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: Linking our own research interest for the processes of public memory building and remembrance of difficult pasts through the lens of heritage-work, the aim of the current study is to address discourses on ‘the Holocaust issue’ and perceptions of Jews in Romania after more than two decades since the 1989 Revolution. Our focus is mainly on the perceptions of Jewish people from the city of Oradea, a territory where two thirds of about 27000 Jews were killed during WWII. By examining private initiatives of heritage-making carried out with the purpose of contributing to the preservation of the memory of those killed during WWII and comparing them with the official ones, we intend to disclose aspects of the ‘social distance’ and intercultural communication on this Romanian territory where Jews and Roma people were ghettoized, then sent directly to extermination camps (mainly to Auschwitz), where a genocide was carried out. The symbolic re-enactment of Jewish history in the public sphere through heritage-making helps remodel perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours in a multi-ethnic society by promoting moral values regarding other human beings such as tolerance and mutual respect. Therefore, our study inquires to what extent the public memory relating to the Holocaust contributed to shaping social relationships in a multi-cultural society. Our anthropological reflection on the (re-)enactment of the Jewish history during the Holocaust through heritage-making and its social appropriation offer insights into (1) discourses on the Holocaust in Romania and the way in which public memory operates, (2) perceptions of Jews among local people from Oradea and, (3) the building of identity narratives on the acknowledgment or denial of a dark side in our past.
Abstract: The subject of mental formation of an image about the Other brings together and creates a relationship between areas seemingly not in an obvious connection, such as Cultural Anthro- pology, Imagology, Sociology, and the area of Communication Studies. In other words, the essence of intercultural communication and research is understanding how cultures, subcultures, or, better said, groups generally communicate to others and among themselves. Because any communication is fundamentally intercultural, it means accepting the Other, understanding the cultural game differences and different ways of thinking. Having the central focus of analysis on imagology and ethno-psychology, the theme of the research is to show how the Jewish community of Romania has built their auto-image and hetero-image in recent years. This contributes to observing the construction of identity through multiple attributions that make a differentiating picture. The study aims to show how the identity and alterity are built through images about the Self and images about the Other. This type of analysis has been applied in various ways to different ethnic or cultural communities, as members issued their own perceptions of the world and of alterity, conceptualized through images and symbols. Images about ourselves and about the others have an important role in social construction and they result of, and depend on, how we relate and communicate with the Other. If the socio-mythical-economic portrait of the “Jew” has been so far widely discussed in Andrei Oişteanu’s work (2004), which is based on the stereotypical image of the Jews in European culture until the early 1970s – 1980s, this paper tries to illustrate how the image of the Romanian Jewish community is being perceived today. This research is part of a larger study dealing with life stories as means of intercultural communication and has as a central point the stories of the Shoah survivors.
Abstract: It is a fact, that the Holocaust of European Jews has marked in various ways the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish presence worldwide. In the case of the Jews who live in Greece and especially in the city of Thessaloniki, though the Community delayed to break silence about this traumatic historic event, this fact was never let slip from memory. In the public sphere of action, the updating of Holocaust takes place through community actions at first hand and, later, through initiatives from local authorities, by making mnemonic and memorial donations. For the past seventy-four years, Holocaust inheres as a memory in three post-war Jewish generations in Thessaloniki and seals diversely the identity of the social subjects. This mnemonic event in collaboration with the social and politic developments and turmoils, describes the identity of the Jewish element, both directly and indirectly. The presentation will be focused on qualitative empirical data of fieldwork, from a sociological analysis perspective. More specifically, in this paper it will be explored the way in which, the Holocaust of the Greek Jewry emphasizes on the individual and collective responsibilities and, at the same time, it’s function as a contemporary conservation mechanism of the Jewish identity, a cohesive bond of the Greek-Jewry in Thessaloniki.
