Abstract: Bourdieu’s triad of doxa, orthodoxy, and heresy explains consensus and contestation yet leaves undertheorized the middle ground where practice unfolds. I theorize mediodoxy as a third logic of practice and knowledge that neither ratifies doxa nor negates it. Drawing on 23 interviews with Jews and Muslims, I reconstruct sequences in which actors invoke racialized tropes (“Timbuktu,” “pure-blooded”), normalize discriminatory jokes, or acquiesce in exclusion. These cases show symbolic violence operates not only by external imposition but also through the practical compromises of those navigating stigma. Extending Bourdieu’s claim that domination works with the complicity of the dominated, I specify mechanisms of complicity and argue that mediodoxy can crystallize as a mediodoxic habitus—durable, patterned, and formed through recurrent experience of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. Mediodoxy refines field theory and advances the sociology of racism and antisemitism by showing inequality is stabilized, legitimated, and rendered ordinary between orthodoxy and heresy.
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: Jewish social justice education is an active and growing field of practice, encompassing a diverse range of agendas and practices: teaching Jewish texts and values around issues of refugees, human rights and environmental justice; organising members of the Jewish community to oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories and support the Israeli Left; advancing gender equality and LGBT+ inclusion within the community through informal education and training; engaging Jewish students in volunteer service-learning projects to alleviate poverty in the developing world; building inter-faith coalitions to work on local agendas such as housing, crime and healthcare; encouraging a culture of charitable giving and volunteering among Jewish young people; and mobilising Jews in the national and international political arenas around issues such as gun violence, climate change, immigration, hate crime and antisemitism. Yet Jewish social justice education remains an under-researched and under-theorised phenomenon. This theoretical lacuna has practical implications for the thousands of educators and activists across the world who are attempting to achieve social justice ends through the medium of Jewish education but have no well thought-out rationale as to what this might mean and, consequently, cannot know if it has any chance of success. This thesis explores possible theoretical foundations for Jewish social justice education by creating a hermeneutical dialogue between Freirean critical pedagogy, Catholic models of social justice education, Jewish social justice literature and interviews with thinkers and practitioners who consider themselves to be part of the Jewish social justice education enterprise. After drawing out and analysing the philosophical, political and educational themes that emerge from this dialogue, I propose three possible directions a coherent normative theory of Jewish social justice education could take: ‘Jewish politics in a renewed public sphere’, ‘Jewish education for relational community building’ and ‘Jewish critical pedagogy for cultural emancipation’.
