus sich spezifische Implikationen für die pflegerische Betreuung ergeben.
Abstract: This article adopts a historical perspective to explore Jewish women’s experiences of anti semitism in Sweden. The empirical foundation of the study comprises interviews with approximately thirty women born in the 1950s, 1970s or 1990s, all of whom self identify as Jewish. Employing a dialogical epistemology rooted in intersectionality and shared authority, the study emphasises both the content of the women’s life stories and the ways they interpret and articulate their experiences. A key finding of this study is that the fear of antisemitism is a persistent presence in the lives of most participants. A notable continuity over time is the school, which emerges as a recurring site where Jewish women have experienced a sense of being different. However, there is a generational shift in how these experiences are interpreted. Women born in the 1990s are more likely to identify such experiences explicitly as antisemitism, compared to those born in the 1950s or 1970s. Another significant conclusion is that understanding Jewish women’s stories about antisemitism requires these accounts to be situated within broader relational contexts, encompassing both their own and others’ experiences as well as both contemporary and historical processes. Past experiences are often reactivated by current events, such as the attack of 7 October 2023. There is also a before and after 7 October. After 7 October, the fear of antisemitism increased, and some women describe the fear as constant or existential.
A general conclusion in the article is that the fear of antisemitism is present in most of the women's lives. A continuity over time is that the school is a place where Jewish women have experienced that they are different. Women born in the 1990s interpret these experiences to a greater extent, than the women born in the 1950’s and the 19970’s, as an experience of antisemitism. In this respect, our results differ from previous international research showing that older people in particular experience and regard society as antisemitic, while younger people do not do so to the same extent.
A further conclusion is that to understand women's narratives about experiences of antisemitism, these should also be understood in relation to the experiences of others both in the present and in the past, since these form layer upon layer of experiences that are actualized by current events such as October 7. There is also a before and after October 7. After 7 October, the feeling of insecurity has increased, and some women describe the fear as constant or existential.
Abstract: There is a rich body of research concerning Jews who lived in Germany before 1933. Publications on the Holocaust are equally numerous, a significant proportion of this output tackling historical (and contemporary) antisemitism in Germany from a non-Jewish perspective. Much less is known about the post-1945 Jewish population of the former East and West (now reunited) Germany: in terms of Jewish socio-demography, life-worlds, cultural heritage, praxes and about Jewish perspectives on antisemitism. The aim of this article is threefold. Content-wise, it sets out to summarise the existing social scientific research on the post-1945ers, and to identify gaps therein in terms of empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative. Structurally, it seeks to determine the scope and frame of research concerning the post-1945 Jewish population of Germany, demonstrating thus that the study of contemporary Jews is replete with lacunae. Practically, the article outlines the consequences of patchy knowledge, and the hampered knowledge transfer within academia and to the public – consequences which have become painfully clear in the wake of October 7, 2023.
Abstract: This paper, intended as a contribution to transnational memory studies, analyzes museums devoted to people who helped Jews during the Holocaust that recently opened in Bulgaria, France, Germany, Lithuania, and Poland. The author’s particular interest lies in the “traveling motifs” of the “Righteous” narratives. This category encompasses symbols such as a list of names of the help-providers, a fruit tree/orchard, or a wall with photographs of Holocaust victims, which recur in many of the examined exhibitions and are a clear reference to Yad Vashem and other well-established Holocaust memorials. At first sight, they seem to point to a “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust remembrance and to the emergence of a common reservoir of historical notions and images. However, on closer inspection one discovers that the use of these symbols varies and that they refer to differing ways of understanding and telling history.
Author(s): Sarig, Katrina; Oxley, Samuel; Kaira, Anshwin; Sobocan, Monika; Fierheller, Caitlin T.; Sideris, Michail; Gootzen, Tamar; Ferris, Michelle; Eeles, Rosalind A.; Evans, D. Gareth; Quaife, Samantha L.; Manchanda, Ranjit
Abstract: In August 1945, a small group of Jewish industrialists was tried in absentia by the military court in Maribor, Yugoslavia. They were convicted of “war crimes” and sentenced to confiscation of property. Part of the nationalization policies of the new Communist government, the episode related to specifically Jewish experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. Subsequent legal cases seeking redress involved agencies of Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Great Britain, the United States, and post-1991 Slovenia over several decades. This article reconstructs the sources, circumstances, and complex consequences of the legal cases in order to uncover structural and ideological factors underpinning the repeated failures of Jewish survivor claims. It sheds light on the memory wars shaping political life in Eastern Europe today, and it sharpens understandings that should facilitate efforts towards restitution of Jewish property.
Abstract: With Poland’s political transformation after 1989, religious minorities including Jews and Muslims gained more autonomy and support from the state authorities. At the same time, the liberal democracy principles of religious equality and the state’s neutrality have still not been fully implemented. The paper focuses on this problematic situation, using the concept of politicization to portray the situation of the Jews and Muslims in contemporary Poland, and their relations with the Polish state. It presents four instances of politicization of religious minorities (specifically, Muslims and/or Jews). The research is based on public surveys, interviews with members of the Jewish and Muslim communities, legal documents, and NGO reports. According to the hypothesis of the paper, Muslims and Jews are significantly politicized in the Polish public discourse, and both communities play significant roles in shaping the political identity of the Polish polity. Their roles differ in character due to historical factors and the contemporary international context.
Abstract: Currently, Jewish and Muslim communities can be found as ethno-cultural minorities both in Berlin, the capital of Germany, and in the surrounding state of Brandenburg. While they sometimes differ greatly in religious and cultural life, both communities also share similar experiences - such as the (former) existence as immigrants, the image of the “cultural other” and the confrontation with group-related misanthropy (anti-Semitism and Islamophobia). Moreover, there are Jewish-Muslim encounters, there are forms of encounter between Muslims and Jews in the region, in different milieus and intercultural and interreligious projects that appear as a kind of “experimental laboratory”. Though, what are the differences, what are the similarities between the two groups? Finally, this article also relates to how October 7th 2023, Hamas’ brutal massacres of Israeli civilians and the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip influence relationships between Muslims and Jews in Berlin and Brandenburg today.
