Abstract: The racial formation of nationalism from the perspective of migration produces multiple forms of “whiteness”. “Not quite/not white” (Bhabha) translated racial difference into a culturally-hybrid formulation of the postcolonial subject in postcolonial theory. The consequence of translating racial difference into culturally hybridity also diluted a focus on the nation by focusing on the diasporic subject. In Eastern Europe however, “whiteness” is firstly marked by the ambiguous history of the racial other within the nation rather than the historical colonization of racial others beyond. Further, the often traumatic displacement of racial others in/from Eastern Europe has more to do with forms of nationalism than colonialism. Thus, the displacement of racial others in relation to Eastern European nationalism take on an importance largely missing in deracinated postcolonial condemnations of the nation. Europe-based Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s And Europe will be stunned: the Polish trilogy, provides a provocative invitation to think the disturbing place of race in the formation of nationalism in Eastern Europe precisely from these two dimensions: the history of racial difference (Jews) within the nation (Poland), and the centering of racial “returns” for the past and future of nations both in Eastern Europe and beyond it. Through film, public performance and spoken/written word, And Europe… firstly stages the nation from the historical perspective of displaced/exterminated racial others. Through a provocative call to return of the Jews into the Polish nation from which they fled or were exterminated, Bartana proposes a ghostly and literal racially hybridity within the nation to counter the ongoing construction of “whiteness” in Eastern Europe. Secondly, And Europe.. also performs a powerful critique of the problematic politics of return in Israel which deploys Europe’s treatment of its Jewish others to now consecrate the Israeli nation as an exclusively Jewish state. The currency of “whiteness” from the doubled perspective of a future Poland and the present in Israel delivers contradictory returns for the nation by producing hybridity here in Europe and homogeneity there outside it.
By thinking “whiteness” for/against the nation, the essay shows how the returns of race and of racial others can help think a hybrid nation both within Eastern Europe and outside it. Seen from a global perspective, “Whiteness” in Eastern Europe thus offers the racially hybrid nation rather than the culturally hybrid postcolonial subject as a counter to the racism of contemporary nationalisms.
Abstract: This paper examines the discourse around anti-Semitism in Germany since 2000. The discourse makes use of the figure of the Jew for national security purposes (i.e. via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the trope of the “dangerous Muslim”) and the politics of national identity. The article introduces the concept of the “War on Anti-Semitism”, an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties. While the War on Terror is fought against the Muslim Other, or the War on Drugs is fought against predominantly Latinx and Black communities, the War on Anti-Semitism is ostensibly fought on behalf of the racialized Jewish Other. The War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany's internal and external security measures by providing a logic for the management of non-white migration in an ethnically diverse yet white supremacist Europe.
In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration by replacing the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) with a jus soli (principle of residency). In the wake of these changes and the resulting racial anxiety about Germanness, state sponsored civil-society educational programs to fight anti-Semitism emerged, targeting predominantly Muslim non-/citizens. These education programs were developed alongside international debates around the War on Terror and what came to be called “Israel-oriented anti-Semitism” in Germany (more commonly known as “Muslim anti-Semitism”).
Triangulated through the enduring legacy of colonial racialization, the Jew and the Muslim are con/figured as enemies in socio-political German discourses. This analysis of the War on Anti-Semitism has serious implications for our understanding of “New Europe”. By focusing on the figure of the Jew and the Muslim, the implications of this work transcend national borders and stress the important connection between fantasy, power, and racialization in Germany and beyond.
Abstract: In response to a call for interview partners for an ethnography on the Israeli-Jewish lesbian diaspora in Berlin, my prospective partners contacted me, offering their migration stories while apologetically stating that they were no longer, or not exactly, lesbians. Admittedly, such transformations should not come as a surprise. Scholarship on queer migration to urban spaces elaborates the sexual imaginary, which brands the city as the scene in which gay cultures are rooted and develop, and which allows, and perhaps actively embraces (specific kinds of) sexual diversity. This sexual imaginary assumes contingency among sexuality, transformation storyline and displacement, and suggests that identity is enabled, enacted, conscripted and occasionally, violently incited as a result of spatial positions and migration. While the migration stories celebrate and brand the city as a cosmopolitan and queer haven, they also reveal an ambivalent dimension, which draws on ambiguous historical baggage and current hostility to strangers. In what follows, I discuss the shift to ‘queerness’ and the emergence of racial identities that came to light during my Berlin ethnography, charting the ways those shifts coincide and exploring the processes by which identities are lost and found.
Abstract: In June 2020, Black Lives Matter UK (BLM-UK) posted a series of tweets in which they endorsed the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Calling for ‘targeted sanctions in line with international law against Israel’s colonial, apartheid regime,’ one tweet claimed that ‘mainstream British politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism’. The tweets were seen by some to be antisemitic and resulted in the English Premier League, the BBC and Sky Sports, which had hitherto been supportive of the Black Lives Matter protests, distance themselves from the Black Lives Matter movement. One month later, during the BLM protests in the USA, Black NFL player DeSean Jackson posted material to his Instagram story that was also viewed as antisemitic. This article unpacks, via these two sports-based incidents, the relationship between anti-racism, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism. I discuss how these tensions are not new, but a clear echo of the tensions that existed in the 1960s and 1970s during the height of the Civil Rights Movement; these tensions continue because the foundational issues remain unchanged. These two incidents raise important questions about how sports organisations operate in a world where sport is seen as ‘apolitical’ and strive for ‘neutrality’ but fail to recognise sport is political and that a position of neutrality cannot be successfully achieved. The article assesses the challenges that arise when sports organisations, and their athletes, choose to engage in a certain kind of sport politics.
Abstract: The brutal, racist murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 sparked a reckoning about the treatment of Black people all over the world, and the undeniable reality of systemic racism and discrimination in societies on both sides of the Atlantic. We vociferously expressed our concerns about this at the time. However, we realised that we needed to go further. No community is immune from the scourge of prejudice and ours is no exception. As society as a whole sought to examine racial diversity, the Board of Deputies became aware of moving and concerning testimonies of Black members of our own community about their experiences.
As such, we launched this Commission to learn more about the experiences of Black Jews, Jews of Colour and Sephardi, Mizrahi and Yemenite Jews, to examine the issues and make recommendations for how our community can do better. We were delighted that the eminent journalist of Black and Jewish heritage, Stephen Bush, agreed to Chair the Commission.
The report’s release in the week that George Floyd’s murderer has been found guilty, and on this year’s Stephen Lawrence Day, feels particularly poignant, especially given the Commission’s many references to the Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Our Commission has considered 17 different areas of communal life, and the ground-breaking report makes 119 recommendations, with profound implications for British Jewry. Among them are the following:
Representative bodies and organisations involved in rabbinic training should encourage members of under-represented ethnic groups to put themselves forward for communal roles
Jewish schools should ensure that their secular curriculum engages with Black history, enslavement and the legacy of colonialism, and review their curriculum through a process led by students, particularly those who define as Black or of Colour
Jewish studies departments should ensure that their teaching celebrates and engages with the racial and cultural diversity of the Jewish community worldwide, including Mizrahi, Sephardi and Yemenite tradition
Communal institutions, particularly synagogues and schools, should commemorate key dates for diverse parts of the community, like the Ethiopian Jewish festival of Sigd and the official Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran (30th November)
Schools and youth movements should improve training for teachers and youth leaders on tackling racist incidents
Communal bodies and Jewish schools should establish regular listening exercises that seek the concerns of their members or students
Communal bodies should ensure that complaints processes are accessible, transparent, fair and robust, with all complaints related to racism handled according to the Macpherson principle, and specific new processes for handling complaints about security
Communal venues should ensure that their security guards or volunteers desist from racial profiling
Communal venues should institute bag searches for all visitors, including regular attendees, so as not to stigmatise people who look different, without compromising on security
A code of conduct should be developed for discourse on social media, making clear that attempts to delegitimise converts, calling people names such as ‘Kapo’, or using Yiddish terms such as ‘Shvartzer’ in a racist way, are completely unacceptable
Batei Din should improve processes for conversion, including stricter vetting of teachers and host families, and a clearer process for complaints
Abstract: Restitution for the mostly Jewish property and assets that were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II (WWII) in various European states has been a highly debated issue ever since the end of the war. Countries that adhered to the ideas of communism and nationalisation of property in the immediate aftermath of the war failed to address this issue until very recently. Serbia, too, has only began to consider remedying the incredible damage done to its rather small Jewish community. More specifically, in the past decade, Serbia has been trying to repair the damage by passing a series of restitution laws which eventually led to separate legislation on heirless property. This paper explores the substance and application of these laws, as well as the history of discrimination based on which the Serbian Jewish community was persecuted by German occupiers and their collaborators. In doing so, through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), this paper identifies another group that has been persecuted on the basis of race, namely the Romani. What follows from such research is the following: firstly, the law allowed for discrimination on a racial basis of both Jews and Roma during WWII and, secondly, the law is now remedying the damages caused towards the former group, but not the latter. In conclusion, this paper suggests that such a distinction is made due to a possible interest convergence, as defined by CRT.
Abstract: Emma was born in 1956. Her parents survived the Holocaust with the help of false documents and their Slavic appearance – goes the family legend. Emma was brought up by her parents, according to communist principles. She is already 17 when she first learns from her aunt that she is Jewish. She meets her husband, Ben, a Nigerian, in 1976, and they leave for Nigeria. A year later Emma returns alone, pregnant, and from then on, her relationship with Ben is almost completely cut off. In 1990, Emma sends her child to a Jewish school. The analysis of the narrative interview reveals that for Emma, the meaning of choosing a stranger from a different culture was to get rid of a stigma. The presence of the colored child born from the relationship comforts her – if she manages to hide the Jewishness of the child, this covers her Jewishness as well. Along with this, she seems to be trying to protect her son from her identity problem: the color of his skin gives clear evidence of who he is and where he comes from. A decade later, she changes her strategy: now she wants the hidden stigma to be revealed and seen. And once more she uses her son to achieve this: if her son attends a Jewish school, he becomes Jewish. And if he is Jewish, that means that she too is Jewish.
Abstract: Minority and immigrant Germans' embrace of the derogatory term Kanake as a self-ascription and of the low-status ethnolect Kanak Sprak has been compared to US rappers' combative use of "niggah" and Black English. This essay, however, compares the revaluation of the term Kanake, a non-assimilatory Kanak identity, and the ethnolect Kanak Sprak to some early 20th century German Jews' revaluation and embrace of Eastern European Jewish culture and Yiddish. It demonstrates also how non-minority and non-Jewish Germans have used Yiddish and Kanak Sprak in literature, theater, film, and popular culture to re-inscribe ethnic difference, especially at times when minorities and Jews were becoming indistinguishable from non-minority Germans (emancipation edicts or nationality law reform). Because Kanak Sprak is inseparable from HipHop culture, the second half of the essay examines the many parallels between the importation and naturalization of German HipHop and German Klezmer. Both were imported from the United States in the early 1980s; and following the fall of the Berlin Wall and German re-unification, both have played a role in German Vergangenheitsbewältigung [mastering the past]. While HipHop and Klezmer have become the soundtrack of German anti-racism, anti-Nazism, and multiculturalism; some observers are critical of non-minority and non-Jewish Germans' appropriation or instrumentalization of ethnic music, and have cited instances of antisemitism and racism in German Klezmer and HipHop.
Abstract: During the course of her fieldwork in Paris, anthropologist Kimberly Arkin heard what she thought was a surprising admission. A French-born, North African Jewish (Sephardi) teenage girl laughingly told Arkin she was a racist. When asked what she meant by that, the girl responded, "It means I hate Arabs."
This girl was not unique. She and other Sephardi youth in Paris insisted, again and again, that they were not French, though born in France, and that they could not imagine their Jewish future in France. Fueled by her candid and compelling informants, Arkin's analysis delves into the connections and disjunctures between Jews and Muslims, religion and secular Republicanism, race and national community, and identity and culture in post-colonial France. Rhinestones argues that Sephardi youth, as both "Arabs" and "Jews," fall between categories of class, religion, and culture. Many reacted to this liminality by going beyond religion and culture to categorize their Jewishness as race, distinguishing Sephardi Jews from "Arab" Muslims, regardless of similarities they shared, while linking them to "European" Jews (Ashkenazim), regardless of their differences. But while racializing Jewishness might have made Sephardi Frenchness possible, it produced the opposite result: it re-grounded national community in religion-as-race, thereby making pluri-religious community appear threatening. Rhinestones thus sheds light on the production of race, alienation, and intolerance within marginalized French and European populations.
Abstract: This study examines the multiple and conflicting ways in which German national identity is spatially expressed through the material and metaphor of the human body. In particular, it describes the various gendered, sexed, and raced constructions of Germany, as they emerged in the capital city of Berlin since 1989. Based on two ethnographic case studies situated in neighboring urban environments, the Love Parade and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the author shows how bodily representations of post-1989 Germany are fluctuating between the sexualized, demasculinized celebration of multiculturalism and the repeatedly racist, masculinist and even anti-Semitic reconstruction of German nationhood. While the German government is making active efforts to situate the future Berlin Republic within a network of increasingly integrated European nation states, and is involved in sponsoring both the Love Parade and the MMJE, social movements in Berlin are actively supporting and contesting such politics. It is this struggle between government efforts and grassroots politics, and the role of the human body in the political process of constructing collective identities that this book ultimately explores.
Topics: Synagogues, Ethnography, Race, Racism, Ethnicity, Diversity, Pluralism, Conflict, Bukharian Jews, Mountain Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: The prevalence of anti-Semitism in Russia is well known, but the issue of race within the Jewish community has rarely been discussed explicitly. Combining ethnography with archival research, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue documents the changing face of the historically dominant Russian Jewish community in the mid-1990s. Sascha Goluboff focuses on a Moscow synagogue, now comprising individuals from radically different cultures and backgrounds, as a nexus from which to explore issues of identity creation and negotiation. Following the rapid rise of this transnational congregation—headed by a Western rabbi and consisting of Jews from Georgia and the mountains of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, along with Bukharan Jews from Central Asia—she evaluates the process that created this diverse gathering and offers an intimate sense of individual interactions in the context of the synagogue's congregation.
Challenging earlier research claims that Russian and Jewish identities are mutually exclusive, Goluboff illustrates how post-Soviet Jews use Russian and Jewish ethnic labels and racial categories to describe themselves. Jews at the synagogue were constantly engaged in often contradictory but always culturally meaningful processes of identity formation. Ambivalent about emerging class distinctions, Georgian, Russian, Mountain, and Bukharan Jews evaluated one another based on each group's supposed success or failure in the new market economy. Goluboff argues that post-Soviet Jewry is based on perceived racial, class, and ethnic differences as they emerge within discourses of belonging to the Jewish people and the new Russian nation.
