Abstract: Insbesondere für die deutsche Linke hat der Nahost- und Antisemitismusstreit eine immense Bedeutung und Sprengkraft. Er ist Dauerthema in linken Zeitschriften und Veranstaltungen sowie beliebter Gegenstand der Agitation konservativer Medien gegen die Linke. Gelegentliche Eskalationen zu verschiedenen Anlässen sorgen dafür, dass die Problematik ganz oben auf der politischen Agenda bleibt. Dabei verläuft die Auseinandersetzung auch innerhalb der Linken selten solidarisch. Starke Identifikationen sowie extreme und zudem häufig antagonistische Positionierungen und Blickwinkel kennzeichnen die Debatte. Regelmäßig kommt es auch zu sehr persönlichen und verletzenden Vorwürfen und Angriffen; sogar vor physischer Gewalt wird nicht haltgemacht. Und im Gewand dieser Debatte wird immer wieder auch verhandelt, was eigentlich (noch) links ist.
Ziel dieser kommentierten Bibliografie zur Thematik Linke, Nahostkonflikt und Antisemitismus ist es, zu einer Versachlichung der Diskussion beizutragen. Sie will den einseitigen Positionen, schablonenhaften Schuldzuschreibungen und ritualisierten Phrasen komplexere Perspektiven entgegensetzen, Zugang zu Hintergrundwissen und «Fakten» sowie zu den Bedingungen ermöglichen, die diese erst zu solchen machen, und somit Anregungen zur (selbst-)kritischen Reflexion geben. Die Broschüre soll zudem einen leichten Einstieg in die inzwischen doch recht umfassende Literatur zum Thema bieten. Denn insbesondere in der Zeit nach 1990 ist eine Vielzahl von relevanten Studien und ernsthaften Debattenbeiträgen erschienen, die eine gute Grundlage bieten für die fundierte und kritische Auseinandersetzung mit spezifischen Traditionen, ideologischen Erbschaften, Prägungen und grundlegenden Ambivalenzen linker Politik in Hinblick auf den Nahostkonflikt. Im Folgenden werden die wichtigsten dieser Beiträge in Form von kurzen Inhaltsangaben und Kommentierungen vorgestellt. Als Sammlung von Basistexten ist diese Broschüre vor allem für die Nutzung in der politischen Bildungsarbeit gedacht. Doch auch Studierende, Wissenschaftler/innen und alle anderen Interessierten werden sich mit ihrer Hilfe schnell einen Überblick zum aktuellen Stand der Forschung verschaffen können.
In die Darstellung wurden vor allem Bücher aufgenommen, die Grundlegendes zum Verständnis linker Kontroversen zum Thema in einer bestimmten Epoche leisten (zum Beispiel zur Zionismus- Debatte in der Arbeiter/innenbewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts) oder die wesentliche Begriffe beziehungsweise theoretische Perspektiven in die Diskussion eingeführt haben (beispielsweise «antiimperialistischer Antizionismus»). Neben recht bekannten, weitverbreiteten und häufig zitierten Publikationen sind auch solche berücksichtigt, die hierzulande bisher weniger rezipiert wurden – sei es, weil sie nicht in deutscher Sprache veröffentlicht wurden oder weil die Texte aus anderen Gründen nicht leicht zugänglich sind. Soweit Zitate vom Englischen ins Deutsche übertragen wurden, stammen die Übersetzungen vom Autor. Nicht alle besprochenen Bücher werden im gleichen Umfang behandelt. Dahinter steht durchaus die Absicht, eine Gewichtung vorzunehmen und unnötige Wiederholungen zu vermeiden. Stattdessen wird die jeweilige Bedeutung der Texte für die Gesamtdebatte herausgestellt. Wo immer es möglich ist, werden die Leser/ innen bei Monografien auch auf kürzere Texte der entsprechenden Autor/ innen (die für Seminare und Lesekreise geeignet sind) oder Online-Ressourcen hingewiesen. Die in fünf Abschnitte unterteilte Darstellung beschränkt sich im Wesentlichen auf wissenschaftliche Beiträge
Abstract: En 2005, la France célébra le centenaire de la loi de séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat, un an après le vote de la loi sur les signes religieux à l’école et le débat passionné qu’elle a suscité en France. Depuis plusieurs années, la laïcité est devenue un terrain d’affrontements et de vives tensions. Par exemple, Marine Le Pen se réclame du principe de laïcité pour se donner une respectabilité républicaine. Or, les valeurs que défend le Front national sont à l’opposé du principe de laïcité.
Il faut donc rappeler qu’en France, la laïcité c’est d’abord une liberté de croyance, une liberté de conscience qui permet aux hommes et aux femmes qui composent une société d’y vivre comme ils le souhaitent. Elle permet donc de concilier la diversité des croyances et des patrimoines culturels avec l’égalité des droits. L’État républicain doit se faire accueillant à tous, sans discrimination. Pour cela, il se refuse à tout privilège des particularismes : ni religion reconnue, ni athéisme consacré. Les religions et les humanismes athée ou agnostique peuvent se vivre librement, dans la sphère privée de l’intimité personnelle. La laïcité est donc porteuse d’un idéal, celui de l’individu-citoyen, elle est donc faite pour tout le peuple. La laïcité c’est également un ensemble de lois qui permettent à tous les citoyens de vivre ensemble sans qu’ils aient à renoncer à leurs particularités. Il n’y a pas de contradiction entre l’identité et la citoyenneté.
Face à une laïcité très souvent mal connue ou ignorée par une majorité des citoyens, les juifs de France, qu’ils soient croyants, pratiquants ou non, attachés à leurs origines religieuses ou athées, ont tissé des liens historique, sociologique et philosophique avec cette laïcité consubstantielle à leur citoyenneté et à leur adhésion à la Nation, résume Gérard Fellous, dans ce texte que nous publions pour ce vingt-huitième numéro des Etudes du CRIF: « La laïcité française. L’attachement du judaïsme. » Le judaïsme français s’est toujours montré fortement attaché aux principes fondamentaux de la laïcité, résume-t-il encore, avec justesse.
Certes.
Mais, si les atteintes à la laïcité ne sont pas acceptables, il ne saurait pourtant être question d’abdiquer devant les éventuelles atteintes aux fondamentaux, tant en France qu’en Europe.
La montée d’une sorte d’antijudaïsme institutionnel et « légal » inquiète les juifs d’Europe, lequel antijudaïsme a commencé à se traduire dans plusieurs grands pays de l’Union européenne par une remise en cause directe du droit et de la possibilité d’exercer librement la religion juive. Lorsque l’Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe vote en plénière, une résolution contre la circoncision assimilée à une mutilation sexuelle, cela nous éclaire sur sa face sombre. Le CRIF a mis un point d’honneur à dénoncer ce projet de loi-cadre. Nous pensons également à la remise en cause de la cacherout alimentaire - et surtout des autorisations jusque-là consenties à l’abattage rituel juif, dans quelques pays, ce qui serait une atteinte à une tradition millénaire.
Roger Cukierman,
Président du CRIF
Abstract: Technically, Israel is not the only official Jewish homeland in the world. In the Far East of Russian Siberia there still exists the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan. Beginning in 1928 the Soviet Union set aside a territory larger than Belgium and Holland combined and considerably bigger than Israel, for Jewish settlement, located some five thousands miles east of Moscow along the Soviet-Chinese border, between the 48th and 49th parallels north latitude, where the climate and conditions are similar to Ontario and Michigan. Believing that Soviet Jewish people, like other national minorities, deserved a territorial homeland, the Soviet regime decided to settle a territorythat in 1934 would become the Jewish Autonomous Region. The idea was to create a new Zion–in a move to counterweight to Palestine – where a “proletarian Jewish culture” based on Yiddish language could be developed. In fact, the establishment of the JAR was the first instance of an officially acknowledged Jewish national territory since ancient times: the “First Israel”. But the history of the Region was tragic and the ex-periment failed. Nevertheless, Birobidzhan’s renewed existence of today and the revival of Jewish life in the post-Soviet JAR are not only a curious legacy of Soviet national policy, but after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the worldwide religious rebirth represent an interesting case-study in order to studysome challenging geographic pro-blems, and interethnic relations.
Abstract: This book traces the global, national, and local origins of the conflict between Muslims and Jews in France, challenging the belief that rising anti-Semitism in France is rooted solely in the unfolding crisis in Israel and Palestine. Maud Mandel shows how the conflict in fact emerged from processes internal to French society itself even as it was shaped by affairs elsewhere, particularly in North Africa during the era of decolonization.
Mandel examines moments in which conflicts between Muslims and Jews became a matter of concern to French police, the media, and an array of self-appointed spokesmen from both communities: Israel's War of Independence in 1948, France's decolonization of North Africa, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1968 student riots, and François Mitterrand's experiments with multiculturalism in the 1980s. She takes an in-depth, on-the-ground look at interethnic relations in Marseille, which is home to the country's largest Muslim and Jewish populations outside of Paris. She reveals how Muslims and Jews in France have related to each other in diverse ways throughout this history--as former residents of French North Africa, as immigrants competing for limited resources, as employers and employees, as victims of racist aggression, as religious minorities in a secularizing state, and as French citizens.
In Muslims and Jews in France, Mandel traces the way these multiple, complex interactions have been overshadowed and obscured by a reductionist narrative of Muslim-Jewish polarization.
Abstract: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are complex, delineable, yet inter-related social-psychological phenomena. While antisemitism has been described as an irrational, age-old prejudice, anti-Zionism is often represented as a legitimate response to a ’rogue state’. Drawing upon media and visual sources and rich interview data from Iran, Britain and Israel, Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism: Representation, Cognition and Everyday Talk examines the concepts of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, tracing their evolution and inter-relations, and considering the distinct ways in which they are manifested, and responded to, by Muslim and Jewish communities in Iran, Britain and Israel. Providing insights from social psychology, sociology and history, this interdisciplinary analysis sheds light on the pivotal role of the media, social representations and identity processes in shaping antisemitism and anti-Zionism. As such, this provocative book will be of interest to social scientists working on antisemitism, race and ethnicity, political sociology and political science, media studies and Middle Eastern politics.
Abstract: This volume examines how people in Poland learn about Jewish life, culture and history, including the Holocaust. The main text provides background on concepts such as culture, identity and stereotypes, as well as on specific topics such as Holocaust education as curriculum, various educational institutions, and the connection of arts and cultural festivals to identity and culture. It also gives a brief overview of Polish history and Jewish history in Poland, as well as providing insight into how the Holocaust and Jewish life and culture are viewed and taught in present-day Poland.
This background material is supported by essays by Poles who have been active in the changes that have taken place in Poland since 1989. A young Jewish-Polish man gives insight into what it is like to grow up in contemporary Poland, and a Jewish-Polish woman who was musical director and conductor of the Jewish choir, Tslil, gives her view of learning through the arts. Essays by Polish scholars active in Holocaust education and curriculum design give past, present and future perspectives of learning about Jewish history and culture.
Contents:
Introduction
Culture, Identity and Stereotypes
The Historical Context
Jewish Student NGOs in Present-Day Poland (1999–2013): Being Here by Piotr Goldstein
Jewish Studies and Holocaust Education at Polish Universities
The Center for Holocaust Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków: Studies, Research, Remembrance by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Elisabeth Büttner and Katarzyna Suszkiewicz
Holocaust Education in Polish Public Schools
The Legacy of the Holocaust in Poland and Its Educational Dimension by Piotr Trojański
NGOs and Their Role in Holocaust Education and Jewish Studies
Memory, Non-Memory and Post-Memory of the Holocaust: Coming Out of Amnesia in Post-Communist Poland? by Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs
Museums: Their Role in Holocaust Education and Jewish Studies
The Role of the Arts in Holocaust Education and Jewish Studies
Teaching About the Holocaust through Music by Izabella Goldstein
Jewish Culture Festivals in Poland
Conclusion
Abstract: In the context of the Dutch immigration debate, tributes to the Holocaust and the memory of Europe’s dead Jews increasingly serve to dismantle multiculturalism as a failed paradigm and to drive a wedge between a revitalized, redeemed, color-blind, post-racial Europe and disenfranchized immigrant, minority and Muslim populations. Embedded in these invocations of the Holocaust and its moral imperatives is a ‘spectropolitics’ of tolerance, in which tolerance, staged as an essential touchstone of Dutch identity, supplies a differential norm that measures the civilizational and racial disjuncture between Europeans, minorities, and Muslims, and validates the new dual paradigm of Dutch citizenship and immigration policy: securitization and disciplinary integration. The centrality of the Holocaust as paradigmatic of Dutch and European racial history meanwhile sidelines the colonial past as constitutive of European identity; displaces an alternative understanding of race as (bio- and necro-political) instruments of colonial rule; and disavows the continued application of these instruments of racial rule in Dutch and European post-colonial societies.
Abstract: Over the last 130 years attendance by Jewish children at Jewish day schools in Britain has waxed and waned, until now, in the twenty-first century, attendance figures are similar to those of the 1880s, with almost 60 per cent of Jewish children attending a Jewish primary or secondary school. Recent research has examined this trend within the Jewish population as a whole, mainly concentrating on Jewish secondary schooling. Because of the impact this phenomenon has had on chederim and because of the fundamental differences between the different branches of Judaism, it is important for Jewish educators and leaders to understand what factors lie behind the choices that parents make when deciding on their children's schooling. This study investigates the reasons why parents who are affiliated to Progressive synagogues choose to send their children to Orthodox Jewish primary schools, concentrating on one Progressive community in the north of England in particular, and contrasting the data with that from two larger and older communities. The data was collected through the use of interviews and questionnaires, then analysed in relation to the history and size of the three communities and contrasted with the conclusions of previous studies. The findings suggest that the size and relative age and history of the principal community have had a significant influence on the attitudes of the parents toward the city's Jewish community and the importance of the role of the Orthodox Jewish primary school in maintaining that community, to the extent that the parents' social identity as 'Jews' is more important to them than their synagogue affiliation.
Abstract: Modern Greek historiography has rendered Salonican Jews invisible in the national historical narrative, while those occasional works appearing in the past decades have treated them as a coherent and isolated community. In the 1970s and 1980s, a leftist historiography challenged the nationalist narrative but replaced it with a methodological ethnocentrism. The “new Greek history” was almost exclusively preoccupied with state formation, failed modernization, class structure, and the impact of the West, neglecting various religious, gender, and ethnic internal “others.” Only in the 1990s did the politics of identity and memory provide a space for the emergence of an interest in Greek-Jewish history. However, reliance on the homogenizing and static concept of community (borrowed from Greek historiography) and the absence of bottom-up, sociohistorical works still result in the exclusion of Salonican Jewry from the historiographical mainstream. The Greek-Jewish historiography of Salonica shares many of the negative features of Greek historiography, and both should turn to a systematic and multidimensional study of crossings and interrelations between axes of difference.
Abstract: After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors' own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.
