Abstract: The recent Eurozone crisis and the outbreak of political and populist Euroscepticism pose an unprecedented challenge to advocates of the post-war ‘Idea of Europe’. In the United Kingdom and France, some of the most eloquent and impassioned defences of ‘Europe’ have been penned by Jewish intellectuals. The historian Walter Laqueur, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and journalists such as David Aaronovich, for example, have all rallied to the cause of ‘Europe’. This article will focus on the responses of Robert Menasse and Henryk Broder, two Jewish intellectuals from Austria and Germany, who have recently published powerful reflections on the European idea. Menasse’s polemic of 2012, Der Europäische Landbote (The European Courier), defends the idea of Europe as a ‘Friedensprojekt’, or ‘peace project’, and the European Union as an institutional antidote to the destructive power of nationalism and the self-interest of the nation-state. Broder’s bestselling book of 2013, Die letzten Tage Europas: Wie wir eine gute Idee versenken (The Last Days of Europe: How we are Scuppering a Good Idea), embraces ‘European values’ but launches a critique of a European Union which stifles pluralism and critical debate. This paper analyses how Menasse and Broder define the idea of ‘Europe’ and argues that, despite their differences, in form and content, the work of Menasse and Broder draws on a common tradition of enlightened cosmopolitanism as well as informs the renewed academic debate in the humanities and social sciences about the place of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in our global world.
Abstract: This article discusses a number of trends in the evolution of Italy's attitudes towards Jewish concerns since the 1980s. In this overview, such factors that can be better understood within broader trends known from elsewhere are privileged. The prevalent denial of Italy's sharing in the bleaker side of Europe's legacy has now been reduced: because of less parochial attitudes on the part of gentile culture; because of the passing away of the generation compromised by the Fascist persecution of the Jews and then ‘recycled’ into democratic society; because of present-day Italy's Jewry being both globalised (for example, in terms of information) and more assertive; and because of lessons learnt from bitter episodes in Italy, mainly the hatred pandemic of 1982–83. This was itself, arguably, at least in part a ‘glocalised’ reflection (a local adaptation of an outer trigger and a global response) of a worldwide media climate triggered by the war in Lebanon, but also a convergence of the product of local dynamics hastened by an outer trigger and a global catalyst. That episode, and the redefinition of formal agreements between Italy and its Jewry in the late 1980s, make that decade bisect the local Jewish experience since 1945, whereas the history of Italian politics was bisected by the end of the First Republic in the early 1990s, partly precipitated by the new geopolitics.
Abstract: From 1990 until 2008, about 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany. At the same time, Germany re-unified and took its place at the centre of the new Europe. In a global world, in which people maintain multiple homes, languages, identities and means of communication across thousands of miles, these migrants challenged German Jewish notions of identity, rootedness and community. Their particular Soviet and post-Soviet approaches to these issues also challenged the liberalising tendencies of an emerging European Jewish identity. This review essay examines how Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish migration to Germany interacted and intersected with new notions of European Jewish identity in Germany, with special focus on Berlin, the largest, most cosmopolitan Jewish community in Germany. Rather than continuing to bemoan the ‘failed integration’ of post-Soviet Jewry into some notion of fixed German Jewish identity or into liberal European notions of identity, a global approach would allow for the co-existence of many Jewish identities in a diverse German Jewish community.
