Urban renewal, contested memories and the politics of cultural production: The case of Jewish–Muslim encounters in Germany

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Through the case study of Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel (train-station district), this article investigates how a new generation of Jewish and Muslim entrepreneurs resists the preconceived community labels through discourses of hybridity, shared interests and ambivalent experiences of being a minority in Germany, in a way which resembles Stuart Hall’s idea of new ethnicities on the margins. The analysis then employs recent insights from memory studies to the emerging field of Jewish-Muslim encounters to unpack the existing tensions between micro-level, neighbourhood memories and macro-level imaginations and socio-political constructions of Jewish and Muslim minority identities. While empirical studies have focused on convivial practices within multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, this analysis, however, illustrates how taken-for-granted ideas of such spaces are produced and contested through different examples of Jewish-Muslim encounters. In doing so, the article contributes to the debate on the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Europe by showing the potential for and limitations of the creation of Jewish-Muslim conviviality within urban gentrification projects, with their tendencies to replace local histories and (Jewish and Muslim) perspectives from below.