Abstract: In November 2024, violence following a football match in Amsterdam was framed as evidence of migrant men’s failed integration into Dutch society. The frame achieved discursive dominance, anchoring public debate, and was adopted by the government before empirical substantiation. We examine the affective-discursive processes behind the frame’s salience amid conjunctural conditions and heightened collective anxieties. We conceptualize anxiety-fear arrangements as configurations of affective relations between socio-material elements. Frames, as meaning-making devices, organize meanings and orient emotions, shaping relations within arrangements. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of political statements, parliamentary transcripts and media items, we trace how the failed integration frame organized meanings, channeling collective anxieties onto tangible objects of fear: migranticized bodies, objects and places. The frame became salient through precedence, emotional intensity, cultural resonance and moral certainty. Empirically, we illustrate how bodies are ‘migranticized’ through framing. Conceptually, the anxiety-fear arrangement provides an operative template to understand meaning-making in conjunctures.
Abstract: This chapter examines the manifestations of antisemitism within three international online large groups convened by the Greek Institute of Relational and Group Psychotherapy following the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel. Drawing on the social unconscious (Hopper, Fromm), relational psychoanalysis, and group-as-whole dynamics, the analysis traces how 80–120 mental health professionals enacted unconscious antisemitic patterns across three phases: initial idealization of the Greek cofacilitators as “neutral” containers, subsequent demonization marked by paranoid suspicion and conspiratorial attribution, and finally, fragmented empathy, where Jewish grief became conditional upon political disclaimers. The chapter introduces “conditional solidarity” as a contemporary antisemitic mechanism whereby Israeli professionals’ trauma is delegitimized unless accompanied by self-condemnation. Integrating the Talmudic Bar Kamtza narrative and the Greek Danaids myth, the analysis illuminates how institutional failures to process collective mourning perpetuate cycles of envy, aggression, and unmetabolized loss. The concept of “institutional illiteracy” describes professional communities’ inability to hold the complexity of Jewish identity, resulting in persecutory-paranoid dynamics rather than reflective containment. This psychodynamic approach reveals antisemitism’s persistence within ostensibly progressive therapeutic spaces.
Abstract: Wie unterscheiden Kinder – und inwiefern greifen sie dabei auch auf antisemitische Deutungsmuster zurück? Diese Studie nimmt eine bislang unbeachtete Perspektive ein: die frühen Lebensjahre von Kindern im Alter von vier bis acht Jahren. Ausgehend vom Agency-Konzept der Kindheitsforschung versteht sie Kinder nicht als passive Empfänger gesellschaftlicher Normen, sondern als aktive Akteure, die Differenz konstruieren, aushandeln und reproduzieren. In Gruppendiskussionen mit 36 Kindern zeigen sich Momente, in denen antisemitische Wissensbestände aufgegriffen, neu verknüpft und performativ in Szene gesetzt werden – von klassischen Stereotypen über phantasmatische Bedrohungsbilder bis hin zu Vorstellungen einer »jüdischen Physiognomie«. Die Studie macht sichtbar, dass antisemitisches Othering bereits im Kindesalter Ausdruck findet. Ziel ist es nicht, Kinder als Antisemiten zu markieren – ebenso wenig, sie davon per se freizusprechen. Es geht darum, ihre Perspektiven ernst zu nehmen und zu zeigen, wie sie gesellschaftlich wirksame Deutungen aktiv mitgestalten. Damit leistet die Untersuchung einen grundlegenden Beitrag in der Schnittstelle zwischen Kindheitsforschung und Antisemitismusforschung und eröffnet neue Horizonte für pädagogische und gesellschaftliche Reflexion.
Abstract: My group-analytic work in small and large groups focuses on analyzing group communication through the group. As group analysts, we create space for talking about emotions and fantasies and encourage group participants to endure the coexistence of great diversity, perceive inner resonance phenomena, and enter into dialogue about them. To work on social rifts, we have to face the challenge of dealing openly with hatred, hostility, and conspiracy myths – including antisemitic stereotypes. Scenes from a small group in Berlin in 2024 show the balancing act of group-analytic work, in which politically motivated remarks are viewed neither on the level of rational arguments nor as purely individual phenomena. To this day, the group presented here continues to engage in circular movements with its own fear, with abrupt indifference in social interaction, with the effect of prejudice and rumor in society, and with moments of silent retreat. Group analysis can promote trust in one’s own abilities and relationships and is, at the same time, an effective means of dealing with destructive aggression such as antisemitism in the long term. I see this as an important attempt to counter the social crisis of trust with an increase in sensitivity and the ability to speak.
Abstract: Jüdische Identität im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Eigendefinitionen, Antisemitismus und Rassismus.
Welche Hautfarben haben Jüdinnen und Juden - und welche werden ihnen zugeschrieben? Wie verorten sie sich selbst?
Seit Jahrhunderten werden Menschen durch rassistische Weltanschauungen vor allem nach ihrer Hautfarbige bewertet. »Rassentheorien«, Kolonialismus, Antisemitismus und andere Überlegenheitsfantasien schufen eine fundamentale Hierarchie: eine Ordnung der Welt, die auf der Ordnung nach Hautfarben beruht. Die Publikation beleuchtet diese Stereotypisierungen und Ausgrenzungen, die Jews of Color welt-weit - insbesondere in Europa, den USA und Israel - erfahren.
Heutige Diskurse verstehen Hautfarbige als historische und soziale Konstruktion und weniger als biologische Kategorie. Gerade die jüngste Eskalation des Nahost-Konflikts führte zur Verfestigung des Stereotyps von Juden als Weiße Kolonialherren, die eine »nicht-Weiße«, indigene Bevölkerung unterdrücken. Dafür wird ausgeblendet, dass Jüdinnen und Juden - nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Tatsache, dass ihre Geschichte von Migration, Vertreibung, und allen voran von der Schoa geprägt ist - auf allen Kontinenten präsent waren und sind.
Sind Jüdinnen und Juden nun aber Weiß, »nicht-Weiß« oder Schwarz? Die verschiedenen Antworten und ihre weitreichenden Folgen bekräftigen die Aktualität und Dringlichkeit dieser Publikation.
Topics: Main Topic: Antisemitism, October 7 2023 Attacks and Aftermath, Gender, Feminism, Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Israel-Related, Antisemitism: Left-Wing, Antisemitism: Theory, Theory: Critical Theory, Sexism and Misogyny, Intersectionality
Abstract: Antisemitism and Sexism: Ideological Constellations Before and After 7 October analyses the manifold ways in which antisemitism and sexism appear not as isolated ideologies but as intersecting ones, exploring their historical, social, political, economic, and psychological constellations. Drawing on Critical Theory, the book offers a comparative historical analysis of these entanglements from nineteenth-century Europe—particularly Germany and Austria—through National Socialism and its preconditions, to the historical and contemporary formations of Islamism. The sexist antisemitism of 7 October and its aftermath are examined as a contemporary eruption of these enduring ideological patterns, while Critical Theory itself is sharpened in light of these events.
Structured around distinct analytical dimensions, the book opens with a theoretically dense examination of the damaged relationship between human beings and nature under modern labour society, identified by Critical Theory as a key source of both antisemitism and sexism. Subsequent chapters analyse the contradictory constructions of Judaism and femininity, the relation between body and mind, and socially regulated forms of sexuality. Conspiracy myths linking weakness and omnipotence, the psychosocial roots of authoritarian dispositions, and the embedding of these ideologies in specific formations of capitalist modernity and repressive communities are examined in turn. The book also offers a critical examination of intersectional feminist antisemitism in the aftermath of 7 October and advances a proposal to reformulate intersectionality as an ideology-critical framework for a feminist critique of antisemitism.
Abstract: Comment les minorités peuvent-elles s’intégrer aux nations européennes ? Comment renouer avec le projet émancipateur de l’Europe moderne, qui apparaît plus que jamais en crise ? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, Bruno Karsenti adopte le prisme de la question juive : question qui se pose à propos de cette minorité que sont les juifs, question qu’ils se posent à eux-mêmes au fil de leur intégration. Il retrace l’essor et le déclin des centres que les juifs ont constitués tout au long de leur histoire moderne, entre assimilation et émancipation, discrimination et persécution. Cette trajectoire heurtée part de l’expulsion des juifs d’Espagne en 1492, s’instaure comme question juive dans l’Allemagne du xixe siècle, manque de disparaître avec l’anéantissement du monde juif à l’Est et se transforme avec la persistance d’un centre juif en France.
Nourri par des travaux d’histoire et de sociologie, ce livre de philosophie politique éclaire le rapport complexe des juifs de la diaspora à leur identité, aux nations dont ils sont devenus les citoyens et, depuis 1948, à l’État d’Israël. En restituant ce cadre, Bruno Karsenti met au jour les paradoxes qui traversent tous les processus d’intégration, depuis la Shoah, les décolonisations et le 7-Octobre. Ce diagnostic s’accompagne d’un engagement : comprendre l’antisémitisme et le racisme, interroger le sionisme et le modèle républicain, c’est rouvrir le champ d’une critique politique fidèle à l’idéal d’émancipation – et donc à la promesse européenne.
Abstract: Pearn Kandola’s Antisemitism and Islamophobia at Work report (2024) is a comprehensive study in which over 1000 Muslim and Jewish employees participated, either through in-depth focus groups or our survey, to shine a light on their experiences of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the workplace since October 7th 2023.
Late last year, we published our groundbreaking Religion At Work (2023) report, the largest of its kind. It explored the experiences of people of faith in the workplace, highlighting the difficulty for employees of any religion to express their faith at work.
Released in November 2023, a question we were increasingly faced with as time went on was the impact on Muslim and Jewish employees, in particular, since October 7th. However, the data for this momentous report was gathered and analysed before the current Israel-Gaza conflict, which could tell us little to answer this question.
As a result, we carried out a new piece of research, designed to look at the:
Extent to which Jewish employees experience antisemitism in the workplace;
Extent to which Muslim employees experience Islamophobia in the workplace;
Impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict on them
Actions that organisations can take to ensure people feel safe and included in workplaces
The research was in two parts:
Firstly, a survey was carried out in June 2024 in which 500 Jewish and 500 Muslim employees participated, followed by in-depth interviews with 20 people, 10 of each faith.
The report closes with key recommendations for employers to better support Muslim and Jewish employees by research author Professor Binna Kandola OBE.
Abstract: Как, в какой обстановке человек начинает испытывать ксенофобские чувства, в том числе антисемитизм? Следует ли искать корни этого в семейных традициях, в детской дворовой или школьной среде, в чтении соответствующей литературы, во влиянии взрослых наставников, встреченных на жизненном пути, в идейных поисках и стремлении осмыслить окружающую действительность, в определенных контекстах социального общения или пережитых травматических обстоятельствах?
Объектами моего анализа являются люди, зарекомендовавшие себя своими многолетними пространными антисемитскими публикациями. Все они – интеллектуалы, в свое время получившие полное или незаконченное вузовское образование. По этим данным вырисовываются два типажа и две линии, ведущие к антисемитизму. Очевидно, следует различать идеологических антисемитов, перешедших на эту позицию в результате своего жизненного опыта и интеллектуальных размышлений, и почвеннических антисемитов, получивших индоктринацию в своей семье. Первые шли от разума, вторые начали свой путь, опираясь на эмоции. Биографии первых показывают, что в молодости они не раз меняли свою позицию, свое отношение к религии и внешнему миру и свои политические взгляды. Вторые впитывали антисемитские чувства от старших родственников – родителей или дедушек и бабушек. В детские годы они слышали соответствующие разговоры, наблюдали за реакцией или за поступками старших в соответствующих ситуациях. Позднее на это наслаивалась новая информация, которую они тщательно отбирали, стремясь, чтобы она соответствовала их уже сложившимся убеждениям.
Abstract: Marking the 75th anniversary of The Authoritarian Personalityin 2025, this article revisits its insights into the persistence of authoritarianism in contemporary society, drawing centrally on the work of Theodor Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Based on the results of their studies, it can be demonstrated how antisemitism, sexism, anti-feminism, and queerphobia are interconnected rather than separate phenomena—a concept expanded here as the "intersectionality of ideologies." Examining rigid gender norms in authoritarian systems, the article explores their role in reinforcing antisemitic narratives, with examples from Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Additionally, it analyzes the culture industry as a site of ideological entanglement, using the 2022 documenta 15 exhibition as a case study. By reassessing authoritarianism's links to antisemitism and gender oppression, the article highlights its enduring relevance.
