Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.
Abstract: As one of the most visited museums in Germany’s capital city, the Jewish Museum Berlin is a key site for understanding not only German-Jewish history, but also German identity in an era of unprecedented ethnic and religious diversity. Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners experience the Museum. How do modern students relate to the museum’s evocative architecture, its cultural-political context, and its narrative of Jewish history? By accompanying a range of high school history students before, during, and after their visits to the museum, this book offers an illuminating exploration of political education, affect, remembrance, and belonging.
Abstract: How attached do European Jews feel to the countries in which they live? Or to the European Union? And are their loyalties ‘divided’ in some way – between their home country and Israel? Answering these types of questions helps us to see how integrated European Jews feel today, and brings some empiricism to the antisemitic claim that Jews don’t fully ‘belong.’
This mini-report, based on JPR's groundbreaking report ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews’, explores European Jews’ levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, to Israel, and to the European Union, and compares them with those of wider society and other minority groups across Europe. Some of the key findings in this study written by Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit include:
European Jews tend to feel somewhat less strongly attached to the countries in which they live than the general population of those countries, but more strongly attached than other minority groups and people of no religion.
That said, levels of strong attachment to country vary significantly from one country to another, both among Jews and others.
European Jews tend to feel somewhat more strongly attached to the European Union than the general populations of their countries, although in many cases, the distinctions are small.
Some European Jewish populations feel more strongly attached to Israel than to the countries in which they live, and some do not. The Jewish populations that tend to feel more attached to Israel than the countries in which they live often have high proportions of recent Jewish immigrants.
Having a strong attachment to Israel has no bearing on Jewish people's attachments to the EU or the countries in which they live, and vice versa: one attachment does not come at the expense of another. They are neither competitive nor complementary; they are rather completely unrelated.
Jews of different denominations show very similar levels of attachment to the countries in which they live, but rather different levels of attachment to Israel and the EU.
Abstract: In the last decade there has been widely shared discomfort about the way Muslim minority Germans engage with the Holocaust. They are accused of not showing empathy towards its Jewish victims and, as a result, of not being able to learn the necessary lessons from this massive crime. By focusing on instances in which the emotional reactions of Muslim minority Germans towards the Holocaust are judged as not empathetic enough and morally wrong, this article explores how Holocaust education and contemporary understandings of empathy, in teaching about the worst manifestation of racism in history, can also at times be a mechanism to exclude minorities from the German/European moral makeup and the fold of national belonging. Expanding from Edmund Husserl’s embodied approach to empathy to a socially situated approach, via the process of paarung, allows us to reinterpret expressions of fear and envy, currently seen as failed empathy, as instances of intersubjective connections at work. In my reinterpretation of Husserl’s ideas, the process of paarung that enables empathy to happen is not abstract, but pairs particular experiences happening at particular times and places under particular circumstances to individuals of certain social standing and cultural influences. An analogy can be made to shoes. Anyone has the capacity to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes. Nevertheless, the emotional reactions the experience triggers in each person will be shaped by individual past experiences and social positioning. Hence, grandchildren of workers who arrived in Germany after World War II to rebuild the country resist an ethnicized Holocaust memory and engage with it keenly through their own subject positions.
Abstract: Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live.
Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriatio
Abstract: 2011 marked 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This represented a change not just in the content of schools or ideologies, but in the relationships between individuals, institutions, and systems. During this time, the post-Soviet Republic of Lithuania not only had to reimagine its national identity in a local context, but it also had to reimagine itself as a community within the political,economic, and historical imaginations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Therefore, in Lithuania, as in many other post-Soviet countries, debates over which events should or should not be included as part of the national identity, and thus represented in the school curriculum, are more than just discussions about educational content; they are debates over the moral legitimacy of certain narratives and the ability of sovereign states to define them.
Abstract: This paper examines whether the re-emergence of the “Jewish Question” in the 2010-2016 Hungarian public discourse has also re-surfaced the “us” and “them” distinction between Hungarians and Jews that has lain dormant within the Hungarian population, and whether this symbolic exclusion of Jews from the Hungarian nation creates new, additional Jewish and quasi-Jewish groups as “others”, to be lumped together with the “other others”. The paper was submitted in 2016 and therefore does not cover the discussions around the openly antisemitic 2018 election campain’s discourse. The paper makes two main claims. The first is that the state “protectively” treats Hungarian Jews as a distinct group, as a community that is distinguished by its “otherness”, separated from the “us” of the national narrative. The second claim is that an “out-grouped other”, which does not identify with the government’s concept of an ethnic nation, is depicted with stereotypes that historically described Jews, regardless of their background, origins or religion. As populist, ethnic nationalism is being resurrected in Europe, the following questions arise: How can affiliated Hungarian Jews and “outed”, “non-Jewish Jews” take part in a nation that rhetorically excludes them while cynically attempting to promote their (Jewish) separateness in a seemingly positive manner? Why is this separation important and perhaps even dangerous? And how can Hungarians (who are cast as Jewish) credibly participate in Hungary’s internal and external politics and democracy?It is argued that the current “Jewish Question” debate in Hungary after 2010 may have less to do with actual Jews and more to do with creating the populist fiction of a homogeneous, isolated, ethnic nation, reminiscent of the ethnic nationalist concepts championed during the 1920s and 1930s with tragic consequences.
Abstract: Around 2011 Israeli (Jewish) immigration to Germany became a recurring subject in public discourse. Reflecting ideological investments, the migration was reported with curiosity. Israeli migrants turned into Jews in German imagination, contradicting their self-definition of being primarily Israelis. As Jews they were welcome, but within limits. If the ‘guests’ expressed too much agency and challenged the status quo of German/Jewish and more so Jewish/Muslim and Israeli/Palestinian relations, things could become complicated. While Palestinian issues are met with increasing support across the social, media, and political spheres, Palestinians are not that welcome as (Muslim) migrants. They are suspected of importing a ‘new antisemitism.’ This paper seeks to unravel the conflicting attitudes towards the interlinked categories Israelis/Jews and Muslims/Palestinians, by focussing on the issue of the politics of hospitality. These reveal how agentic presences of those categorised as others destabilise the assumed ethnic, and ethno-religious boundaries of the German, nominally Christian, majority.
Abstract: To date, scholars have mainly focussed on the history of the Kindertransport. This thesis is the first to examine extensively how the Kindertransport has been remembered in Britain, and to compare British memory of this event with memory in the other English-speaking host nations which took in the refugee children (Kinder), namely America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ‘Kindertransport’ is understood here as referring not just to the actual rescue of children with mainly Jewish origins from Nazism that took place between 1938 and 1940, but also the effects it had, such as transplantation to strange environments. There is yet to be a true exploration of how the memories of the Kinder and these nations’ memories of the Kindertransport developed. Any comparison of these various host countries must consider the degree to which memory of the Kindertransport is not uniform, and the extent to which it is shaped by factors such as the role of these countries in the Second World War, and – above all – nationally conditioned memory discourses. Increasingly, according to memory scholars, Holocaust memory operates in a transnational, even global network. This thesis will assess this expectation against the empirical evidence. Is it more the case that host nations remember the Kindertransport in essentially national terms, even where they are aware of its transnational history? In order to assess this question, this thesis will examine a representative cross-section of different genres including testimony, museum exhibitions, memorials, and novels. I argue that the Kindertransport is much more nationally focussed and celebratory in Britain than in other host nations, where this memory is more transnational in focus. However, there are signs that national memory in Britain is beginning to develop in a more self-critical direction.
Abstract: This paper examines whether the reemergence of “the Jewish Question” in post-2010 Hungarian public discourse has also re-surfaced the “Us” and “Them” distinction between “Hungarians” and “Jews” that has been latent within the Hungarian population, and whether this symbolic exclusion of Jews from the Hungarian “nation” creates new, additional Jewish and quasi-Jewish groups as “others”, to be lumped together with the “other others”.The current “Jewish Question” debate in Hungary may have less to do with actual Jews, and more to do with creating the populist fiction of a homogeneous, isolated, ethnic nation, reminiscent of the ethnic nationalist concepts championed during the 1920s and 1930s with tragic consequences. The paper’s first premise is that the state “protectively” treats Hungarian Jews as a distinct group, as a community that is distinguished by its “otherness”, separated from the “Us” of the national narrative. The second premise is that an “outgrouped other”, which doesn’t identify with the government’s concept of an ethnic nations, is depicted with stereotypes that historically described Jews, regardless of its background, origins or religion. In this context, the questions we must ask, as populist, ethnic nationalism is being resurrected in Europe, are, how can affiliated Hungarian Jews, and “outed” “non Jewish Jews” take part in a nation that rhetorically excludes “them”, while cynically attempting to promote “their” (Jewish) separateness in a seemingly positive manner? Why is this separation sensitive, and perhaps even dangerous? How can Hungarians (who are cast as Jewish) credibly participate in Hungary’s internal and external politics and democracy?
Abstract: My thesis is an empirical study of young British Jews, exploring their experience of being Jewish, British, and male in society today given the fluid nature of each of these aspects of their identity. As society has changed over the last half century each of these aspects which had normative monocultural taken-for-granted expressions have been repeatedly deconstructed, examined and re-built, and I argue that in the process they have emerged as fluid entities. It is in negotiating these fluid aspects that today’s young male Jews ask, what does it mean to be a Jew, what does it mean to be British, and what does it mean to be male as they try to make sense of their lives. The method chosen for this study has been the in-depth interview which I conducted with a sample of 16 interviewees chosen to reflect the diverse range of religiosity, age and intellectual ability which is apparent in the heterogenous nature of the Anglo-Jewish community supplemented with a group discussion. I have produced an interview tool of overlapping coloured discs representing the three aspects I am studying as an aid for the interviewee to think and talk about themselves. I have transcribed the interviews and used constructionist thematic analysis to advance my argument. I argue that Jewishness is constructed between extremes of adherence to halachic requirement on one hand and a Jewishness experienced as cultural affinity to history, family, and tradition without recourse to halacha on the other hand. I argue that Britishness is being experienced between varying degrees of nationalistic localism against cosmopolitan liberalism played out against a backdrop of Britain contrasted with the rest of the world and also London against the rest of Britain. With regard to being male, I have rejected the view that masculinity is constructed in the inherently unstable terms of physicality against intellectualism. Instead, I argue that it is better considered as lying in a range between competitive hegemonic masculinity on the one hand against a cooperative model with which physicality and intellectualism can combine to produce a more stable and emotionally satisfying mode of living. I argue that young Jewish men inhabit a fluid three-dimensional matrix being aware of the pitfalls of particularism, xenophobia, and misogyny as they negotiate their relationships with their families, communities, and wider society to construct their Jewish British masculine identity.
Abstract: Throughout 2021, JPR researchers Professor Sergio DellaPergola and Dr Daniel Staetsky analysed the responses of over 16,000 European Jews in 12 European countries who participated in the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey conducted by JPR and Ipsos in 2018. The result of their hard work and innovative approach is ‘The Jewish identities of European Jews’, a study into the what, why and how of Jewish identity.
The report finds some extraordinary differences and similarities between Jews across Europe, including:
European Jews are much more likely to see themselves as a religious minority than an ethnic one, yet fewer than half of all Jewish adults across Europe light candles most Friday nights;
Jewish identity is strongest in Belgium, the UK, France, Austria, Spain and Italy, and weakest in Hungary and Poland;
The memory of the Holocaust and combating antisemitism played a more important part in people’s Jewish identity than support for Israel, belief in God or charitable giving. Rising perceptions of antisemitism may have stimulated a stronger bond with Jewish peoplehood;
Only about half of all Jews in Europe identify with a particular denomination, although there are significant differences at the national level;
Higher proportions of younger Jews are religiously observant than older Jews;
Belgium has the largest proportion of Jews identifying as Orthodox in its Jewish population, followed by the UK, Italy, France and Austria;
Spain has the largest proportion of Jews identifying as Reform/Progressive, followed by Germany and the Netherlands;
Levels of attachment to the European Union among European Jews are higher than, or very similar to, levels of attachment among their fellow citizens in the countries in which they live
Abstract: As we approach the post-witness era this paper investigates the changing role of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors in twenty-first century British politics and culture. In the first part, the article discusses the ways in which, through their role in educational initiatives and commemorative culture, survivors have acquired an increased visibility in British understandings of the Holocaust. For a significant period of time, this process was characterized by a tendency to abstract survivors from their Jewish identities to ensure that they could more easily act as mediators of a universalized, yet highly domesticated, Holocaust narrative with meanings for contemporary British society. However, in the second part the article will argue that, starting from the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is also possible to discern an increasing acknowledgement of British Holocaust survivors’ ‘difference.’ It will be suggested that British politicians have attempted to mobilize survivors, the Anglo-Jewish community they are seen to represent, and the Holocaust more in general, in Britain’s domestic battle against Islamic extremism and in the pursuit of the rather elusive concept of ‘British values.’
Abstract: Multiple identities are becoming an increasingly important issue in a globalized world. This study examines the interference of Jewish identity with other collective identities, national and transnational, as well as the influence of religion and values on Jewish and other collective identities in Jewish late adolescents in Belgium. We compared data with those of a previous study on native Belgians and Muslim immigrants (Saroglou & Galand, 2004) and found similarities between Jews and the other two groups in the hierarchies of collective identities and values; however, Jews differed in their weak European identity and the considerable importance to them of autonomy and self-enhancement values (power and achievement). Jewish cultural identity was unrelated to other collective identities, but a shift from a Jewish identity to a new, Belgian identity or to a broad, transnational identity (or both) was occasionally related to low levels of attachment to religion, tradition, power, security, and hedonism and to high levels of universalism, autonomy, and conformity.
Abstract: This thesis analyses three Central European countries – Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary - and their relations with Israel. I chose these three Central European countries because they share the same geopolitical space and historical experience. These three Central European countries and Israel are geographically distant, face different geopolitical threats, and have only a few policy issues in common. Nonetheless, ‘the question of Israel’ has been very much present in the foreign policies of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. Building on constructivism and IR scholarship that engages with memory studies, this thesis explores the process of national identity re-formation and its impact on the formulation of national interest. Specifically, it focuses on: a) past legacies, institutionalized in collective memory and expressed in narratives, which linger over and constrain policy choices; b) the role of decision-makers with a special focus on their role in national identity re-formation in times when a policy is in transition and when a new regime must establish its legitimacy. I look at the historical roots of the relations of the three Central European countries with Israel. I do so by analysing the role of the Jewish question in the nation-building process of Polish, Czech, and Hungarian nations. Further, I argue that as the three former Communist countries started to re-define their relations with Israel, the legacy of the Jewish question has had a significant impact on the formulation of their foreign policies towards the Jewish state.
Abstract: Yellow Star, Red Star asks why Holocaust memory continues to be so deeply troubled—ignored, appropriated, and obfuscated—throughout Eastern Europe, even though it was in those lands that most of the extermination campaign occurred. As part of accession to the European Union, Jelena Subotić shows, East European states were required to adopt, participate in, and contribute to the established Western narrative of the Holocaust. This requirement created anxiety and resentment in post-communist states: Holocaust memory replaced communist terror as the dominant narrative in Eastern Europe, focusing instead on predominantly Jewish suffering in World War II. Influencing the European Union's own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted to reconcile these two memories by pursuing new strategies of Holocaust remembrance. The memory, symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust have been appropriated to represent crimes of communism.
Yellow Star, Red Star presents in-depth accounts of Holocaust remembrance practices in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, and extends the discussion to other East European states. The book demonstrates how countries of the region used Holocaust remembrance as a political strategy to resolve their contemporary "ontological insecurities"—insecurities about their identities, about their international status, and about their relationships with other international actors. As Subotić concludes, Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe has never been about the Holocaust or about the desire to remember the past, whether during communism or in its aftermath. Rather, it has been about managing national identities in a precarious and uncertain world.
Abstract: Катастрофа европейского еврейства привела к почти полному исчезновению еврейской общины Германии. Чудо случилось в 1990-х годах, когда русскоязычные евреи стали тысячами прибывать в эту страну. Для местных евреев неожиданная иммиграция казалась удачным шансом, выпавшим еврейским сообществам и обществу в целом. Однако первое поколение русско-еврейских иммигрантов столкнулось с большим числом социальных проблем и трудностей интеграции на рынок труда. К этому следует добавить культурное отчуждение от немецкого общества и серьезные различия в культуре, ментальности и идентичности с местными еврейскими общинами. А также конфликты между старожилами и новоприбывшими относительно желаемых моделей организации еврейской жизни – в силу чего и через тридцать лет после начала иммиграции русские евреи все еще мало представлены в общенациональном еврейском руководстве. И все же, впервые после окончания Второй мировой войны у еврейских общин Германии появился шанс построить плюралистическую модель религиозных, культурных, образовательных и политических проектов. Второе поколение русских евреев Германии не сталкивается с проблемами интеграции, подобные проблемам родителей, и большинство из этого поколения вольется в немецкий средний класс и профессиональную элиту страны – или уже находятся там. Но при этом совершенно непонятно пока, до какой степени второе поколение русских евреев будет искать собственные корни, интересоваться еврейским наследием и участвовать в жизни еврейских общин.
Abstract: Концепция «двойной лояльности» в еврейском случае подразумевает, что еврей стоит на стороне Израиля вне зависимости от страны своего проживания, а принцип Талмуда, известный как «Закон государства обязателен для исполнения евреями» (Дина де-мальхута дина) часто рассматривается как требование к еврею придерживаться лояльности тому государству, где он живет. Попытка многих советских евреев, на разных этапах послевоенной истории этой страны, совмещать патриотизм в отношении страны проживания и преданность Израилю, воспринимался властями СССР как вызов и повод для репрессивных кампаний. Нынешняя ситуация в постсоветских странах в целом иная, и ближе к подходу современных демократических государств, признающих феномен «поли-лояльности» и двойного гражданства, закрепленного межправительственными соглашениями и программами о развитии культурных, научных, деловых и других связей.
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Circumcision / Brit Milah, Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals, Media, National Identity, Islam, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Jewish - Non - Jewish Relations, Body
