Abstract: The events of October 7, 2023, and their aftermath have intensified social and political tensions across Europe, profoundly impacting both Jewish and Muslim communities. This article explores the phenomenon of dual silencing, where members of these communities face exclusion, misrepresentation, and suppression in public discourse. Jewish voices, often conflated with Israeli state politics, encounter rising antisemitism, while Muslim perspectives are increasingly marginalized amid heightened Islamophobic/anti-Muslim rhetoric. Through an analysis of personal accounts, public testimonies, media narratives, political responses, and societal attitudes, this study examines how both communities experience symbolical erasure and selective amplification depending on shifting political agendas. Using the Czech context as a case study, this article argues that the post-October 7 discourse has deepened existing societal fault lines and significantly influenced how Jewish and Muslim identities are negotiated in the public sphere. The study concludes by considering the implications of this dual silencing for intercommunal relations, and the future of pluralism in Europe.
Abstract: The severe restrictions on public life following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic affected Holocaust memorials and museums worldwide, especially in Europe, Israel, and the United States. These measures posed significant challenges to contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration, which were based on collaborative practices of remembering, particularly related to the experience of presence at the memorial sites. In our chapter, we ask in which ways the pandemic had an accelerating effect on global Holocaust memory by tracing, analyzing, and identifying the institutionalized use of online platforms and digital formats on social media. We present results from an online survey conducted with 32 key institutions in the field of Holocaust commemoration in the Spring and Summer of 2020 and discuss them in the context of various forms of digital activities initiated by Holocaust memorials and museums in response to the pandemic. For that purpose, we have created a comprehensive database of 45 digital projects, which were released in the first months of the pandemic, and conducted a multimodal analysis of selected projects. We identified a significant increase in social media use and digital tools, in particular video formats, helping institutions to communicate virtually with potential audiences. Memorials utilized various social media features like live streams, stories, and hashtags to implement elements of participatory memory culture that offer users the possibility to participate in new collaborative forms of mediated commemoration. In doing so, they helped to establish like-minded and co-creative commemoration communities.
Abstract: In our chapter, we investigate how the Covid-19 restrictions affected the translation of in-person commemorative ceremonies into online-only events. Whilst the majority of existing research has a relatively small scale, we have turned to the larger scope of social media data to examine wider online memory culture. To do so, we conduct comparative analysis of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram data from institutions organising commemorative events for the liberation of Neuengamme, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the liberation of Beau Bassin together with non-institutional posts using the hashtags from these institutions. Through this analysis, we aim to answer our main research questions: how do the online discourses by institutions and the wider public compare in relation to posts using shared hashtags during major commemoration periods during Covid-19 lockdowns? To what extent did the move to remote engagement during the pandemic reconfigure the so-called bifurcation of memory culture, between institutional and popular memory discourse (Hoskins, 2014) in any way that might suggest that the lockdowns evidence a change in commemoration practices? Our findings demonstrate that despite the major anniversaries marked in 2020, related memory institutions had little impact on social media, and their commemorative approaches in these spheres were not transformed by the pandemic.
Abstract: We provide a comparative analysis of how European radical left parties (RLPs) politicise the Israel – Palestine and Russia – Ukraine conflicts. Examining the positions of 25 RLPs, we test four hypotheses examining variation in Israel-hostility, Russia-related stances, cross-conflict coherence, and the dynamics of war fatigue. Patterns of politicisation are complex and there is no unified party family response. We show that while no RLP is Israel-friendly, levels of Israel-hostility vary substantially and tend to intensify as the Gaza war persists. By contrast, positions on Russia – Ukraine remain deeply divided, with no linear shift towards Russia-friendliness. Ideological subtype shapes, but does not determine, party responses, while broader contextual factors, most notably the ‘Trump effect’, repoliticise questions of European security. However, further politicisation is limited by the weakness of cross-conflict coherence. Several parties express consistent anti-imperialist logic in their response, but most disaggregate their critiques. RLP foreign policy emerges as ideologically-driven but contextually responsive.
Abstract: This research paper examines safety perceptions among Jewish minorities at European places of worship (PoWs) between October 2023 and April 2024. The study utilizes PROTONE survey data from Belgium (N = 571), Germany (N = 734), Spain (N = 1198), and Italy (N = 895), specifically comparing 79 Jewish and 3,318 non-Jewish respondents. Qualitative components include 43 interviews with faith leaders (including 16 Rabbis) and five focus groups conducted in Brussels, Berlin, Rome, and Madrid. Grounded in postsecularism, vulnerability assessment models, and securitization theories, the research explores how threats and security measures shape feelings of insecurity. Key findings indicate that violent attacks and property damage strongly predict perceived unsafety. Comparative analysis reveals that Jewish respondents perceive significantly higher levels of anti-Semitic hostility and hate crimes than non-Jewish groups perceive regarding their own communities. While positive community and authority relations marginally mitigate fear, structural vulnerabilities like outdated infrastructure persist. Attitudes toward security vary; CCTV is universally accepted, but armed guards raise concerns about carization. Generational differences appear, with younger Jewish individuals reporting notably higher anxiety and avoidance behaviors. The study contextualizes these findings within broader socio-cultural and political processes, highlighting the dual role of Jewish PoWs as essential and sacred sites for spiritual fulfillment and robust local communal resilience.
Abstract: The monograph contains the results of the author's research on the European Union's (EU) policy regarding the "Jewish question", as well as the characteristics of contemporary Jewish communities in Europe. It analyzes current issues related to the development and implementation of the EU Strategy on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life (2021–2030).
It is argued that the development of new legislation to combat antisemitism, based on the definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), as well as the implementation of effective measures to support the development of Jewish life (the term "Jewish life" refers to the development of the traditional way of life of the Jews), are important tasks not only for the EU but for the entire civilized world. European efforts in these areas can serve as a benchmark and model for the United States, Canada, and other countries where such practices are just beginning to be established.
The author also analyzes the challenges of combating antisemitism in the EU and the reasons for the increasing emigration of Jews from the European continent. The monograph is intended for political scientists, historians, civil servants from EU countries and EU candidate countries, students of humanities, and all those interested in Jewish Studies.
Abstract: This article explores how Holocaust education can be reimagined through the lens of Critical Theory—particularly the work of Theodor W. Adorno—in order to more effectively confront contemporary antisemitism. While Holocaust education is often invoked as a response to rising antisemitism, its actual impact in this regard remains contested. Drawing on Adorno’s reflections on antisemitism and education after Auschwitz, the article highlights both the emancipatory potential and the limitations of education. Central themes include the importance of early childhood education, the critique of ideology, and the tension between pedagogical aims and societal structures. The article proposes eleven impulses for rethinking Holocaust education, emphasizing, among other points, the need to turn toward the subject, the dangers of half-education (Halbbildung), and the importance of linking historical specificity with sociological insight. Rather than offering a prescriptive model, it outlines a conceptual framework that situates Holocaust education within a broader project of social critique and enlightenment. Ultimately, it argues that Holocaust education alone cannot prevent antisemitism, but can meaningfully contribute to resisting it.
Abstract: This chapter seeks to analyse the entanglement of exclusionist ideas in antisemitic and anti-feminist thought in Poland and Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It will consider discriminatory politics, practices, and violence against women, Jews, and other groups that were perceived as ‘Other’, drawing on cases from Germany, Poland, and Hungary in a comparative approach. Since connections between exclusion, sexuality, and violence during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are currently undergoing reinterpretation, the chapter will also examine developments and examples of anti-gender ideology and right-wing populism in contemporary Poland and Europe and discuss the dangers such shared forms of ressentiment pose to democracy.
Abstract: The pro-Gaza demonstrations that marked the summer of 2014 were trailed by a concern over the intensity of anti-Semitism among European Muslims and accusations of ‘double standards’ with regard to anti-Muslim racism. In the Netherlands, the debate featured a nexus between the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, freedom of speech and the limits of tolerance, which beckons a closer analysis. I argue that it indicates the place of the Holocaust in the European imaginary as one of a haunting, which is marked by a structure of dis/avowal. Prescriptive multicultural tolerance, which builds on Europe’s debt to the Holocaust and represents the culturalized response to racial inequalities, reiterates this structure of dis/avowal. It ensures that its normative framework of identity politics and equivalences, and the Holocaust, Jews and anti-Semitism which occupy a seminal place within it, supplies the dominant (and in the case of anti-Semitism, displaced) terms for the contestation of (disavowed) racialized structures of inequality. The dominance of the framework of identity politics as a channel for minority populations to express a sense of marginalization and disaffection with mainstream politics, however, risks culturalizing both the origins and the solutions to that marginalization. Especially when that sense of marginalization is filtered and expressed through the contestation of the primacy of the Holocaust memory, it enables the state, which embeds Jews retrogressively in the European project, to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities (including anti-Semitism, now externalized from the memory of Europe proper and attributed uniquely to the Other); to erase its historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary securitization. Moreover, it contributes to the obfuscation of the political, social and economic dynamics through which neo-liberal capitalism effects the hollowing out of the social contract and the resultant fragmentation of society (which the state then can attribute to ‘deficient’ minority cultures and values).
Abstract: Проаналізовано значення поняття «культура історичної пам’яті», розглянуто історію її формування у Західній Європі, особливості ландшафту пам’яті у Східній Європі та Україні, визначено ключові питання історичної політики України, які мають потенціал перешкодити європейській інтеграції України. Внаслідок проведеного дослідження встановлено, що Україна належить до східноєвропейського регіону історичної пам’яті, якому притаманні етатизм, єдність та героїчність, віктимність, сек’юритизація. На шляху до європейської інтеграції перед Україною поставатимуть проблеми піднесення ролі Голокосту в історичній пам’яті та визнання часткової відповідальності за злочини колаборантів, обмеження регулювання з боку держави історичної сфери, українсько-польських історичних конфліктів. Водночас може відбуватися дифузія західноєвропейської та східноєвропейської моделей пам’яті.
Abstract: This article examines the role of antisemitism in international politics. Drawing on a genealogy of European antisemitism, it proposes the analytic framework of the ‘enemy within’ to foreground instances when Jewish ‘enemy’ figures are positioned on both sides of the boundaries organising international political orders. This particular permutation of (racial) bordering is porous and ambivalent, even or especially as ‘hard’ and binary racial borders are simultaneously enforced. The article identifies four characteristics of the Jewish ‘enemy within’: a shared origin story with European Christendom; simultaneous presence on both sides of a (racial) boundary; a prompting of fears around contagion, infiltration and assimilation; and deployment to legitimise strategies of hyper-vigilance, surveillance and purification. The genealogy traces how the Jewish ‘enemy within’ is mobilised in consolidation or defence of, first, Christian medieval order and, second, raced nation-states, economies, and bodies, in modernity. In both periods, the Jewish ‘enemy within’ appears as both an insider and outsider whose perceived ambivalence threatens, and is mobilised to defend, religious, racial and political international orders. Finally, the article applies this framework to contemporary antisemitism. Overall, the article offers a novel engagement with antisemitism in International Relations and a tool for analysing complex forms of racial bordering in global politics.
Abstract: This report from B’nai B’rith International, democ and the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS) documents the surge of antisemitism on university campuses across Europe in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel. Since then, Jewish students and faculty have faced harassment, intimidation and violence, creating a climate of fear and exclusion across campuses.
Universities that should safeguard open debate and diversity have instead seen antisemitic rhetoric, Holocaust distortion, glorification of Hamas and calls for “intifada.” Professors, radical student groups, and outside organizations have often fueled this atmosphere, while administrators too often failed to act.
Covering Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, the report identifies repeated patterns: threats and assaults against Jewish students, antisemitic vandalism, incitement to violence, and weak or inconsistent institutional responses.
Abstract: Since long before the October 7 attacks, Jewish communities in Europe have experienced growing hate, harassment and hostility on social media. This policy paper articulates the key challenges of online antisemitism, and provides comprehensive and practical policy steps which governments, platforms, regulators and civil society organisations can take to address them. Built through 42 interviews with Jewish organisations and experts in antisemitism and digital policy from across CCOA’s five geographies (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden), it collates local experiences and channels them into a cohesive pan-European strategy, uniting communities and sectors in joint responses.
Interviewees identified five central challenges with online antisemitism:
Jewish communities and organisations across the five geographies report the significant behavioural, social and psychological impacts of online antisemitism, which have created a chilling effect on participation in public life.
Concerns exist not just over fringe violent extremist content, but the prevailing normalisation of mainstream antisemitism and a permissive culture which facilitates its spread across all areas of society.
There are a wide range of social media platforms in the social media ecosystem each adopting distinctive approaches and standards to content moderation, however the widespread accessibility of antisemitism suggest that significant barriers remain to the effective implementation of Terms of Service, and that many platforms are failing in this regard.
There is limited awareness and understanding of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Jewish civil society, little capacity to implement it, and a lack of confidence in its efficacy in addressing antisemitism.
Law enforcement has lacked both the capacity and legislative tools to effectively respond to the scale of illegal activity on social media.
Mainstreaming Digital Human Rights
This policy paper presents policy recommendations for Governments, Tech Platforms, Digital Regulators, and Civil Society. These approaches constitute a collective pathway, but may be diversely applicable across different geographies, communities and jurisdictions.
Abstract: Las siguientes reflexiones afrontan, en clave victimológica, el conflicto palestino-israelí, y más concretamente la actual Guerra de Gaza. El desencadenante de la operación militar israelí contra la población palestina fueron los salvajes atentados cometidos en Israel por la organización terrorista Hamás el 7 de octubre de 2023, con imágenes dantescas que dieron la vuelta al mundo. Sin embargo, en el concreto caso de España, dicho ataque y su rotunda condena fueron silenciados por las instituciones universitarias, no mostrando empatía alguna con la población israelí y judía. Todo lo contrario, sucedió con la operación militar en Gaza por parte del ejército hebreo, la cual dio lugar no solo a concentraciones de protesta en favor del pueblo palestino, sino también a todo tipo de proclamas, amenazas e insultos contra Israel. La actual situación ha conducido a que la población judía residente en Occidente se haya vuelto prácticamente invisible, habiéndose reducido al mínimo la vida judía en Europa por miedo a ataques y atentados contra un colectivo, sin tener en cuenta que un importante sector del mismo condena sin paliativos la Guerra de Gaza y sus repercusiones sobre la población palestina.
