Abstract: Antisemitism remains a persistent and growing challenge across Europe and beyond, despite strengthened legal frameworks and national strategies aimed at combating hate and supporting Jewish communities. Recent evidence, including findings from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), demonstrates that many Jewish individuals continue to experience harassment, discrimination, and hostility in both online and offline environments. These experiences often result in fear, concealment of identity, avoidance of Jewish spaces, and significant psychological distress. This paper examines antisemitic victimization through a trauma-informed lens, arguing that both overt hate crimes and cumulative forms of everyday prejudice can produce profound and lasting psychological harm. Drawing on trauma studies and victimization research, it explores common responses to antisemitic experiences, including avoidance, shame, anxiety, social withdrawal, and identification with the aggressor. The analysis further considers how historical trauma, competitive victimhood, conspiracy beliefs, institutional failures, and the politicization of antisemitism contribute to the persistence of anti-Jewish prejudice and hinder victim recovery and reporting. The article advocates for a trauma-informed, human rights-based approach to victim support that prioritizes safety, validation, empowerment, and access to justice. It identifies barriers to reporting, including fear of retaliation, lack of support, and low institutional trust, and highlights the importance of community engagement, trauma-informed policing, and accessible reporting mechanisms. Overall, the paper argues that victim-centered approaches can contribute not only to recovery and reporting outcomes but also to broader prevention efforts. Finally, practical recommendations are offered for policymakers, law enforcement agencies, judicial actors, educators, and civil society organizations.
Abstract: The Netherlands’ history with antisemitism is complex. Active collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust and mistreatment of Jewish survivors after the war are issues the country still struggles to confront. Recently, official apologies have been offered for this painful past. One aim of group apologies is to promote intergroup reconciliation. However, little is known about how such apologies are received by the broader population in a country and how it may affect the public’s attitudes toward the victim group. One possible outcome of a group apology is a more positive view and reduced stereotyping of the victim group among the general public. This study (N = 471) experimentally tested this idea in the context of an apology for the Dutch collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. It was predicted that the apology would reduce antisemitic stereotypes by increasing perceptions that Jewish Dutch people are part of the Dutch ingroup and by reducing conflation of Jewish Dutch people with Israel and Israeli policy. Additionally, relations between antisemitic stereotypes, apology-related measures, social dominance orientation (SDO), and political ideology were explored. Findings showed that, although the means differed in the expected direction, these effects were not statistically significant, thus the hypotheses could not be confirmed. Results further showed that people higher on SDO and right-wing ideology endorsed antisemitic stereotypes more strongly, and people who endorsed antisemitic stereotypes more strongly were less in favor of apology, reparations, and Holocaust commemoration. These results are discussed in light of policy recommendations regarding intervention strategies to combat antisemitism.
Abstract: This chapter examines how antisemitism is visually expressed in public space in Europe against the backdrop of the war in Gaza. Drawing upon a qualitative analysis of publicly documented incidents, it focuses on offline, material, and symbolic acts such as graffiti, paint attacks, stickers, and the defacement or removal of memorials. The study analyses these incidents as communicative interventions that embed antisemitic meaning into everyday environments through repetition, placement, and symbolic association. The analysis identifies four recurring visual strategies: red symbolism and implied violence; Nazi symbolism and Holocaust inversion; desecration and overwriting of Jewish memory; and the marking and targeting of Jewish space. Together, these themes demonstrate how contemporary antisemitism operates offline by creating false and dangerous equivalences between European Jews and the actions of the Israeli state, thereby normalising hostility within shared public spaces. Rather than relying on explicit declarations of hatred, these visual practices often function through implication, collapsing distinctions between Jewish identity and geopolitical conflict. By foregrounding these visual strategies and their cumulative effects, the chapter contributes to a broader understanding of antisemitism as a historically adaptive form of political hostility that becomes normalised through everyday visual exposure.
