"We Don't Want To Be the Jews of Tomorrow": Jews and Turks in Germany after 9/11

Abstract

This article examines how German Turks employ the German Jewish trope to establish an analogous discourse for their own position in German society. Drawing on the literature on immigrant incorporation, we argue that immigrants take more established minority groups as a model in their incorporation process. Here, we examine how German Turks formulate and enact their own incorporation into German society. They do that, we argue, by employing the master narrative and socio-cultural repertoire of Germany's principal minority, German Jewry. This is accomplished especially in relation to racism and antisemitism, as an organizational model and as a political model in terms of making claims against the German state. We argue that in order to understand immigrant incorporation, it is not sufficient to look at state-immigrant relations only—authors also need to look at immigrant groups' relationships with other minority groups.