Abstract: 589 actes antisémites ont été recensés en 2021, soit une augmentation de près
de 75% par rapport à l'année précédente.
Les violences physiques ont augmenté de 36% comparativement à 2020.
‣ Les actes portant atteinte aux personnes représentent 45% des actes
antisémites, dont 10% sont des agressions physiques.
Selon les chiffres du Ministère de l'Intérieur, 73% des actes racistes portant atteinte aux
personnes sont dirigés contre des Juifs.
‣ Deux phénomènes inquiétants méritent une attention particulière :
๏ le nombre élevé d'actes antisémites commis dans la sphère privée (25% des actes
antisémites). Il s'agit essentiellement d'actes commis à proximité du domicile de la
victime, par un voisin d'immeuble ou par des personnes vivant dans le quartier.
๏ la proportion d'utilisation d'armes dans les agressions physiques (20%) et
menaces (10%) à caractère antisémite. Les armes les plus utilisées sont les couteaux
(9 cas) et les pistolets (5 cas). Les autres actes sont commis au moyen de carabines,
mortier de feu d’artifice, marteau, machette, pistolet à plomb, ciseaux.
‣ En 2021, deux pics d'augmentation des actes antisémites ont été relevés :
๏ en mai, pendant le déroulement de l'opération "Gardien des murailles" lancée par
Israël contre le Hamas. 5 actes antisémites ont été recensés en moyenne par
jour au cours de cette période. Il s'agit essentiellement d'insultes et de gestes
menaçants. Dans près de 1/3 de ces actes, le thème de la Palestine est évoqué.
๏ en août, pendant les premières mobilisations contre les restrictions sanitaires. Il
s'agit essentiellement d'inscriptions antisémites désignant les Juifs comme les profiteurs,
voire les instigateurs de la crise sanitaire.
Abstract: This study analyses how history museums in Austria, Hungary and Italy, represent the Holocaust. With close reference to debates about European Holocaust commemoration, it addresses how these exhibitions in countries closely related to Germany during the Holocaust construct the past as an object of knowledge/power. It also examines how the conceptualisation of historical agency assigns meaning and creates specific subject positions for the visitor. The research includes 21 different permanent exhibitions, established after 1989/1990, from which four, deemed representative, form the case studies. In Austria the author chose the Zeitgeschichte Museum in Ebensee, in Hungary the Holokauszt Emlékközpont in Budapest, and in Italy the Museo della Deportazione in Prato and the Museo Diffuso della Resistenza, della Deportazione, della Guerra, dei Diritti e della Libertà in Turin. Within the case studies Birga U. Meyer analyses how prisoner uniforms, perpetrator
Abstract: In Hungary, during the decades of the communist regime, mentioning Jewish values or wounds would not have fit into the idealistic consensus (and uniformity, even more). So, virtually 100,000 Hungarian Jews tried to hide or forget their roots.
After the regime change in 1989, the Jewish revival progressed with tremendous force. The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, who had hardly heard anything about Judaism or even about the history of their family at home, suddenly “reinvented” Jewish life. Institutions and grassroots places with an informal, but distinctly Jewish spirit, were born. For the new generations their Jewishness became a positive, almost “sexy” distinction from anybody else.
Interestingly, literature did not take over this vibrant revival. Despite the fact that the significant part of the Hungarian writers, especially the winners of international awards, are of Jewish descent. Thus, Jews are overrepresented in Hungarian literature. Nevertheless, this is a traditional tendency in Hungary that writers don’t really like to belong to minority groups. That’s why, Jewish themes or even the topics of the Holocaust and the representation of the life of the Second Generation, hardly fit into this mainstream perception. Recently, some of the Third and the Fourth Generation - mostly lesser-known, younger writers and especially women - have already begun to investigate the repressed memory of their families.
Abstract: Reflecting on the months since the recent October 7 attack, rarely has the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, ‘The Fragility of Freedom’, felt so poignant. Communities globally experienced the shattering of presumed security, and antisemitic incidents responsively spiked.
Antisemitism rose across both mainstream and fringe social media platforms, and communities resultantly reported a rise in insecurity and fear. CCOA constituent countries have recorded significant rises in antisemitic incidents, including an immediate 240% increase in Germany, a three-fold rise in France, and a marked increase in Italy.
The antisemitism landscape, including Holocaust denial and distortion, had shifted so drastically since October 7 that previous assumptions and understands now demand re-examination. In the run up to Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, this research compilation by members of the Coalition to Counter Online Antisemitism offers a vital contemporary examination of the current and emergent issues facing Holocaust denial and distortion online. As unique forms of antisemitism, denial and distortion are a tool of historical revisionism which specifically targets Jews, eroding Jewish experience and threatening democracy.
Across different geographies and knowledge fields, this compilation unites experts around the central and sustained proliferation of Holocaust denial and distortion on social media.
Abstract: This chapter introduces the notion of ‘enabling concepts’: concepts which may or may not themselves constitute a mode of hate speech, but which through their broad social acceptability facilitate or legitimate the articulation of concepts which can be more directly classed as hate speech. We argue that each distinct hate ideology will contain its own, partly overlapping set of ‘enabling concepts.’ In this chapter, we will focus on the enabling role of references to apartheid for the constitution of antisemitism in British online discourse around Israel. This argument does not rest on agreement as to whether the ‘apartheid analogy’—comparisons between contemporary Israel and the former Apartheid regime in South Africa—itself constitutes a form of antisemitism. The chapter draws on qualitative analysis of more than 10,000 user comments posted on social media profiles of mainstream media in the UK, undertaken by the Decoding Antisemitism project in the wake of the May 2021 escalation phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We will show how web commenters frequently use the apartheid analogy to trigger more extreme antisemitic stereotypes, including age-old tropes, intensifying and distorting analogies (such as Nazi comparisons) or calls for Israel’s elimination. The results will be presented in detail based on a pragmalinguistic approach taking into account the immediate context of the comment thread and broader world knowledge. Both of these aspects are relevant preconditions for examining all forms of antisemitic hate speech that can remain undetected when conducting solely statistical analysis. Based on this large dataset, we suggest that—under the cover of its widespread social acceptability—the apartheid analogy thus facilitates the articulation and legitimation of extreme antisemitic concepts that would, without this prior legitimation, be more likely to be rejected or countered.
Abstract: Over the past 3.5 years, the Decoding Antisemitism research project has been analysing antisemitism on the internet in terms of content, structure, and frequency. Over this time, there has been no shortage of flashpoints which have generated antisemitic responses. Yet the online response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October and the subsequent Israeli operations in Gaza has surpassed anything the project has witnessed before. In no preceding escalation phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict has the predominant antisemitic reaction been one of open jubilation and joy over the deaths of Israeli Jews. As demonstrated in the sixth and final Discourse Report, this explicit approval of the Hamas attacks was the primary response from web users. The response to 7 October therefore represents a turning point in antisemitic online discourse, and its repercussions will be felt long into the future.
The report contains analysis of the various stages of online reactions to events in the Middle East, from the immediate aftermath to the Israeli retaliations and subsequent accusations of genocide against Israel. As well as examining online reactions in the project’s core focus—the United Kingdom, France, and Germany—this report also, for the first time, extends its view to analyse Israel-related web discourses in six further countries, including those in Southern and Eastern Europe as well as in North Africa. Alongside reactions to the escalation phase, the report also examines online responses to billionaire Elon Musk’s explosive comments about Jewish individuals and institutions.
Additionally, the report provides a retrospective overview of the project’s development over the past 3.5 years, tracking its successes and challenges, particularly regarding the conditions for successful interdisciplinary work and the ability of machine learning to capture the versatility and complexity of authentic web communication.
To mark the publication of the report, we are also sharing our new, interactive data visualisations tool, which lets you examine any two discourse events analysed by our research team between 2021 and 2023. You can compare the frequencies and co-occurrences of antisemitic concepts and speech acts by type and by country, look at frequencies of keywords in antisemitic comments, and plot keyword networks.
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Discourse, Antisemitism: Monitoring, Internet, Social Media, Main Topic: Antisemitism, War, Terrorism, Attitudes to Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
Abstract: The question was asked by a girl of about 12 standing in front of the synagogue. It shows many of the aspects that play a role in the encounter with the New Synagogue Dresden as an out-of-school place of learning and which will be explored here. What is striking is a diffuse lifeworld knowledge with a simultaneous failure to differentiate between different religions, the understanding of symbolism and the double occupation of “Why?” between causal and final cognitive interest. On the one hand, then, the question speaks to the consideration of for what reason, and on the other hand, for what purpose, certain signs and practices occur. After an introduction to the New Synagogue, its potentials for the development of competencies, especially among children and young people, are explored. After that, the focus is on the conditions necessary for its use, and another section deals with the specific difficulties that can arise. The book concludes with a plea for the synagogue as an out-of-school place of learning, also beyond the topic of Judaism.
Abstract: Common antisemitic visual representations are rooted in Ancient Christianity and the Middle Ages, but we have also witnessed new developments after the Holocaust and the condemnation of fascism. Stereotyping and dehumanization through zoomorphism, demonization, exaggeration of certain physical features anchored in the false presumptions of physiognomy and other visual devices have been weaponized across the centuries for racist and antisemitic agendas. This study undergoes a comparative analysis of two corpuses of antisemitic images from the Romanian press and social media at a distance of one century between them. I analyze the persistency, transformations, and new developments of antisemitic image codes popularized by the Romanian far-right from the start of the 20th century, through to the rise of fascism and the Second World War, up to the present-day social media. This visual qualitative analysis with critical historical insights is carried out on the following corpuses: a) a contemporary subset of 81 memes, digital stickers, and other visuals from 17 Romanian far-right Telegram channels and groups posted over the course of one year (August 2022 – August 2023); and b) 70 archival political cartoons published by 17 far-right ultranationalist newspapers (and one pro-Soviet communist newspaper) between 1911 and 1948. Findings show how persistent certain antisemitic stereotypes have proven across time and different cultural spaces – the hook-nose, zoomorphism, the blood-libel accusations, Judeo-Bolshevism, the satanic representations – and how the visual dimension serves to efficiently implant antisemitic narratives in the collective mind. These (visual) narratives are skillfully recontextualized to fit new (geo-)political realities – the post-Holocaust times, the COVID-19 crisis, the war in Ukraine.
Abstract: Love, to a significant other, can be the motivation for migration, inform a migration trajectory, or provide reasons for remaining in situ. Even so, love remains in the undercurrents of migration research. It is not explicitly addressed, even though it underpins migration within the constellation of arranged marriage, or if the pursuit of love is limited by social structures, or law. This paper links the dynamics of agentic love and self-initiated migration by way of German (non-Jewish) and Israeli (Jewish) migrants in Israel and Germany, respectively. It highlights individual trajectories of love migrants, establishing that love within the area of migration studies needs to be conceptualised as multifaceted and complex, at times contradictory, and as part of an affective trajectory of the migration process; and that the ability to follow up on falling in love, and to actualise love, cannot be unhinged from privilege.
Abstract: CST’s Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023 shows 4,103 instances of anti-Jewish hate recorded across the UK in 2023. This is the highest annual total ever reported to CST. It is a 147% rise from the 1,662 antisemitic incidents in 2022, and 81% higher than the previous yearly record of 2,261 incidents, reported in 2021. CST recorded 1,684 antisemitic incidents in 2020, and 1,813 in 2019.
A further 2,185 potential incidents were reported to CST that are not included among this report’s statistics as, upon investigation, they were not deemed to be antisemitic. Many of these incidents involve suspicious activity or possible hostile reconnaissance at Jewish locations, criminal activity affecting Jewish people and buildings, and anti-Israel activity that did not include antisemitic language, motivation or targeting.
The record total of anti-Jewish hate incidents in 2023 is a result of the unparallelled volume of antisemitism perpetrated following the Hamas terror attack on Israel on 7 October. Of the 4,103 instances of anti-Jewish hate reported, 2,699 (66%) occurred on or after 7 October. This figure alone exceeds any previous annual antisemitic incident total recorded by CST, and marks an increase of 589% from the 392 instances of antisemitism reported to CST over the same time period in 2022.
Abstract: After the 1968 emigration, very few Jews remained in Poland, and even more miniscule was the number of “Jewish Jews.” Since then the number has grown somewhat, and much of it is due to the process of de-assimilation; i.e., some people with Jewish ancestors raised in completely Polonized families began to recover, reclaim, and readapt their Jewish background. An analysis of this phenomenon is offered with a series of putative reasons for its occurrence. The individuals constituting the “products” of de-assimilation are the majority of Polish Jews today and form much of the current leadership. While individuals everywhere can strengthen their ties to the Jewish people and can experience teshuvah or another kind of “Judaization,” the process of de-assimilation does not seem to be reducible to those moves. It begins with no Jewish identity, and is highly dependent on the attitudes and cultural trends in the majority society. It does not remove the de-assimilationists from the majority culture. The phenomenon is general and deserves to be studied as a sociological mechanism working in other cases of assimilation to a majority culture. In the Jewish case, it is especially dramatic. Probably the first example can be found in the evolution of the Marrano communities settled in Holland. The presence of de-assimilation seems to differentiate some European, first of all East European, communities from the globally dominant American and Israeli ones. Probably this rather new concept is needed to describe a significant part of the world of the Jews of twenty-first century Europe.
Abstract: This landmark study provides a detailed and updated profile of how British Jews understand and live their Jewish lives. It is based on JPR’s National Jewish Identity Survey, conducted in November-December 2022 among nearly 5,000 members of the JPR research panel. It is the largest survey of its kind and the most comprehensive study of Jewish identity to date.
The report, written by Dr David Graham and Dr Jonathan Boyd, covers a variety of key themes in contemporary Jewish life, including religious belief and affiliation, Jewish education and cultural consumption, Jewish ethnicity, Zionism and attachment to Israel, antisemitism, charitable giving and volunteering, and the relationship between community engagement and happiness.
Some of the key findings in this report:
Just 34% of British Jews believe in God ‘as described in the Bible’. However, over half of British Jewish adults belong to a synagogue and many more practice aspects of Jewish religious culture.
94% of Jews in the UK say that moral and ethical behaviour is an important part of their Jewish identities. Nearly 9 out of 10 British Jews reported making at least one charitable donation yearly.
88% of British Jews have been to Israel at least once, and 73% say that they feel very or somewhat attached to the country. However, the proportion identifying as ‘Zionists’ has fallen from 72% to 63% over the past decade.
Close to a third of all British Jewish adults personally experienced some kind of antisemitic incident in the year before the survey, a much higher number than that recorded in police or community incident counts.
Abstract: In the lives of students in Luxembourg’s Liberal Jewish complementary school, flexibility and mobility are highly valued as key characteristics of modern living. Complementary school students feel they easily meet these criteria—they are multilingual, cosmopolitan, and their approach to Jewish life is flexible, and equally importantly, they look, dress, and comport themselves “like everyone else.” These factors are understood to facilitate multiple movements and belongings in the contemporary world. The students directly contrast their ways of being with those of more observant Jews whom they refer to as “religious”; the material, embodied, and visible nature of observant Jewish life is perceived to be an impediment to participation and success in the secular sphere. However, when Jewishness appears in these students’ secular school classrooms, it is most often represented by Orthodox-presenting men—often a man in a yarmulke. Further, these men and their yarmulkes are taken to represent all Jews, framed as a homogeneous group of religious adherents. For many complementary school students, these experiences can be jarring—they suddenly find themselves on the “wrong” side of the religious–secular divide and grouped together with those from whom they could not feel more distant. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a material approach to religion, this article argues that the yarmulke comes to point to different levels and modes of observance and identities and enable different possible belongings in the secular public sphere as it travels across contexts that include different definitions of and attitudes toward religion and Jewishness.
Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: The initiatives that took place to support Israeli families temporarily in the UK
started within three days after 7th October.
• Key organisations in the Jewish Community came together to help: JAFI, UJIA,
PaJeS, CST.
• They were supported by other organisations in various ways, e.g. JVN, and by
many individuals.
• There was a huge gap between the large number of expressions of interest in
school places and eventual places taken up.
• Each Local Education Authority Admissions process was different from each other,
and LEAs waived usual procedures to be accommodating and speed up the
admissions processes.
• Almost all temporary Israeli families were able to visit their UK school prior to
accepting a place and starting school.
• By November, more than 100 children had been placed in schools, mostly in the
primary sector.
• Whilst each school dealt uniquely with the situation of having temporary families in
their schools, there were many commonalities, e.g. acquiring school uniform,
communication, pairing with other Hebrew speakers.
• Relating to the school system in the UK has been a steep learning curve for these
families.
• PaJeS has been significantly involved in providing support, especially in
admissions advice, Hebrew, wellbeing, funding and resources.
• A concern at the beginning, which was that the regular school population would be
disadvantage by schools accepting these additional families, has not materialised.
• By the beginning of December 2023, although some families are still arriving, the
number of Israelis temporarily in UK schools has already begun to decrease.
• Some families who are leaving, want an option to return and want schools to “save”
their places for them, which challenges the schools.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between marriage and conversion from a critical gender perspective, based on a comparative ethnographic study of women’s conversion to Judaism, Islam and Christianity in the Netherlands. In the study of religion and gender, a valuable conceptual framework developed that questions the limited representation of religious women (as somehow ‘oppressed’) and recognises agency within observance. However, up to now, theories and conceptualisations of female conversion have not been able to successfully deal with the tension between individual agency and relationality, more concretely: between individual choice and the impact of intimate relationships. This article suggests a framework more capable of grasping the complexities of conversion and marriage, by introducing the concept of mixedness. In this approach, relationships are understood as agential spaces of religious becoming. Conversion forms and reforms what is ‘mixed’ within a relationship, and intimate relationships indeed play an important role in religious becoming. The goal is to move beyond the binary options that women seem to have to vocalise their process: either they convert because of someone else (implying less agency) or their religious transformation is an expression of autonomous, individual choice (neglecting the impact of relationships). Mixedness highlights the dynamic and fluid aspects of intimate relationships, whilst simultaneously focusing on the interactions between the couples’ experiences of mixedness and social norms of majority and minority religio-racial groups.
Abstract: This article analyses the experiences of Dutch women who became Jewish via a giyur process. While the past decade has seen an increased interest in the ethnographic study of women’s conversion, little is known about the process of giyur from a gender and everyday perspective, which is what this article focuses on. This is based on ethnographic research and interviews with 20 (Orthodox and non-Orthodox) converts. The main focus of this article is on the negotiations of gender and power in the process of giyur. The role of gender difference seemed to be one of the most important experienced differences between Orthodox and Liberal/Progressive forms of Jewish life. Not only is there an impact in the decision to join one or another community, but notions of gender and sexuality also influence the whole process of giyur, from first attraction to continued learning, implementation, and practicing of a “Jewish life.” Women have to deal with the power of the rabbinic court, who eventually can decide whether a candidate is allowed to become Jewish. However, questions of authority and individual choice played a role in different gendered areas as well: the position of women in the synagogue, reflections on the impact of relationships and the implementation of certain commandments in their everyday lives. Analysing these dynamics offers insight into the intersections of gender, power and conversion, as well as the role of gender in contemporary Jewry.
Abstract: This cross-sectional study follows Open Science principles in estimating relationships between antisemitism, i.e. anti-Jewish bigotry, and conspiracy belief, i.e. endorsement of conspiracy theories, through analysis of data collected from a representative sample of UK adults (n=1722). Antisemitism was measured using the Generalized Antisemitism scale, and conspiracy belief was measured using the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale. Positive relationships were found to exist between all forms of antisemitism and all types of conspiracy belief, and an average across all items of the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs scale was found to predict Generalized Antisemitism at least as well as any individual type of conspiracy belief. On a more detailed level, antisemitic attitudes relating to British Jews were found to be most strongly associated with belief in conspiracies relating to personal well-being, while antisemitic attitudes relating to the State of Israel and its supporters were found to be most strongly associated with belief in conspiracies relating to government malfeasance. Generalized Antisemitism itself was found to be most strongly associated with belief in malevolent global conspiracies. Exploratory analysis additionally examined the effect of standard demographic variables that had been introduced into the main analysis as controls. Through this means, it was found that antisemitic attitudes relating both to Jews qua Jews and to Israel and its supporters are more prevalent among less highly educated people and members of other-than-white ethnic groups, while antisemitic attitudes relating to Israel and its supporters are more common among younger people. In addition, it was found that female gender is associated with reduced antisemitic attitudes relating to Jews qua Jews and also with increased antisemitic attitudes relating to Israel and its supporters. However, the addition of demographic controls did not explain any additional variance in Generalized Antisemitism beyond that which was already explained by conspiracy belief – perhaps suggesting that demographic characteristics are more strongly associated with the inclination towards particular expressions of antisemitism than with antisemitism itself.
Abstract: This paper examines the geographies of how young people, aged 11–25, in the Greek, Jewish and Palestinian diasporas in the Midlands region of England articulate notions of formal and informal politics. In doing so, it connects work on diasporic politics with work on the geographies of diaspora, young people's politics, and, in particular, diasporic youth politics. The paper discusses how young people have views on politics and on being political but feel that they struggle to have their voices heard by those in positions of power. At the same time, it paints a picture of how these participants articulate such feelings of politics in complex, multi-scalar, multi-directional ways. In doing so, they are potentially creating new spaces to feel and be political. The paper therefore stresses that it is important that diasporic politics takes into account the views of young people and that assumptions should not be made as to where such politics are located.
Abstract: This article follows up on assumptions of Rogers Brubaker and Benjamin Moffitt, according to whom, some Western and Northern European right-wing populist parties use ‘civilisationist’ and liberal-illiberal narratives that are, for instance, characterised by a ‘philo-Semitic stance’. The paper analyses to what extent the German right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) fits into this concept, considering the party’s ambivalent attitude towards Judaism, Jews, and Israel. Using qualitative content analysis, the study is based on an examination of AfD electoral manifestos and parliamentary documents from the federal level as well as from states such as Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, and Thuringia between 2014 and 2019. Our results reveal differences that range from open anti-Semitic statements to self-definitions as a ‘pro-Jewish’ party. We argue that different positions can be explained by regionally divergent discursive opportunity structures as well as personnel heterogeneity across the party sections under study. Furthermore, we reason that a combination of anti-Semitic and pro-Jewish/Israeli statements fits into the AfD’s strategy of addressing both voters from the radical right with anti-Semitic prejudices and more moderate, conservative voters that reject open hostility towards Jews and Israel. We conclude that the AfD fulfils Brubaker’s and Moffitt’s concepts only to a rather limited extent.