Resurgence Of Antisemitism Research Articles

The resurgence of antisemitism: insights from cultural sociology

The resurgence of antisemitism: insights from cultural sociology

Understanding perceptions of contemporary antisemitism among Orthodox Jews in London

ABSTRACT Communal statistics and media reports reflect that there has been a resurgence of antisemitism. This paper explores whether this evidenced rise of antisemitism is effecting the Jewish community, in particular the Orthodox Jewish community. It elucidates the perceptions of Orthodox Jews in North London about the scale and significance of antisemitism. The study, which was informed by sociological framework, employed a qualitative approach using 28 semi-structured interviews and 5 focus groups. This article is important because it explores whether the perceptions of antisemitism were accentuated among this prime target group. This paper will first consider the shift in the manifestation of antisemitism which has been noted by Orthodox Jews. Second, this paper will consider the various contributory factors which influenced the framing of those varied perceptions.

Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte by Christian Heilbronn, Doron Rabinovici, and Natan Sznaider

Reviewed by: Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte ed. by Christian Heilbronn, Doron Rabinovici, and Natan Sznaider Simon Gansinger Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte. Edited by Christian Heilbronn, Doron Rabinovici, and Natan Sznaider. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019. 494 pages. €20.00 (paper). In 2004, when Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck, and Natan Sznaider first published Neuer Antisemitismus? the debate on the subject was still in its infancy. Now, 15 years later, things have changed. In the opening pages of the second (substantially revised) edition of their book, Rabinovici and Sznaider assert that "it can hardly be denied that … there is a new antisemitism that has been on the rise in [End Page 422] recent years" (12; all translations are mine). In 2019, the tentative tone of the title is an anachronism, a reflection of a dim past that has crystallized into an all too clear present. It seems no longer topical to ask whether today's antisemitism differs in important ways from that of yesterday. Instead, the 18 authors who contributed to Neuer Antisemitismus? Fortsetzung einer globalen Debatte attempt to uncover some of the manifestations of a concept that, sadly, reality has vindicated. Seven of those articles are reprinted from the first edition, six of which have been supplemented with a short postscript, and 11 are new additions. Notwithstanding considerable differences, all the authors seem to be in agreement that we are confronted with unprecedented configurations of antisemitism that call for original research and innovative responses—even if the agreement does not extend to the meaning, extent, and causes of "new antisemitism." One wonders if, faced with a resurgence of antisemitism in many corners of the world, intellectual vigor comes at the cost of conceptual rigor. As discussions since the turn of the millennium have amply illustrated, "new" is hardly an uncomplicated attribute. It raises the question of change, and change is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to analyze. One reason for this is the ever-looming danger of nominalism: two things that are thought to belong to the same category—such as classic and new antisemitism—may have little in common save the fact that some people use the same word for both, and what appears to be a new instance of an old phenomenon might actually be something entirely different. Gerd Koenen's article on the "Myths of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century," which stresses the historical contingencies in the development of antisemitic ideologies, is the only one that makes this question explicit, and few authors seem to share his concern. Part of the appeal of the label "new antisemitism" rests in its vast potential. In contrast to attributes like "Islamic," "Leftist," or "respectable," "new" does not restrict its object. This is why, on pain of arbitrariness, it is all the more important to be diligent about what is and what is not new about the phenomena that new antisemitism claims to describe. Regrettably, the editors do not [End Page 423] enter into this discussion. Instead of "making the implicit explicit" (13), as the introductory essay proclaims, they leave it to the reader to glean from the contributions how antisemitism has been transformed in the last few decades. Taken together, the articles paint a complex picture of what we could call the modes of change: the ways in which new antisemitism differs from its predecessors without, however, evolving into a separate species of hate. Many authors emphasize the sheer extent of the phenomenon. In recent years, antisemitism has gained, and sometimes regained, wider currency in countries where it had been kept on the margins. In his article "Antisemitism in Contemporary France," Michel Wieviorka diagnoses a revival of classical antisemitism in French society. While right-wing antisemitism began to rear its head again in the 1980s, some parts of the Left took Israel as the existential foe of emancipation. Simultaneously, the large-scale immigration from the Maghreb led to the emergence of a distinctly Islamic type of Jew-hatred in the banlieues of the cities. Within a short period of time, which saw the Islamist terror attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and on the HyperCasher supermarket in Paris, the country with the largest Jewish population in Europe...

"You know, I used to be a Jew"

Beginning with the unlikely pairing of Max Reinhardt and Groucho Marx, this article unpacks an old, politically troubling Jewish joke as a way of tracing two trajectories that unfolded between Austria and the United States. The first follows the author's family, the second the interdisciplinary field of American studies. The joke's commentary on the dilemmas of assimilation, as played out in the family history, frames a more sustained examination of how national identity was understood by the American studies project consolidated in Salzburg and the US just after World War II. Focusing on how the new field's ways of engaging and occluding problems of race, subordination, exploitation, and land-theft shaped an interpretation of American democracy's history and prospects, the article puts these issues in the context of Donald Trump's election as president and the urgency of understanding not only the ruptures but also the historical continuities his presidency represents. Against the backdrop of those reflections, the article considers how contemporary American studies does and might engage the continuities. The field must help shape a national narrative both accessible in idiom and able to reckon with the ongoing history of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Doing that entails not only moving beyond but also borrowing anew from that early, Salzburg-style formation of American studies. It may also benefit from the Jewish joke: the conclusion and two postscripts read the joke's limitations in the light of recent social struggles yet also note its unnerving relevance to the Trump-era resurgence of antisemitism.

Is Religion Coming Back as a Source for Antisemitic Views?

The most violent American and European antisemites in the 21st century, including not only Jihadists but also white (and black) supremacist terrorist, made some reference to religion in their hatred of Jews. This is surprising. Religious antisemitism is often seen as a relic of the past. It is more associated with pre-modern societies where the role of religion was central to the social and political order. However, at the end of the 19th century, animosity against Judaism gave way to nationalistic and racist motives. People such as Wilhelm Marr called themselves antisemites to distinguish themselves from those who despised Jews for religious reasons. Since then, antisemitism has gone through many mutations. However, today, it is not only the actions of extremely violent antisemites who might be an indication that religious antisemitism has come back in new forms. Some churches have been accused of disseminating antisemitic arguments related to ideas of replacement theology in modernized forms and applied to the Jewish State. Others, from the populist nationalist right, seem to use Christianity as an identity marker and thus exclude Jews (and Muslims) from the nation. Do religious motifs play a significant role in the resurgence of antisemitism in the 21st century?

Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture, Dorian Bell

Reviewed by: Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture by Dorian Bell Nancy Fitch Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture. By Dorian Bell. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 384 pages. $39.95 (paper). Dorian Bell’s Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture is a theoretically informed book that situates the discursive development of modern antisemitism in France in the context of the history of this country’s imperial conquests and fantasies. Given the resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary Britain, the United States, and Germany, as well as in France, a study like Bell’s that attempts to elucidate both its development and its functioning in practical political and social milieux represents an important contribution. The book is impressively researched and employs multiple theoretical frameworks. Bell’s study begins and ends with discussions of recent Muslim violence directed toward Jews in France. Explaining the violence is complicated, and one of the strengths of Bell’s book is that he avoids simple answers and works with fragments, elements, and tropes that come together in different times and spaces by different authors to produce a variety of effects. Since the book is cast as a theoretical intervention, the history here is only provisionally linear; disruptions are as frequent as continuities; cause and effect depend on conjunctures and repetitions contingent on particular spatial and temporal configurations rather than on anything predetermined. This approach, along with his many theoretical digressions, can make Bell’s arguments difficult to follow. Still, he has much to offer through his rich analysis. Bell launches his study with a critical reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Though many scholars and commentators have criticized Arendt’s attempt to historicize antisemitism by linking it to imperialism, Bell aims to show that “Jews and empire do, in fact, have everything to do with each other . . .” (36). Two parts of Arendt’s analysis are especially significant. Both authors want to argue that modern antisemitism developed in the context of the nation state and the rise of empires in nineteenth [End Page 183] century Europe. Although neither argues that one can identify a singular line of causation that culminated in the Holocaust or in twenty-first century antisemitism, both point to a significant rupture with the past when “modern nation-states like France grounded the legitimacy of human rights in the principle of national sovereignty [citizenship]” (54). This development was praised at the time as Jews, Protestants, and others gained rights they heretofore lacked. Still, it meant, dangerously, according to Bell, that citizenship, one’s sense of belonging to a community, effectively depended on an accident of birth. Arendt identified another rupture: the increasing marginalization of Jews as a source of state finance, as bourgeois capitalists engaged in imperial adventures replaced them as the state’s source of funds. Once modern states could depend on non-Jewish money, Jews became “superfluous.” Bell refutes this argument, what he calls her “displacement” theory, by demonstrating that “empire made Jews seem more entangled in government affairs” (30). The final point that Bell makes in his critical analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism is his discussion of Arendt’s “boomerang” thesis. According to Arendt, Europeans developed an extreme form of racism in Africa when they encountered peoples “alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (Arendt, cited on 43). Gradually, the racism and bureaucratic apparatus associated with it “boomeranged” back into continental Europe with increasingly deadly consequences. Bell acknowledges problems in Arendt’s argument, but he recognizes that she opened up analytical space to explore the relationship between Jews, antisemitism, race, and empire more closely. Much of the rest of the book looks at the cultural work that novels, short stories, and newspaper articles performed in nineteenth century France. Bell’s analysis here constitutes the main strength of his book, as he demonstrates how political notes, diplomatic decisions, and fiction mingled to rework old antisemitic tropes into modern discourses of a virulent mass-based hatred of Jews. Major characters are frequently Jewish colonial conspirators, usually born abroad in places like Germany or North Africa. For [End Page 184] Bell, the literature was full of contradictions, as antisemitic...

Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century

Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies have recently embraced ethnonationalists and even outspoken antisemites such as Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as friends of the Jewish state and opponents of antisemitism, and they have even engaged in antisemitism themselves. This has deep roots in Zionist history but is expressed today in radically new ways. This article concisely explicates the nature of modern antisemitism, its relationship to earlier forms of anti-Jewish animosity, and documents how Orbán and Netanyahu are promoting antisemitism today while cynically redefining the term to exculpate themselves and condemn their political opponents on the Left as the real antisemites.

Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century

Netanyahu, Orbán, and the Resurgence of Antisemitism: Lessons of the Last Century

Zionist-Nazi Collaboration and the Holocaust-A Historical Aberration? Lenni Brenner Revisited

Over thirty years ago Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators awakened the ghosts of Nazi-Zionist collaboration. This collaboration was an extension of Zionism's historical attitude to anti-Semitism in Europe, which saw anti-Semitism as the natural reaction of non-Jews to the abnormal presence of Jews. The Zionist movement was outraged by these public revelations of collaboration and sought to censor them. Brenner brought together some of the most damning evidence of Zionism's collaboration with the Nazis and their obstruction of the rescue of European Jews to anywhere but Palestine. This essay critiques Brenner's thesis, especially its failure to analyse the Holocaust in depth. Brenner rightly denounced this collaboration, but, as in the case of the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum Yad Vashem, he produced no analysis of this official Israeli memorial project. This essay furthermore explores the implications of Zionist collaboration as in the case of Argentina under the Junta and for a future resurgence of anti-Semitism.

B. Harrison, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion

B. Harrison, The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion

The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism on American College Campuses

Few American college campuses have witnessed the number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents reported at San Francisco State University, Columbia University, and the University of California at Irvine (2000–2005), however, dozens of American campuses every year experience at least some manifestation of this ugly problem, which is now undoubtedly national in scope. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) documents nearly 100 anti-Semitic incidents on American college campuses in 2005 alone. Most incidents are probably not reported to the ADL. The United States Commission on Civil Rights monitors anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses and will continue to do so.

Dialectic at a Standstill: The Discourse of Victimhood in Thomas Bernhard's "Heldenplatz"

A photo in the Burgtheater playbill accompanying Thomas Bernhard's drama Heldenplatz (1988) shows the eponymous square fifty years after the Anschluss, this time devoid of crowds cheering a triumphant Fuhrer.1 At one corner of the Heldenplatz, we see, in medium close-up, a high metal fence bearing a rudimentary placard with the words Platz der Opfer (19). A meager bouquet of marguerites and a sash admonishing us to never forget dangles beneath the small plaque. While the call to remember pertains to the Jewish victims of the Third Reich, a commemoration symbolically effected by renaming the Heldenplatz, the photo allows a more insidious reading. Its lack of specificity could be seen as an injunction to remember others who perceive themselves as victims, such as then President Kurt Waldheim, a former SA-member. Oliver Herrmann's other photographs in the playbill also suggest that one of Heldenplatz's underlying themes is the role of victimhood and its relation to historical responsibility. Black-and-white photos of scowling elderly people are juxtaposed with images of police battalions, anti-Waldheim protesters bearing signs such as Wer tritt Waldheim zuruck? and Nie wieder Pflichterfullung fur fremde Grossmachtinteressen! (108-09; 33), as well as the nearly empty Heldenplatz and city center from various vantage points. With the exception of a few quotations from the drama, verbal commentary is eschewed. The minimalist presentation cleverly conjures what will be the crux of the play: the pervasive rhetoric of victimization and victimhood among heterogeneous groups. Heldenplatz ultimately undermines stark oppositions of victims and perpetrators and instead reveals a problematic relationship between the two. In what follows, I would first like to discuss Bernhard's juridical-ethical discourse, which seems to present the characters as victims of Austrians' selective treatment of the past, only to subvert this subject position. Then I will look at the nonsynchronous and non-dialectical thinking of the drama's Jewish protagonists and the connection between this logic and their selfperception as victims. Staging a Show Trial There seems to be an inverse relation between the magnitude of the scandal Heldenplatz generated and the amount of close attention expended on the piece (see Pfabigan 14-15). The uproar surrounding the play-- commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Austria's premier stage, the Burgtheater, and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Anschluss-reached unprecedented heights and continued from June well into December of 1988. The coup de theatre attending Heldenplatz exposed fissures in society regarding Austria's historical responsibility, and the typically querulous Bernhard was taken to task for his vituperative attack on postwar Austria and its citizens.2 Closer scrutiny has only recently revealed the drama's contradictory aspects and the nuances intrinsic to Bernhard's hyperbole.3 Heldenplatz centers on the Jewish Schuster family, which, lured by academic positions and Vienna's cultural life, returned from English exile in the 1950s. In their own estimation, the Schusters are now, in March 1988, confronted with a resurgence of antiSemitism. One brother, Josef, intends to leave for Oxford with his wife. The elderly patriarch, however, unexpectedly commits suicide before the play begins. In the days following his death, bereaved family and friends congregate in the Schusters' apartment on the Heldenplatz, incessantly discussing Josef s act and the man himself I would argue that one reason for the furor caused by Heldenplatz was Bernhard's use of juridical discourse to address ethical questions of historical accountability Underlining the non-synchronisms between Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany, where a juridical discourse about National Socialism and the Holocaust preceded theological, historiographical, and social-psychological ones (Koch 7), Bernhard's drama seeks to combine a juridical with a socio-psychological approach. …

The Polls: Attitudes Toward American Jews

CONGRESSIONAL debate in the fall of 1981 over the sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia evoked heated public discussion, including some highly critical remarks in the media about the lobby and Israel's veto over American foreign policy. Coupled with news coverage of increasing vandalism of Jewish institutions, such stories have led some observers to conclude that there is resurgence of antisemitism in the United Is there resurgence? What do studies about the attitudes of Americans toward Jewish fellow Americans tell us? Surveying attitudes toward Jews in the United States started in the 1930s, with the triumph of the Nazis in Germany and their vigorous propaganda abroad. American Jewish organizations and individuals wanted to learn the extent of antisemitism in this country and to develop ways to counteract it. By the early 1960s over hundred surveys of attitudes toward American Jews had been conducted. These were compiled and analyzed in Jews in the Mind of America.I Charles Herbert Stember, the editor, concluded that antisemitism was a disappearing problem in the United States. But to this day is has not disappeared entirely. In October 1964 the Survey Research Center of the University of California at Berkeley conducted the first national survey to assess the extent and nature of contemporary antisemitism. The results were published as The Tenacity of Prejudice2 and dealt with attitudes toward discrimination in its various forms, social distance, and traditional antisemitic beliefs. Gertrude Selznick and Stephen Steinberg, who edited the volume, developed an index of 11 antisemitic beliefs which has served as point of re-