Abstract: While concern about antisemitism is growing, especially online, agreement about what exactly constitutes antisemitism is declining, especially when it appears in contexts other than those associated with Nazism.
Based on four empirical case studies and combining various qualitative analyses of digital content and semi-structured interviews, this thesis explores expressions of antisemitic hate speech and how the discursive boundaries of what can and cannot be said about Jews are perceived, dealt with, and experienced by different actors in the Norwegian digital public sphere. These include key political actors on the far right and the left, as well as members of the small and historically vulnerable Jewish minority. Theoretically, the thesis combines sociological boundary theory with perspectives from media studies, antisemitism studies and multidisciplinary research on online hate.
The thesis shows how the neo-Nazi organisation Nordic Resistance Movement and online debaters in various comment sections push boundaries by producing and promoting antisemitic content in both explicit and implicit ways. It also shows how “anti-Islamic” far-right alternative media and left-wing political organisations draw boundaries through comment moderation on their digital platforms. A key finding is that antisemitic hate speech is a diverse and complex phenomenon that can be difficult to identify. Finally, the thesis also sheds light on the experiences of antisemitic hate speech among Norwegian “public Jews”.
Beyond the empirical findings, the thesis contributes to media studies by proposing an analytical framework for how the concepts of boundaries and boundary-making can be used to understand different key dimensions and dynamics of the digital public sphere, in particular, how hateful content is communicated and countered, and the consequences for those targeted.
Abstract: The Sixth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2024, presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 879 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution over time.
The 2024 survey came during a historically fraught moment for the Jewish people globally. The impact of the horrific October 7th attacks and the subsequent war in Israel cannot be understated. How is this affecting Jewish leadership and Jewish communal life? Therefore, in addition to the regular topics covered by the survey (community priorities, threats, security concerns, attitudes towards Europe and Israel), this edition included a special section designed to understand the impact of October 7th on Jewish life in Europe.
That October 7th has profoundly affected Jewish Europe is evident across multiple sections throughout the survey. Concern about antisemitism and the threat of physical attack has intensified. A large majority of 78% feel less safe living as Jews in their cities than they did before the Hamas attack, and respondents are more cautious about how they identify themselves as Jews. They are also more distant from their wider environments, with 38% reporting they have become more distant from non-Jewish friends.
The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others
Abstract: For a well-functioning and inclusive democracy, it is crucial that minority voices can participate in public debate and express their opinions through the news media. However, media participation can be demanding, especially considering the proliferation of online hate. Based on in-depth interviews with 15 self-identified Jews who have participated in Norwegian media as Jews, this article explores the strategies Jewish minority voices employ when participating in the news media, both to position themselves and achieve their aims as representatives of a small-sized and vulnerable minority, and to deal with the risk of and experiences with antisemitism. The findings show that it can be demanding and distressing, but also rewarding to participate in the media as a minority voice, and most often the motivations and gains outweigh the risks. Although it is common to experience antisemitic hate speech in the wake of media participation, this has not led the participants to withdraw from public engagement. Consequently, this article argues that hate speech does not necessarily represent a boundary for public participation. However, participating as a minority voice requires strong motivation, emotional resilience, and the ability to focus on the positive outcomes of media participation, including the possibility of social change.
Abstract: This chapter examines the connection between Jewish identity and place in a Jewish community. The focus is on the Jewish cemetery in Trondheim, in the central part of Norway, and the aim is to explore how Jewish identity affects preferences for cemetery space. Against the backdrop of a larger ethnographic study and national research project, this study tracks narratives about burial decisions, illuminating the confluence of Jewish identity and Jewish burial space. The way the Jewish cemetery may mobilize or immobilize Jewish identity and belonging to the Jewish community is a multifaceted subject that relates to such wider experiences as mobility, relations to places of origin and Jewish networks. As discussed in the chapter, several aspects, religion, the Holocaust, and their Jewish kin relations, are in play for the participants and contribute to negotiating their burial decision.
Abstract: Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.
Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.
Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Visitors at Holocaust Museums and Memory sites
Diana I. Popescu
Part I: Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces
Mobile Memory; or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Michael Bernard-Donals
Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen)
Stephan Jaeger
"Really made you feel for the Jews who went through this terrible time in History" Holocaust Audience Re-mediation and Re-narrativization at the Florida Holocaust Museum
Chaim Noy
Understanding Visitors’ Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture: A Comparative Empirical Research at three European Museums
Xenia Tsiftsi
Attention Please: The Tour Guide is Here to Speak Out. The Role of the Israeli Tour Guide at Holocaust Sites in Israel
Yael Shtauber, Yaniv Poria, and Zehavit Gross
The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust exhibitions: A Study of the National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottinghamshire, and the Jewish Museum in London
Sofia Katharaki
The Affective Entanglements of the Visitor Experience at Holocaust Sites and Museums
Adele Nye and Jennifer Clark
Part II: Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site
"…It no longer is the same place": Exploring Realities in the Memorial Falstad Centre with the ‘Falstad Digital Reconstruction and V/AR Guide’
Anette Homlong Storeide
"Ways of seeing". Visitor response to Holocaust Photographs at ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’ Exhibition
Diana I. Popescu and Maiken Umbach
Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during The COVID-19 Pandemic
Kate Marrison
Curating the Past: Digital Media and Visitor Experiences at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Christoph Bareither
Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre: Examining Paths and Obstacles to Visitor Experience
Laura Beth Cohen and Cary Lane
Part III: Visitors at Former Camp Sites
The Unanticipated Visitor: A Case Study of Response and Poetry at Sites of Holocaust Memory
Anna Veprinska
"Did you have a good trip?" Young people’s Reflections on Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Town of Oświęcim
Alasdair Richardson
Rewind, Relisten, Rethink: The Value of Audience Reception for Grasping Art’s Efficacy
Tanja Schult
"The value of being there" -Visitor Experiences at German Holocaust Memorial Sites
Doreen Pastor
"Everyone Talks About the Wind": Temporality, Climate, and the More-than Representational Landscapes of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes
Ian Cantoni
Guiding or Obscuring? Visitor Engagement with Treblinka’s Audio Guide and Its Sonic Infrastructure
Kathryn Agnes Huether
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: For more than a decade, there has been a discussion about the scope and character of a “Muslim antisemitism” in Europe, spurred on by anti-Jewish harassment and terrorist attacks by Muslims in some European countries.* However, there are only a few major studies on the attitudes of Muslims towards Jews in Europe, while larger studies on the attitude of Jews towards Muslims have so far been missing completely. Based on the data from the 2017 survey, “Attitudes towards Jews and Muslims in Norway. Population Survey and Minority Study” (CHM), it is now possible to investigate how Jews and Muslims in Norway perceive each other, whether they see opportunities for cooperation as minorities and have common experiences of discrimination, what their positioning in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks like, and whether it influences their mutual perception. While the focus is on the relationship between Muslims and Jews, in some cases the results for the general Norwegian population are included as a tertium comparationis, since Jews and Muslims form part of Norwegian society.
Abstract: This study explores how an extreme far-right alternative media site uses content from professional media to convey uncivil news with an antisemitic message. Analytically, it rests on a critical discourse analysis of 231 news items, originating from established national and international news sources, published on Frihetskamp from 2011–2018. In the study, we explore how news items are recontextualised to portray both overt and covert antisemitic discourses, and we identify four antisemitic representations that are reinforced through the selection and adjustment of news: Jews as powerful, as intolerant and anti-liberal, as exploiters of victimhood, and as inferior. These conspiratorial and exclusionary ideas, also known from historical Nazi propaganda, are thus reproduced by linking them to con-temporary societal and political contexts and the current news agenda. We argue that this kind of recontextualised, uncivil news can be difficult to detect in a digital public sphere.
Abstract: The Fifth Survey of European Jewish Community Leaders and Professionals, 2021 presents the results of an online survey offered in 10 languages and administered to 1054 respondents in 31 countries. Conducted every three years using the same format, the survey seeks to identify trends and their evolution in time.
Even if European Jewish leaders and community professionals rank antisemitism and combatting it among their first concerns and priorities, they are similarly committed to expanding Jewish communities and fostering future sustainability by engaging more young people and unaffiliated Jews.
The survey covers a wide variety of topics including the toll of COVID-19 on European Jewish communities and a widening generational gap around pivotal issues. Conducted every three years since 2008, the study is part of JDC’s wider work in Europe, which includes its partnerships with local Jewish communities and programs aiding needy Jews, fostering Jewish life and leaders, resilience training.
The respondents were comprised of presidents and chairpersons of nationwide “umbrella organizations” or Federations; presidents and executive directors of private Jewish foundations, charities, and other privately funded initiatives; presidents and main representatives of Jewish communities that are organized at a city level; executive directors and programme coordinators, as well as current and former board members of Jewish organizations; among others.
The JDC International Centre for Community Development established the survey as a means to identify the priorities, sensibilities and concerns of Europe’s top Jewish leaders and professionals working in Jewish institutions, taking into account the changes that European Jewry has gone through since 1989, and the current political challenges and uncertainties in the continent. In a landscape with few mechanisms that can truly gauge these phenomena, the European Jewish Community Leaders Survey is an essential tool for analysis and applied research in the field of community development.
Abstract: Artist Gunter Demnig’s counter-memorial project Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) installs small brass plaques into the pavement in front of homes from which Nazi victims were deported. Extending to 27 countries, over 70,000 plaques are embossed with the names and fates of individuals memorialized. This article discusses the material, visual and narrative representations of the afterlives of the victims, addressing how the memory of their lives has been muted, forgotten and reinserted into the landscape. It is based on fieldwork throughout Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Stolpersteine, as objets chargés, engender contestations: they are celebrated, banned, cherished and vandalized. For some, Stolpersteine can serve as ersatz gravestones. Their afterlives are complex and destabilizing, both inspiring and politically controversial. Drawing from Nora’s notion lieux de mémoires, the concept of lieux chargés is introduced to theorize the salient sites and events relating to the processes, dynamics and emerging rituals surrounding Stolpersteine.
