European anti-Semitism Research Articles

A new exodus? Explaining Jewish migration from Europe after the Cold War

ABSTRACTWhy are European Jews migrating to Israel in significant numbers? Israeli leaders and popular press reports suggest that incidents of antisemitism have reached such high levels across Europe, even in fully democratic countries, that Jews are leaving once again to escape persecution and violence. Others suggest that Jews are migrating for the same reasons other migrants do: for greater economic opportunity. Until now, we have had no way of weighing the relative merit of these claims, hampered by the absence of reliable comparative data on antisemitism in Europe. Leveraging a new dataset compiled by the author, this study tests these competing hypotheses and finds that European Jews migrate because of greater economic opportunity in Israel. While concerns about antisemitism in Europe are at record highs and more Jews are considering moving to Israel than ever before in the post-war era, so far most Jewish migration is to take advantage of better economic opportunities in Israel.

The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return

This article analyzes contemporary antisemitism and Holocaust distortion in Eastern Europe. The main argument is that Brown and Red, Nazism and Communism, respectively are not at all equal. In Eastern Europe, in particular, antisemitic ideology is grounded on the rehabilitation of anticommunist national “heroes.” The history of the Holocaust is thereby distorted. Based on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of “social frameworks,” the author shows how “competitive martyrdom,” the “Double Genocide” ideology, and “Holocaust obfuscation” are intertwined. Empirically, the paper examines these concepts in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, and Romania. Keywords: Double Genocide, Holocaust Distortion, East European antisemitism, Holocaust, Gulag, anticommunism, national identity

Seeing Selves and Imagining Others

From his early childhood, Stanley Cavell learned to tread carefully the intervening space between twin pillars: of aesthetic sensibility on the one hand, and political belonging on the other. Early in his memoir Little Did I Know, Cavell establishes a set of differences between his mother and father that far exceed both gender and age (his father was ten years older than his mother), as he notes the starkly contrasting dispensations of their respective families:The artistic temperament of my mother’s family, the Segals, left them on the whole, with the exception of my mother and her baby brother, Mendel, doubtfully suited to an orderly, successful existence in the new world; the orthodox, religious sensibility of my father’s family, the Goldsteins, produced a second generation—some twenty-two first cousins of mine—whose solidarity and severity of expectation produced successful dentists, lawyers, and doctors, pillars of the Jewish community, and almost without exception attaining local, some of them national, some even a certain international, prominence.From his mother’s family, Cavell would inherit the musical sensibility that, had he not ventured into the world of academic philosophy, might have led him towards a career as a musician or in music. In his father’s family Cavell observes a religious belonging that, in the decades in which Cavell is raised, becomes morally inseparable from political belonging, as the rise of European anti-Semitism and the threat of Hitler’s ascent to power would drastically alter the political significance of Jewish religious identification.

התקבלותו של הרומן על השואה והעבדות "טבע הדם" מאת קריל פיליפס בעולם הפרנקופוני

In this article, I examine the mitigated reception of The Novel of Blood when it appeared in French translation. Indeed, while The Nature of Blood encountered huge success in the anglophone world, Caryl Phillips’s sixth novel was translated into French as La nature humaine, and has a cover illustration also diverging significantly from the original one. A double shift consequently occurs, with significant repercussions for the reception of the novel. First of all, it reduces the novel being a further fiction on the Holocaust, an interpretation reinforced by the cover illustration which diverges from the original. Phillips has paid attention to merge the story of European antisemitism in another context, racism towards people of colour since the 15th century in Europe, more specifically in Venice, where the first ghetto was established.

New Sensibilities, New Volatilities: Antisemitism in Contemporary Hungary

This article examines three case studies of new-old sensibilities toward antisemitism, the Holocaust, and liberalism, in Hungary, which show: 1) how in a climate of mutual resentment, a debatable charge of intellectual antisemitism elicited widespread rejection; 2) how an official attempt to partially displace the West European “Holocaust paradigm” during the 2014 Holocaust commemoration led to a recoding of an older anti-fascist narrative in a right-wing key; and, 3) how new discourses on ethnic homogeneity and the Hungarian mainstream’s partial convergence with the Western far-right have yielded an odd combination of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and pro-Israel attitudes today. The article argues that antisemitism in Hungary grew substantially from 2006 to 2011, but has not exploded into a major political or social force under the authoritarian and xenophobic shift of the country since 2010. Hungarian Jews have not found themselves at the center of conflicts beyond their making, as in the past, but they are no longer able to enjoy the kind of security they experienced under Hungarian liberal democracy either—the situation in the country has become volatile and unpredictable.

Antisemitic Acts and Attitudes in Contemporary France: The Effects on French Jews

Threats and violence from radicalized Islamists have led to heightened security measures for Jewish organizations in France. French soldiers are protecting Jewish schools, kindergartens, community centers, and other Jewish institutions. In addition to terrorism, there are a number of other factors that have led to increased antisemitism in France. This article discusses data on antisemitic incidents and surveys on antisemitic attitudes in France. While there is a clear rise in antisemitic incidents, the trend in antisemitic attitudes is less clear. Levels of antisemitic attitudes are particularly high among Muslims, the far-right, and also the far-left, but not necessarily among the general French population. However, the rise of antisemitism has hit observant Jews more than non-observant Jews and it has led to changes in behavior, including in the display of religious signs and avoidance of places of worship. Many French Jews today question their future in France.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

The Evolution of Identity Politics

Reciprocal Reflections: Nostalgia for the Present in Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” and Walter Benjamin’s “Moscow” Essay

Reciprocal ReflectionsNostalgia for the Present in Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” and Walter Benjamin’s “Moscow” Essay Pascale Lafountain (bio) Introduction Coincidences often occur in literature, but it is rare that two prominent authors trade places, traveling to each other’s homelands for a time and thus giving readers reciprocal images of the new places through the eyes of a foreigner. One might say that this happened in the mid-1920s: Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) wrote extensively about his life in exile in Berlin at a time when several German authors were traveling to Russia not as exiles, but as artists and political tourists, intrigued by the very Marxism that was so threatening to Nabokov’s family and personal livelihood. Almost simultaneously, in December 1926, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) traveled to Moscow for two months to visit his “Communist girlfriend,” Asja Lacis.1 The other motivation for Benjamin’s trip to Moscow was to “get a closer look at the situation in Russia, and perhaps even to establish some sort of official tie with it,” as Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem describes in his preface to Benjamin’s Moscow Diary.2 It is perhaps not intuitive to bring together these two authors, whose work and politics are so different, and Will Norman, the only scholar to have treated this pairing in great depth, has acknowledged that for many Nabokov scholars in particular, this pairing must seem “unusual, if not perverse.”3 Two of Benjamin’s greatest influences, Marx and Freud, were at the same time Nabokov’s greatest intellectual nemeses, [End Page 93] and Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s views on Soviet culture could hardly be more disparate. There is, however, ample reason—and precedent—for this article’s emphasis on the implicit conversation between Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s work. The most superficial rationale is biographical: both spent time in Germany between the world wars; both directly experienced the effects of European anti-Semitism as Véra Nabokov as well as Walter Benjamin himself were Jewish; both struggled for success as they published short modernist works in Berlin; both eventually left Berlin for Paris (Benjamin in 1933, Nabokov in 1937); and both applied for visas to the United States, though Benjamin’s application was tragically denied, leading to his suicide in 1940. Both are heirs to French modernism and seem to respond to Proust and other authors exploring memory, even if these affinities carry differing implications.4 Both authors feature flâneurs strolling through major metropolises, though Nabokov’s Berlin narrator remains more distanced, as Norman puts it, “a figure consciously divorcing himself from the crowds, disdainful of purposeful activity, and ultimately defining himself in opposition to the bourgeois.”5 More important for the present inquiry is the shared interest in the material detail of urban surroundings and in the similar implications that these observations carry for their social critiques. Norman notes: Given the mutual interest in high modernist temporal aesthetics, the personal experience of an oppressive tyrannical regime, the incessant insecurity of political crisis and a marginalized social position as impoverished exiles, it should perhaps strike us as unsurprising that Nabokov and Benjamin took parallel steps in formulating a temporal perspective which aimed to redeem the present through the active reorganization of the past.6 Norman has fruitfully compared the “remarkably similar temporal constructions” and strategies of “historical resistance” in Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900,7 emphasizing how their biographies inspire a “skepticism of nineteenth-century linear historicism and its attendant notions of civilized progress” as well as “how these two figures share a strategy to resist the progress of a determining, historical time by constructing a constellated temporal model [End Page 94] by which history can be disarmed and assimilated into personal experience.”8 Norman’s scholarship has thus pointed to some of the central dynamics of history and individuality in Nabokov’s and Benjamin’s work, but I would like to suggest both that these dynamics are already present much earlier than Norman observes and that the portrayal of the future in the present is just as important as the portrayal of the past.9 While Nabokov...

Rezonans medialny nowelizacji ustawy o Instytucie Pamięci Narodowej w wybranych tygodnikach opinii

In the prelude I introduce threads related to European anti-Semitism. Presenting the functionalists’ standpoint, I elaborate on contemporary attempts to explain the phenomena of mass murder of the Jewish nation during World War II, while placing emphasis on the fact that the historical politics of the Holocaust in Israel and Poland is not yet a closed chapter. Following these conclusions, the goal and methodology of my research is devoted to media reaction to the amendment to the Act pertaining to the Institute of National Remembrance in chosen Polish weekly newspapers of record. In the end I present the results of the research conducted from 29th of January to 15th of April.

Review

Over the last decade, at least 400 antisemitic attacks per year have occurred in France.1 Incidents include the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006 and, more recently in 2012, the attack on the Ozar HaTorah schoolhouse in Toulouse, when a lone gunman murdered one adult and three children under the age of ten, and critically wounded one teenage boy.2 In the summer of 2014 there were violent demonstrations against Israel, during which Jews were attacked, Jewish businesses were vandalized, and synagogues were targeted.3 Perhaps more insidious than these eruptions of violence is the increased prevalence of antisemitism in French culture and politics. The results of a November 2014 Fondapol survey on the growing presence of antisemitism in France are dire. One quarter of French people believe that Jews have too much power in the economy and finance, and twenty-two percent think Jews have too much power in the media. Thirty-five percent feel that Jews use their status as victims of the Holocaust as leverage for their own interests, sixteen percent believe there is a global Zionist conspiracy, and fourteen percent of France thinks that the anti-Zionist attacks against Jewish communities in 2014 were understandable.4 The 2014 Fondapol results also found that antisemitic attitudes tend to be more prevalent in “three specific subgroups of the French population: the extreme right, the radical left, and the Muslim community—itself an object of considerable animosity in France.”5 One illustration of this phenomenon is the increasing popularity of stand-up comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, whose viciously antisemitic content has resulted in his arrest for violating hate-speech laws—thirty-eight times. He has also been fined for defaming public figures, although he has failed to pay those fines thus far.6 It is worth noting that Dieudonné also ran for Parliament—as a leftist pro-Palestinian candidate, and then as the head of an anti-Zionist party—multiple times.7 Dieudonné is far from alone in his obsession with the “Jewish Question,” as is evidenced by his growing popularity on social media. How are we to understand the source of this increasingly venomous presence of antisemitism in French radicalism?

Antisemitism in France and colonial Algeria

ABSTRACTThere is a commonplace assumption that, in the twentieth century, antisemitism was an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. However, there was a strand of socialism that equated Jews and capitalism and, to that extent, was antisemitic. When Algeria became a colony of France, French antisemitism was exported there. In the first two decades of the Third Republic, some socialists saw antisemitism as a stepping-stone to anti-capitalism, and thought they could combine forces to overthrow the ‘bourgeois republic’. It was not until the summer of 1898, as the Dreyfus Affair exploded throughout France and colonial Algeria, and they feared that antisemites and the right were about to stage a coup, that socialists rallied to save the republic. Those who became Dreyfusards did so in defence of human rights and the universalist principles of the French Revolution. The antisemitic origins of the charges against Dreyfus were downplayed and some Dreyfusards continued to accept stereotypes about Jews. Other socialists who never became Dreyfusards condemned antisemitism when they discovered the Jewish proletariat. Yet their ‘anti-antisemitism’ reinforced the antisemitic stereotype that imagined a uniquely Jewish form of capitalism that was more virulent than other forms of capitalism. This failure to reject antisemitism in principle and provide a solution to the ‘Jewish question’ other than assimilation would later prove to be disastrous, indeed fatal to the Jewish working class, and continue to be a serious problem for France to the present day.

Some Epistemological Issues in the Public Debate on Contemporary Antisemitism in France

During the last 15 years, the phenomenon of an increase in antisemitic acts in France has led to numerous commentaries, to people taking public stances, and to some preliminary university-based research studies. In this article, we formulate certain epistemological and moral issues that we always encounter sooner or later when we study antisemitism. By starting with certain elements of the public discussion in which a number of academics have participated, we wanted to raise awareness of the reasoning and logic of ideas connected to sociological practice. Among the number of entangled questions that the public debates let us glimpse, at least two of these call into question the practice of sociology. The first has to do with the negation of the reality of contemporary antisemitism. The second touches on a problem that is both moral and epistemological, and has to do with the problem of causal determinism. An individual is only responsible if he is free. If we think that individuals are determined by causes, we must accept to think them as not responsible. We think that it is by taking into account these two questions that a non-deterministic sociology could be developed. This article is dedicated to providing a brief answer to these questions.

Explaining the Discrepancy of Antisemitic Acts and Attitudes in 21st Century France

This paper assesses antisemitism in France and provides an overview of antisemitic acts and attitudes presented in survey results over the past decades. A clear rise in both the number of antisemitic incidents and the level of violence can be traced since 2000. Attitude surveys, on the other hand, do not show such a clear rise of antisemitic attitudes. There are two plausible explanations for this seeming discrepancy. The first is that antisemitic stereotypes may have changed over the years and that therefore no comparable survey data exist. Anti-Zionist forms of antisemitism, which are rarely surveyed, are likely to have become more widespread, whereas older biases contesting the Frenchness of French Jews have waned. The second is that perpetrators of antisemitic acts are a small minority of people who hardly influence the results of representative surveys. Particularly high levels of classic antisemitic attitudes can be found among Muslims and among sympathizers of the far right, and, to a lesser extent among the far left. Antisemitism seems to have radicalized within small groups of French society, including the use of extreme violence against Jews. Fringe groups of radicalized French Islamists pose an additional security threat to French Jews in particular and to society in general.

Are We Them? Textual and Literary Representations of the Chinese in Twentieth-Century Thailand

King Vajiravudh famously published an essay titled Jews of the Orient in 1914 demonizing the Chinese in Siam as ingrates and parasites. The local Chinese became the “Other Within” in the Thai nation that the king was trying to establish. Whether his reaction to the local Chinese was fueled by ire over the recent strike by the Chinese which paralyzed Bangkok, or a reflection of his English education and exposure to European anti-Semitism, is not the focus of my concern. My interest for this exercise is to study how the Chinese in Siam/Thailand are portrayed in Thai language texts, that is, prose fiction and non-fiction produced in the twentieth century (I will not include related areas such as movies, television drama, music, and cartoons). This study does not involve an exhaustive review of all texts but will focus on a few well-known and popular ones. I would like to know whether King Vajiravudh’s portrayal of the Chinese is reflected in subsequent literary production or muted by other realities that existed in Thai society, and how the production of texts on the local Chinese changed over time. More importantly, I am very curious to know how this issue is played out in neighboring countries, especially the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, countries where the “assimilation” of the Chinese into the majority culture happens in varying degrees.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921Karine V.Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 Karine V. Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther, assistant professor of history at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar, provides a well-documented investigation of relations between the United States and the Islamic world during the nineteenth century, and she convincingly argues that this period set the stage for contemporary American attitudes toward Islam. Walther asserts that popular perceptions of Islam were to a great extent shaped by American Protestant missionaries and denominations who combined religious and racial characteristics to depict Muslims as violent barbarians intent upon the destruction or conversion of all unbelieving infidels such as Jews and Christians. However, the conversion of Muslims to Christianity might provide a civilizing influence that would negate the Muslim tendency toward violence. The missionaries who were well connected to key figures within the American government viewed Muslims around the world as monolithic, although most contact with Islam in the nineteenth century concerned the Ottoman Empire. There were considerable lobbying efforts for American intervention in the Middle East to protect Jews and Christians, but, for most of the nineteenth century, American diplomats maintained a policy of nonintervention. However, this policy was altered by the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Walther devotes considerable attention to the Islamic Moros whose resistance to annexation provoked a brutal repression by the United States, although this brutality was rationalized as part of a necessary civilizing mission. Sacred Interests concludes with the post-World War One agreements that ignored Arab nationalism in favor of European mandates that continue to cast a shadow over the turbulent Middle East. Her book suggests that need to break away from nineteenth-century stereotypes and assumptions if they expect to understand the complexity of the Islamic world. The clash of civilizations concept continues to exercise considerable sway over American attitudes toward Islam.Walther begins her account with an examination of American support for the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were Christians and Greece the birthplace of American democracy, and, thus, the Greek rebels deserved the assistance of the United States against the barbaric Ottoman Islamists. In seeking the intervention of the American government, religious lobbyists emphasized the atrocities of the Ottomans while the massacres committed by the Greek forces were ignored. American officials, such as James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, expressed sympathy with the Greek cause, but an official policy of nonintervention was maintained. A similar pattern was evident in the American response to the struggle of Bulgarian Christians and nationalists to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. Walther writes, Americans depicted Bulgarians as politically and religiously advanced Christians at the religious mercy of fanatical, violent, and despotic Muslim rulers (68). The focal point for American agitation in the region was the Christian missionaries and professors at Robert College, which was established in Istanbul as a bastion of American civilization within the barbaric Ottoman capital. Again, Bulgarian atrocities were ignored in favor of depicting Muslim savagery.Support for Bulgarian independence also came from the Russians who were intent upon spreading their influence into the Balkans. The Russians, despite pogroms against Jews, were considered part of Christian civilization and thus exempt from much of the missionary criticism leveled toward Muslim leaders. In fact, Walther argues that Ottoman officials were quite aware of the racial inconsistencies within American and European Christendom, pointing out European anti-Semitism as well as the suppression of Native and the lynching of blacks in the American South. …

Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg

Reviewed by: Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg Mark I. Greenberg (bio) Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950. By Ellen Eisenberg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. X + 292 pp. To the growing scholarly literature on American Jewish regionalism, enter Ellen Eisenberg’s monograph on Jewish Oregonians. Her work speaks directly to differences in the experiences of American Jews who settled outside the East Coast’s large urban areas. “Many remain convinced that Jewish authenticity resides only in the East, and that to put Jewish and Oregonian in the same phrase is somehow oxymoronic. Yet Jewish Oregonians and Jewish westerners have long embraced both parts of their identities and see them as compatible,” the author contends (9–10). [End Page 101] Analysis of the complex interplay between regional and ethnic identity unfolds in six chapters. Eisenberg begins with Oregon’s first Jewish settlers–“town leaders, civic boosters, and neighbors”–who settled small towns in the mid- to late-nineteenth century (15). Their prominence and high levels of acceptance within the state’s social and political hierarchy, as compared with Jews in other regions, stemmed from their acculturation prior to arrival, status as pioneers, contributions to community building, and racial status as white. The author explores migration in the second chapter as well, arguing that the Sephardic/German/Eastern European periodization often used to explain Jewish immigration to America does not work in Oregon. Instead, Bavarian Jews predominated in Oregon’s first wave, joined in Portland by growing numbers of Jews from Posen in the 1860–1880s. Particularly through the synagogue they founded in 1869, these Poseners served as a cultural bridge to the late nineteenth-century influx of Eastern Europeans Jews. By 1920, over 2,000 Sephardim from the Mediterranean Basin comprised the second largest Sephardic community in the U.S. after New York City. Despite their national differences, modernization influences in the southern Pale of Settlement prior to arrival in America, acculturation in America prior to arrival in Oregon, and an occupational structure that reduced class conflict created “relative cohesion among ethnic groups in Portland’s Jewish community” (70). Chapters 3 and 4 analyze social and political relationships between Jews and non-Jews within and outside of the Jewish community. Neighborhood House, founded in 1905 by Portland’s National Council of Jewish Women chapter, served as an important point of contact between the city’s American-born and immigrant communities through the 1930s. For affluent women, Neighborhood House offered “significant work outside the home” (91). Recent immigrants benefitted from the charity’s educational, recreational, and social opportunities but sometimes resented the unequal relationships that underlay the NCJW’s “assimilationist and preservationist impulses” (107). The interplay between class and ethnicity also played out in the political sphere. Electoral campaigns and ballot measures in the first several decades of the twentieth century revealed the emergence of a “Jewish vote.” Working-class and affluent Jews came together across class lines to oppose Sunday closing laws and Prohibition, policies they associated with Christianity’s influence on daily life. The School Bill unified the Jewish community against an initiative strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan and tainted by religious intolerance. Yet the “Jewish vote” was not guaranteed. Despite Joseph Simon’s strong support from white elites, working-class Jews in South Portland believed that he represented [End Page 102] Oregon’s moneyed interests, and they did not rally around him during his various local, state, and national campaigns. Two decades later, Portland Jews voted overwhelmingly for progressive gubernatorial candidate Julius Meier, but he faced ugly, anti-semitic attacks from Christian opponents. The monograph’s interwoven theme of western exceptionalism, Oregon style, is in strong evidence again in the final two chapters. Anti-Zionism never became popular in Portland, unlike in San Francisco. By the 1930s, the city’s increasingly affluent, acculturated, and accepted Jewish community embraced a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a remedy to growing antisemitism in Europe and as a philanthropic enterprise. Several prominent local rabbis and lay leaders, most notably Stephen Wise, founded the Portland Zionist Society and gave the movement greater credibility. Portland Zionists did not succumb to fears that their views...

Defensive representations of an uncomfortable history: The case of Hungary and the Holocaust

The current research examines how representations of a traumatic history influence contemporary intergroup attitudes. Specifically, we examine antisemitism in Hungary as a case example of how the need to defend the group's moral image motivates the assumption of a defensive representation of history − a modification of the group's narrative with regards to its culpability in past atrocities committed against another group. Two studies examined the link between defensive representations of the Holocaust, nationalism, and antisemitism. In the first, correlational study (N=348), we found that Hungarian nationalism and antisemitism were associated, and that this association was significantly mediated by defensive representations of the Holocaust – high nationalism was associated with higher endorsement of defensive representations which in turn were associated with more antisemitism. Low nationalism was associated with greater acknowledgement of in-group responsibility for historical crimes which was associated with less antisemitism. These findings were corroborated in an experimental study (N=165) which indicated that priming defensive representations of the Holocaust increased antisemitism, even when controlling for nationalism. Study 2 further showed, in a 2-step mediation model, that defensive representation primes increased secondary antisemitism, conspiratorial antisemitism, and negative attitudes towards Israel. We discuss the implications of defensive representations of history on contemporary intergroup relations.

Exposing Yiddish Paris: the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair

ABSTRACTDuring the 1930s, Paris was home to approximately two million immigrants. Around 150,000 of these were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who used Paris as the basis for a new Western European influenced Yiddishism and Diaspora Nationalism. This paper traces the high point of that interwar Parisian Yiddish internationalist cultural development, the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion at the 1937 World's Fair. Through an analysis that places the pavilion within its immigrant Jewish and interwar Popular Front Parisian contexts, this article argues that the Modern Jewish Culture pavilion represented the culmination of decades of leftist cultural work in Paris. The Modern Jewish Culture pavilion highlighted both universal and particular aspects of Yiddish culture and placed them on display in the most international way possible. Buttressed by the rise in European fascism, antisemitism, and antifascism, Yiddish culture-makers in Paris created a cultural display that presented a sophisticated, global, pan-leftist Yiddish culture that spoke to Jews and non-Jews around the world in an attempt to preserve the burgeoning global Yiddish culture and stave off fascism.

Robert Nemes, and Daniel Unowsky , eds. Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918. Afterword by Hillel J. Kieval . Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2014. Pp. 345, maps, illus.

Robert Nemes, and Daniel Unowsky , eds. Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918. Afterword by Hillel J. Kieval . Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2014. Pp. 345, maps, illus.

The burdens of brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France

Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and Muslims in France from World War I to the present. Here Ethan Katz introduces a richer and more complex world that offers fresh perspective for understanding the opportunities and challenges in France today. Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, Katz shows how Jewish–Muslim relations were shaped by everyday encounters and by perceptions of deeply rooted collective similarities or differences. We meet Jews and Muslims advocating common and divergent political visions, enjoying common culinary and musical traditions, and interacting on more intimate terms as neighbors, friends, enemies, and even lovers and family members. Drawing upon dozens of archives, newspapers, and interviews, Katz tackles controversial subjects like Muslim collaboration and resistance during World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish participation in French colonialism, the international impact of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and contemporary Muslim antisemitism in France. We see how Jews and Muslims, as ethno-religious minorities, understood and related to one another through their respective relationships to the French state and society. Through their eyes, we see colonial France as a multiethnic, multireligious society more open to public displays of difference than its postcolonial successor. This book thus dramatically reconceives the meaning and history not only of Jewish–Muslim relations but ultimately of modern France itself.