Abstract: This dissertation investigates the postwar development of the Hollandsche Schouwburg, an in situ Shoah memorial museum in Amsterdam, within the fields of memory, heritage and museum studies. During World War II, over forty-six thousand Jews were imprisoned in this former theater before being deported to the transit camps. In 1962, it became the first national Shoah memorial of the Netherlands and in 1993, a small exhibition was added. In the spring of 2016, the National Holocaust Museum opened, which consists of the Hollandsche Schouwburg and a new satellite space across the street.
This dissertation deals with the question how this site of painful heritage became an important memorial museum dedicated to the memory of the persecution of the Dutch Jews. I argue that this former theater was not a site of oblivion before 1962 but rather a material reminder of the persecution of the Jews which at that time was not an articulated part of the hegemonic memory discourse of the war in the Netherlands. The memorial was gradually appropriated by important Jewish institutions through the installment of Yom HaShoah, an educational exhibition and a wall of names. These are analyzed not by focusing on material authenticity, but instead a case is made for latent indexicality: visitors actively produce narratives by searching for traces of the past. This entails an ongoing creative process of meaning-making that allows sites of memory to expand and proliferate beyond their borders. An important question therefore is how the Hollandsche Schouwburg affects its direct surroundings.
Abstract: In June 2015, the Anne Frank House organised an international conference in Amsterdam in order to compare the situations in four different European countries. Relevant representatives of government authorities, football associations, football clubs, anti-discrimination organisations and supporters from Engeland, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands were invited to join the event.In each of these countries, football-related antisemitism is a well-known phenomenon, yet the incidents vary with regard to background, context and scope. The primary objective of the Anne Frank House was to come to a mutual cross-fertilisation of know-how and experiences with regard to this topic.
This report is based on this two-day conference, and discusses the most significant and illuminating aspects of the expert lectures and additional seminars. The most significant and insightful results from the two-day conference in Amsterdam will form a starting point for future developments in the fight against football-related antisemitism in the aforementioned countries.
Abstract: This book is the first comprehensive study of postwar antisemitism in the Netherlands. It focuses on the way stereotypes are passed on from one decade to the next, as reflected in public debates, the mass media, protests and commemorations, and everyday interactions. The Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew' explores the ways in which old stories and phrases relating to 'the stereotypical Jew' are recycled and modified for new uses, linking the antisemitism of the early postwar years to its enduring manifestations in today's world.
The Dutch case is interesting because of the apparent contrast between the Netherlands' famous tradition of tolerance and the large numbers of Jews who were deported and murdered in the Second World War. The book sheds light on the dark side of this so-called 'Dutch paradox,' in manifestations of aversion and guilt after 1945. In this context, the abusive taunt 'They forgot to gas you' can be seen as the first radical expression of postwar antisemitism as well as an indication of how the Holocaust came to be turned against the Jews. The identification of 'the Jew' with the gas chamber spread from the streets to football stadiums, and from verbal abuse to pamphlet and protest. The slogan 'Hamas, Hamas all the Jews to the gas' indicates that Israel became a second marker of postwar antisemitism.
The chapters cover themes including soccer-related antisemitism, Jewish responses, philosemitism, antisemitism in Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch- Turkish communities, contentious acts of remembrance, the neo-Nazi tradition, and the legacy of Theo van Gogh. The book concludes with a lengthy epilogue on 'the Jew' in the politics of the radical right, the attacks in Paris in 2015, and the refugee crisis. The stereotype of 'the Jew' appears to be transferable to other minorities.
Contents:
Preface
1 Why Jews are more guilty than others : An introductory essay, 1945-2016
Evelien Gans
Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
Evelien Gans
3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
Evelien Gans
4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
Remco Ensel, Evelien Gans and Willem Wagenaar
5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
Evelien Gans
Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
6 Philosemitism? Ambivalences regarding Israel
Evelien Gans
7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
Remco Ensel
8 Israel: Source of Divergence
Evelien Gans
9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
Katie Digan
10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
Annemarike Stremmelaar
Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains
since the 1980s
11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
Evelien Gans
12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
Evelien Gans
13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans
Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
Remco Ensel
15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
Remco Ensel
16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
Annemarike Stremmelaar
17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
Remco Ensel
18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
Evelien Gans
Abstract: This chapter offers a comparative overview of immigrant trajectories and inte-gration outcomes of Russian-Jewish youths (the so-called 1.5 generation) who immigrated to Israel and Germany with their families over the last 25 years. At the outset, I compare Israeli and German reception contexts and policies and present the generic features of the 1.5 immigrant generation. Next I overview the Israeli research findings on Russian Israeli 1.5ers – their schooling, social mobility, cultural and linguistic practices, parents’ role in their integration, and juxtapose them with (still limited) German data. e final section presents two recent German studies of young Russian-Jewish adults and the initial findings from my own study among these immigrants living in four German cities. My interviews with 20 men and women, mostly successful professionals or entrepreneurs, indicate that their upward social mobility was facilitated by the continuous welfare support of their families, school integration programs, and low financial barriers to higher education. Despite common occupation-al and social downgrading of the parental generation in both countries, the 1.5-ers in Israel had to struggle harder to overcome their inherent immigrant disadvantage vs. native peers to access good schools and professional careers. Most young immigrants deem full assimilation in the host country’s main-stream unattainable and opt instead for a bilingual and/or bicultural strategy of integration
Abstract: This book offers an ethnographic inquiry into the notion of ‘living together’ [samenleven], investigating its historical emergence and role in ‘culturalist’ and secularist politics in Flanders, as well as how it shapes everyday life in diverse urban neighborhoods. The term culturalism was coined to denote the exclusionary discourses that have emerged in postcolonial Europe positing migrants as cultural ‘strangers’ from which the nation and the perceived original, ‘autochthonous’ population need to be safeguarded. This book reveals how culturalism resulted in a new political project to ‘heal’ an assumed deficit of fellow feeling in multi-ethnic urban neighborhoods and a new political-ethical injunction for denizens to ‘live together’ with their ‘strange’ neighbors.
The book focuses on two Antwerpean neighborhoods - Oud-Borgerhout and the ‘Jewish Neighborhood’ – and follows the neighborhood engagements of white Belgian, Moroccan-Belgian, and Jewish Belgian denizens. Due to the politics of ‘living together’, everyday neighborhood life has become a stage, on which denizens are confronted with ethical and philosophical questions to which secure or comfortable answers are never found: about the nature and ethics of ‘objective’ perception; the diagnostics of strangeness; and the nature of fulfilled subject-hood and ‘true’ sociability. Denizens try to position themselves in relation to these questions through largely internal performative contestations - between so-called ‘old’ and ‘new Belgians’, ‘modern’ and ‘pious Jews’, ‘decent’ and ‘bad Moroccans’. Tracing these negotiations, this book pushes for an understanding of lived culturalism in contemporary Europe that attends to the complexities and ambivalences in, and beyond, the imbrication of the allochthon-autochthon divide in denizens’ (self)understandings.
