Abstract: In early 2018, the Polish parliament adopted controversial legislation criminalising assertions regarding the complicity of the ‘Polish Nation’ and the ‘Polish State’ in the Holocaust. The so-called Polish Holocaust Law provoked not only a heated debate in Poland, but also serious international tensions. As a result, it was amended only five months after its adoption. The reason why it is worth taking a closer look at the socio-cultural foundations and political functions of the short-lived legislation is twofold. Empirically, the short history of the Law reveals a great deal about the long-term role of Jews in the Polish collective memory as an unmatched Significant Other. Conceptually, the short life of the Law, along with its afterlife, helps capture poll-driven, manifestly moralistic and anti-pluralist imaginings of the past, which I refer to as ‘mnemonic populism’. By exploring the relationship between popular and political images of the past in contemporary Poland, this article argues for joining memory and populism studies in order to better understand what can happen to history in illiberal surroundings.
Abstract: In the wake of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine has witnessed a substantial growth in organized anti-Semitism. Central to this development is an organization, known as the Interregional Academy of Human Resources, better known by its Ukrainian acronym MAUP. It operates a well-connected political network that reaches the very top of the Ukrainian society. MAUP is the largest private university in Ukraine, with 57,000 students at 24 regional campuses. MAUP is connected to the KKK; David Duke is teaching courses in history and international relations at the university. Funded by Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran, MAUP’s printing house publishes about 85% of the anti-Semitic literature in Ukraine. Until very recently, Ukrainian President Yushchenko and Foreign Minister Tarasiuk served on its board; former President Kravchuk still does. This paper is a study of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, of its intellectual roots, influence and strength. It traces the Soviet, Christian, German and racist political traditions and outlines the political ambitions of organized anti-Semitism in post-Orange Revolution Ukraine.
Abstract: This book explores the Holocaust exhibition opened within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2000; setting out the long and often contentious debates surrounding the conception, design, and finally the opening of an important exhibition within a national museum in Britain. It considers a process of memory-making through an assessment of Holocaust photographs, material culture, and survivor testimonies; exploring theories of cultural memory as they apply to the national museum context. Anchored in time and place, the Holocaust exhibition within Britain's national museum of war is influenced by, and reflects, an international rise in Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. This book considers the construction of Holocaust memory in 1990s Britain, providing a foundation for understanding current and future national memory projects. Through all aspects of the display, the Holocaust is presented as meaningful in terms of what it says about Nazism and what this, in turn, says about Britishness. From the original debates surrounding the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery at the IWM, to the acquisition of Holocaust artefacts that could act as 'concrete evidence' of Nazi barbarity and criminality, the Holocaust reaffirms an image of Britain that avoids critical self-reflection despite raising uncomfortably close questions. The various display elements are brought together to consider multiple strands of the Holocaust story as it is told by national museums in Britain
Abstract: The 3-year pilot project presented here aims at analyzing antisemitic hate speech and imagery on mainstream news websites and social media platforms in different European contexts. Current forms of antisemitism will be examined in various ways by three international research teams from Germany, France, and the UK.
First, the datasets will be studied in detail (qualitative analysis based on pragmalinguistic, image analytical and historical approaches), taking into account explicit as well as implicit forms of communication (TU Berlin).
The resulting annotated datasets will provide training, validation, and test data for supervised machine learning techniques (King’s College London).
Eventually, all studied phenomena will be measured over time through statistical/quantitative analysis (TU Berlin and King’s College London).
The project stands in contrast to previous quantitative research on antisemitism online due to a) its awareness of verbal and visual complexity in the respective cultural and situational contexts, and b) its detailed, multimodal approach. Thus, it will provide the most accurate picture yet of the full extent of Jew-hatred on the interactive web.
The focus of the pilot project will be on German, English and French websites and their respective social media platforms. After the initial three year period, the focus will broaden out to investigate other European language communities.
The project will make a major contribution to the study of viral hate in different cultural contexts. Moreover, the researchers will engage in an ongoing dialogue not only with academia, but also with political, media and pedagogical institutions. An additional output will be an open source tool that will help to identify the full extent of antisemitism in various web milieus.
The half-yearly discourse reports share central insights of the ongoing research outcomes of the project "Decoding Antisemitism" and review unfolding trends.
The second discourse report presents the definitional basis of our analyses and for the first time provides comprehensive insights into our corpus analyses relating to Great Britain, France and Germany.
Abstract: The 3-year pilot project presented here aims at analyzing antisemitic hate speech and imagery on mainstream news websites and social media platforms in different European contexts. Current forms of antisemitism will be examined in various ways by three international research teams from Germany, France, and the UK.
First, the datasets will be studied in detail (qualitative analysis based on pragmalinguistic, image analytical and historical approaches), taking into account explicit as well as implicit forms of communication (TU Berlin).
The resulting annotated datasets will provide training, validation, and test data for supervised machine learning techniques (King’s College London).
Eventually, all studied phenomena will be measured over time through statistical/quantitative analysis (TU Berlin and King’s College London).
The project stands in contrast to previous quantitative research on antisemitism online due to a) its awareness of verbal and visual complexity in the respective cultural and situational contexts, and b) its detailed, multimodal approach. Thus, it will provide the most accurate picture yet of the full extent of Jew-hatred on the interactive web.
The focus of the pilot project will be on German, English and French websites and their respective social media platforms. After the initial three year period, the focus will broaden out to investigate other European language communities.
The project will make a major contribution to the study of viral hate in different cultural contexts. Moreover, the researchers will engage in an ongoing dialogue not only with academia, but also with political, media and pedagogical institutions. An additional output will be an open source tool that will help to identify the full extent of antisemitism in various web milieus.
The half-yearly discourse reports share central insights of the ongoing research outcomes of the project "Decoding Antisemitism" and review unfolding trends.
The first discourse report provides insight into the methodological approaches and the nature of antisemitic hate speech in selected discourse spaces.
Abstract: In this paper, the question of importance of Judeo--Spanish as the means for maintaining ethnic identity among the Sephardim in the territories of former Yugoslavia is investigated through an analysis of articles dedicated to the topic published in El amigo del puevlo (a Judeo-Spanish periodical which first was published in Serbia, and then in Bulgaria), fragments from the books by Angel Pulido, Los israelitas espanoles y el idioma castellano (Madrid 1904) and Espanoles sin patria y la raza sefardi (Madrid 1905),as well as unpublished documents from the Archive of Serbia and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.The present analysis suggests that a specific language ideology(negative attitudes towards the minority language in question) has played a crucial role in language shift in favor of the majority languages in the region (which has not jeopardized the concept of ethnic identity and membership), thus supporting findings by other authors(e.g., Myhill 2004, Weis 2000) that the maintenance of ethnic identity among Jews over the centuries has often been strengthened bycultural (religious, traditional, literary, etc.) rather than linguistic criteria. From the theoretical standpoint, this research clearly supports the view that the construction of ethnicity and ethnic identity should be viewed as a complex process in which different factors (language being only one of them) have different values and saliency at different points in time (e.g., see Fishman 1989; 1999)
Abstract: This paper specifies and describes the main four stages and strategies of intercultural and memory survival of Sephardic women in Bosnia in the past (during the interwar period) and in the contemporary world (before, during, and after the collapse of Yugoslavia). The first strategy, named here as a (manu)script and orality/textuality one, is illustrated by a study Sephardic Woman in Bosnia (1932) by Jewish Sarajevo feminist Laura Papo Bohoreta (1891–1942). The second one, labeled as a translation and print strategy, is connected with the activity of Muhamed Nezirović (1934–2008), especially his translation of Papo’s book from Ladino into Bosnian (2005). The third one, recognized here as a cultural transfer strategy, is represented by the novels The Scent of Rain in the Balkans (1986) and The Ballad of Bohoreta (2006) by contemporary Serbian female writer Gordana Kuić (1942). And—last but not least—the fourth strategy of digitizing manuscripts and archival texts by Laura Papo is represented by Edina Spahić, Cecilia Prenz Kopušar, and Sejdalija Gušić, a team who prepared and has recently edited three collected books with Papo’s manuscripts (2015–2017
Abstract: Introduction: The importance of multiculturalism for the development of tourism, consistently emphasized in the literature, shows the long history and rich tradition of this form of tourism. Poland has
historically been a land of transition between East and West, a land where different cultures have existed
side by side: German, Jewish, Polish, and Russian. For centuries Poland was a meeting place of different
religions and cultures and today’s landscape still shows evidence of this. The catastrophe of World War II
brought the annihilation of a multicultural society and created a homogeneity, unprecedented in our history.
Jewish heritage and urban cultural tourism: In their almost 2000-year diaspora, Jews have been
present in Poland for eight hundred years: from the early middle ages until the Holocaust, the annihilation during World War II. The Jews were distinguished from other community groups by their religion,
language, customs, art and architecture. In the interwar period of the 20th century, Poland was home to
the largest Jewish community in Europe, distinguished by its enormous cultural and intellectual vitality.
Pandemic time: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the tourism sector hard, and travel
restrictions still apply to us. Therefore, it is necessary to verify the forecasts and prepare new recommendations for cultural tourism destinations during and after the pandemic.
Conclusions: Recently there has been a revival of interests in Jewish heritage and many tourists
(both domestic and foreign) want to explore Jewish culture and remaining monuments of the past.
Despite pandemic time restrictions it is also possible, however new actions and policy are required to
secure sanitary recommendations and rebuild consumer confidence.
Abstract: What is the nature of interactions between Jews and Muslims in contemporary Dubai, Berlin, and Warsaw? The purpose of the three presented case studies is to evaluate the state of affairs and identify newly emerging trends and patterns in the given trans-urban context. The methodology is based on qualitative anthropological research, emphasising an emic perspective that centralises respondents’ own lived experiences and worldviews. The main research’s findings made evident that interactions between Muslims and Jews in each examined location are, to various extents, acknowledged, and in some cases, also embody a formative part of public discourses. Perhaps the most visible manifestations of these relations are represented by the ambitious interfaith projects that were recently established in each geographical area in focus. The Abrahamic Family House (UEA), The House of One (GE), and The Community of Conscience (PL) reveal the aspirations of multi-faith religious leaders to overcome polarising dichotomies and search for common ground. One of the conclusive outcomes of the study is a somewhat diminishing impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on the Jewish–Muslim relations; however, the extent differs in each destination in focus. Finally, an unpredicted observation can be made. A surfacing inclination towards embracing a joint Muslim–Jewish Middle Eastern identity was perceived
Abstract: In current political developments in Europe and the USA, it is striking that a strengthening of nationalism goes hand in hand with certain gender stereotypes, and often this discourse is also linked to moments of antisemitism. Using the example of the Austrian Freedom Party, this chapter analyses this mutual interplay of ideologies and elaborates in particular on the question of how and to what extent an antisemitism that is not expressed openly, can latently be effective in nationalism and antifeminism. Especially against the background of the taboo of manifest and racist antisemitism in the Western, post-national-socialist political public sphere in Germany and Austria, an analysis of this phenomenon is highly relevant. I call this phenomenon the intersectionality of ideologies. It can provide insight into whether antisemitism, as sometimes pretended, has actually been overcome, or whether it is not in fact effective within other ideologies, such as nationalism or antifeminism. The chapter will therefore focus on an analysis of the similarities of antisemitic and antifeminist discourses in the Austrian Freedom Party and their contribution to the strengthening of a nationalist collective.
Abstract: Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-à-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author’s first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.
Abstract: This study explores how an extreme far-right alternative media site uses content from professional media to convey uncivil news with an antisemitic message. Analytically, it rests on a critical discourse analysis of 231 news items, originating from established national and international news sources, published on Frihetskamp from 2011–2018. In the study, we explore how news items are recontextualised to portray both overt and covert antisemitic discourses, and we identify four antisemitic representations that are reinforced through the selection and adjustment of news: Jews as powerful, as intolerant and anti-liberal, as exploiters of victimhood, and as inferior. These conspiratorial and exclusionary ideas, also known from historical Nazi propaganda, are thus reproduced by linking them to con-temporary societal and political contexts and the current news agenda. We argue that this kind of recontextualised, uncivil news can be difficult to detect in a digital public sphere.
Abstract: Culture is the cornerstone where societies have always supported their respective identities. It is a way of life, as long as it expresses not only the values, but also the education, the art, and the daily life of all those who live and work in a society. Thessaloniki has been a multicultural city, gathering populations from different nations and religions over time. The city was a refuge destination for many persecuted Jews in Europe, between 1492 and 1943, which led to the creation of a large Jewish community. As a result, the long tradition combined with the several elements of Jewish cultural interest attracts a large number of tourists from Israel every year. This paper presents the main research results conducted in Thessaloniki regarding tourists’ from Israel motivations and characteristics, but also their main elements of interest. Thessaloniki has all the essential elements, such as history, tradition, monuments, infrastructure, and services for the development of cultural tourism. These, however, need to be improved, so that the city of Thessaloniki becomes a more popular tourist destination for Israelis.
Abstract: The number of Jewish pupils enrolled in Jewish schools has been climbing consistently for several decades and has increased significantly since the mid-1990s. This rise, described in previous JPR Jewish schools bulletins, has taken place in both the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘strictly Orthodox’ sectors. However, JPR’s new schools bulletin reports that, while the number of registered pupils in 2021/21 shows an overall increase of 1,612 pupils on three years previously, the growth rate has moderated in recent years, nearly flattening within the mainstream sector.
“These new findings are already playing an important role in helping community leaders to plan the future of Jewish education in this country”, says Dr Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of JPR. “The clear slowdown in growth in the mainstream sector, particularly at primary level, urgently needs to be understood to ensure that all Jewish children who wish to be educated within the Jewish school system can continue to be offered that opportunity.”
Some of the key findings in this report:
35,825 Jewish pupils were studying in 133 Jewish schools in the academic year 2020/21. This represents an increase of 1,612 pupils, or 4.7%, since 2017/18.
60% of Jewish pupils in Jewish schools are in strictly Orthodox schools; 40% are in non-strictly Orthodox or ‘mainstream’ Jewish schools, a slight shift from 58% to 42% three years previously.
Almost three-quarters of all Jewish pupils in Jewish schools are in schools in Greater London or South Hertfordshire (73.3%) – a drop from 74.6% in the 2017/18 academic year that is influenced by a shift towards Manchester (27% to 29%) and away from London (67% to 65%) in the strictly Orthodox sector.
The geographical distinction between London and elsewhere is most pronounced in the mainstream Jewish sector, where 86% attend schools in London or the surrounding area.
Overall, there has been growth in the numbers of both primary and secondary school pupils since 2017/18, but this conceals a fall in primary pupil numbers for the mainstream Jewish sector over the last two academic years.
Abstract: This thesis focuses on young Christians’, Jews’ and Muslims’ experiences of interfaith work in the UK and what impact(s) being involved in interfaith might have on their religious, social, ethical and political identities. It is situated in a growing academic and policy interest in interfaith work as a means to build cohesive communities, mitigate tension and conflicts, and encourage active citizenship. It also engages with still under-explored questions around how young people active in interfaith work are affected by this activism. The aim is not only to understand how and why young people from different religions are involved in interfaith work, but also the impact being involved in interfaith work might have on young people’s identities and sense of belonging. Focusing on the biographical accounts of young Christians, Jews and Muslims involved in three different interfaith organisations in UK, the thesis explores how the young people have become interested in interfaith work; the relationships, messages and contexts that have been important in forging this interest and activism; what interfaith work means to them socially, theologically, ethically and politically; and the challenges they have experienced with this form of faith-based engagement. Drawing on Kate Tilleczek’s ‘complex cultural nesting approach’, this thesis attends to the young people’s complex personal experiences of interfaith work and the different social actors, contexts and frameworks that have been important in forming this interest. The thesis shows that, to understand young people’s interfaith work, we need a multidimensional approach that considers social and theological dimensions in young people’s lives; look at how interfaith work is a means to fulfil social and political goals, but also forms of theological commitment; and explore how challenges facing interfaith work inform young people’s experiences in different ways, particularly theological, social and political tension in relation to interfaith space, religious congregations and British society at large.
