The New Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamic Dimension of,and Jewish Belonging in,the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.     

Acculturation orientations towards Israeli Arabs and Jewish immigrants in Israel

The State of Israel can be characterized as having two integration policies: an assimilationist one towards “valued” Jewish immigrants and a somewhat ethnist one towards its “devalued” national minority, namely Israeli Arabs. Using the Host Community Acculturation Scale (HCAS), this study explored Jewish undergraduate (N = 153) acculturation orientations towards “valued” Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background and towards “devalued” Israeli Arabs. Results showed that Jewish undergraduates mainly endorsed the integrationism and individualism acculturation orientations towards Jewish immigrants. However, they were more segregationist and exclusionist towards Israeli Arabs than towards Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background. Assimilation was weakly endorsed towards both Jewish immigrants and Israeli Arabs. Based on an extensive questionnaire, multiple regression analyses showed that each acculturation orientation had a distinct psychological profile. The integrationism and individualism orientations were endorsed by undergraduates who were tolerant towards ethnic diversity, felt secure personally, culturally, and militarily, and did not endorse the social dominance orientation (SDO). In addition to not feeling threatened by the presence of Israeli Arabs, integrationists and individualists were identified as secular Israelis and Labour Party sympathizers rather than as religious Jews. In contrast, the assimilationism, segregationism, and exclusionism orientations were endorsed by undergraduates who felt insecure personally, religiously, culturally, and militarily, who tended to be less tolerant towards ethnic diversity, and who were more prone to endorse the SDO. In addition to feeling threatened by Israeli Arabs, they avoided close relations with Russian and Ethiopian immigrants. Segregationists and exclusionists were identified mainly as Jewish nationals. Orthodox Jews, and as Likud Party sympathizers. Exclusionists were distinctive in also feeling threatened by the presence Jewish immigrants of Russian and Ethiopian background. While taking into consideration the context of intergroup relations in Israel, results are discussed using the Interactive Acculturation Model (Bourhis, Moïse, Perreault, & Senecal, 1997).     

MICHAEL WALZER'S SECULAR JEWISH THOUGHT

Although he has never assumed the mantle of a “Jewish thinker,” Michael Walzer has over a period of several decades articulated a comprehensive teaching rooted in philosophical reflection on the sources of Judaism and focused on the most important issues facing both Israel and the diaspora. At the core of his teaching lies a reiteration of what he takes to be the Jewish idea of justice, which he derives from the Bible and other ancient and medieval texts. He also places strong emphasis on liberalism, which he sees not as a product of the Jews' ancient heritage but as “a product of emancipation,” yet no less authentically Jewish for that. On a practical level, his writings are concerned with the implementation of justice and liberal values in both Jewish communities and the Jewish state, in their internal affairs as well as in their relations with others. He has devoted special efforts to showing that a Jewish state is, as such, fully compatible with the promotion of both justice and liberalism, properly understood.     

KUZGUNCUK AS A VILLAGE OF MUTUAL RESPECT AND HARMONY: MYTH OR REALITY?

My research concentrates on the Jews of Istanbul and especially on the Kuzguncuk neighbourhood. My aim is to understand the changes within the social structure of the Jewish community of Turkey and its relationship with the dominant Muslim society. Different from other important Jewish neighbourhoods of Istanbul such as quarters in Balat, Haskoy and Galata-Pera district, Kuzguncuk is known as the “village of harmony” and a “place in which all religious and ethnic groups live in peace, harmony and mutual respect”. In this article, I try to answer the question of whether this is a myth or the real experience of Kuzguncuk. Whether a myth or a real experience, can it be a model for people “living together in peace and harmony”? I will also explore the situation of Jews after the foundation of the Turkish republic. In order to understand the changing structure of Jews of Kuzguncuk, I conducted interviews with seven actual and former residents of Kuzguncuk, who now live in Israel, Kuzguncuk and other districts of Istanbul.     

Talking about Antisemitism in France Before and After <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Hyper Cacher

This article explores tensions in French Jewish discourses about antisemitism in the post-2000 period. Drawing on commentary from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the French Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, I note a complex relationship between change and continuity in discursive characterizations of French antisemitism. While empirical manifestations of antisemitism were notably transformed by the Toulouse attacks of 2012, much French Jewish discourse insisted on continuity from the early 2000s onward. At the same time, Jewish narrative practices shifted rather dramatically. In a political context where Israel was often depicted as part of a history of violent settler colonialism, early 2000s Jewish discourse divorced French antisemitism from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (post)colonial racism in France. After 2012, some Jewish commentators linked Israel to French antisemitism by likening terrorism in Israel with Islamic antisemitism in France. These disjunctures between narratives and empirical violence suggest that the “structures of feeling” behind Jewish reactions to contemporary antisemitism cannot be reduced to empirical questions about safety and security. Social scientists thus need to move beyond an empirical analysis of antisemitism itself and attend to the cultural and affective work Jewish discourses about antisemitism do in any particular moment.     

DELEGITIMIZING JEWS AND ISRAEL IN IRAN'S INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST CARTOON CONTEST

In 2006, the Iranian government-aligned newspaper Hamshahri sponsored The International Holocaust Cartoon Contest. The stated aim of the contest was to denounce “Western hypocrisy on freedom of speech,” and to challenge “Western hegemony” in relation to Holocaust knowledge. This government-backed initiative was a clear attempt to export the Iranian regime's anti-Zionist agenda. Using qualitative thematic analysis and Social Representations Theory, this article provides an in-depth qualitative analysis of the cartoons submitted to the contest in order to identify emerging social representations of Jews and Israel. Three superordinate themes are outlined: (i) “Constructing the ‘Evil Jew’ and ‘Brutal Israel’ as a Universal Threat;” (ii) “Denying the Holocaust and Affirming Palestinian Suffering;” (iii) “Constructing International Subservience to ‘Nazi-Zionist’ Ideology.” Although the organizers of the International Holocaust Cartoon Contest claimed that their aims were anti-Zionist, this article elucidates the overtly anti-Semitic character of the contest and its cartoons. It is argued that the cartoons exhibit a distorted, one-sided version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of Jewish history, and may therefore shape viewers' beliefs concerning Jews and Israel in fundamentally negative ways, with negative outcomes for intergroup relations and social harmony.     

(Dis)agreement with the Implementation of Humanitarian Policy Measures Towards Asylum Seekers in Israel: Does the Frame Matter?

This study investigates emerging public attitudes about the implementation of humanitarian policy measures towards asylum seekers among the Jewish population in Israel. It specifically asks whether the way asylum seekers in Israel are framed informs the process of attitude formation in the Jewish Israeli public. To answer this question, we measure the extent to which the frame “infiltrators” as opposed to the frame “asylum seekers” positively predicts the rejection of humanitarian policy measures toward asylum seekers. Following framing theory, we also propose that the framing effect depends on the respondents’ perceived levels of threat by asylum seekers, and on their political identification. In line with our hypothesis, the findings indicate that the effect of the framing on the rejection of humanitarian policy measures decreases with increasing levels of threat. Although the framing effect on the rejection of humanitarian policy measures towards asylum seekers is somewhat weaker among respondents with a right-wing political identification, the differences between these and other respondents are not significant.     

March of the Living, a Holocaust Educational Tour: Effect on Adolescent Jewish Identity

March of the Living (MOTL) is a worldwide two-week trip for high school seniors to learn about the Holocaust by traveling to sites of concentration/death camps and Jewish historical sites in Poland and Israel. The mission statement of MOTL International states that participants will be able to “bolster their Jewish identity by acquainting them with the rich Jewish heritage in pre-war Eastern Europe.” However, this claim has never been studied quantitatively. Therefore, 152 adolescents who participated in MOTL voluntarily completed an initial background questionnaire, a Jewish Identity Survey and a Global Domains Survey pre-MOTL, end-Poland and end-Israel. Results suggest that Jewish identity did not substantially increase overall or from one time period to the next.     

Nostalgia for Communist Times and Autobiographical Memory: Negative Present or Positive Past?

Twenty‐five years after the fall of communism in Poland, a considerable number of citizens manifest nostalgia for the communist times. In this article, we approach this phenomenon within the framework of autobiographical memory and decide between two sets of hypotheses, one predicting that postcommunist nostalgia is experienced mostly by people who are dissatisfied with the present time (transformation “losers”) and the other predicting that it is the memory of the happy and most recollected past, and memories of particular decades of communism, that mostly trigger nostalgia. The study, carried out on a representative sample of Poles who remembered communism, provided stronger confirmation of the “negative present” hypothesis, but the positive past is also shown to matter. The decade of communism whose memory turned out to predict nostalgia the best was the 1980s and not, as predicted, the 1970s.     

COMMENT

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jews around the world intensified their call for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Jewish Labour Bund, an Eastern European Jewish socialist party, had been, throughout its existence vehemently anti-Zionist, advocating instead its notion of doikayt (literally “here-ness”), which claimed that Jews should focus on building viable communities in any place in which they lived. This article will examine the way the movement remained steadfast in its opposition to Jewish statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust and even in the wake Israel's establishment in 1948, and it will chart the process by which the Bund embraced Israel as quickly in 1955, looking at the rise of a Bund organization in Israel. I will argue that the Bund's position was neither desperate nor naïve. It was grounded in the Bundists' traditional enmity towards Zionism, and reflected their faith in a universalist answer to the problem of Jewish survival. This story complicates contemporary understandings of postwar Jewish and European history, and sheds new light on notions of diaspora and experiences of displacement.     

BOOK REVIEWS

About 25% of the Jewish population in Israel consists of “secular believers.” They self-identify as secular but also believe in God or some kind of higher/deeper power(s). Their identity conflicts with the conventional identification of secularism with atheism, as do post-secular theologies, whose theological ideas reject traditional religion while adopting concepts of faith. Western feminism proved especially conducive to the development of post-secular theology. This study addresses both Israeli Judaism and feminist theology from a post-secular perspective. It analyses two academic fields of discourse—feminist Jewish theology and feminism in Israel—to determine whether, how and why they are developing a Jewish post-secular feminist theology. The study reveals that such theologies are rare and suggests that discursive field structure limits their development.     

PEOPLE OF GOD,CHILDREN OF HAM

Taxonomies inherited from the nineteenth century have shaped the discourse surrounding the racial identity and supposed roots of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. Through their interactions with just a few colonial actors, some of whom were Christian missionaries, others who were Jewish Zionists, a small group of young Falashas developed an elite status in Ethiopia as the true lost Jews in Africa. While most historians specializing in the history of Ethiopia do not believe the Beta Israel are a “lost tribe” of the ancient Israelites, Ethiopian immigrants have altered their self‐conceptions over the past hundred years and come to see themselves as both black and Jewish. This essay offers an alternative reading of the Beta Israel narrative, and asserts that the transformation of their social identities are embedded in a political process of racialization tied to racial ideology, and both secular and religious institutions and the State. In the process of incorporation into western society, their social identities have been transmogrified from religious others in Ethiopia to co‐religionists yet racial others in Israel.     

IDENTITY,POLITICS AND HALAKHAH IN MODERN ISRAEL

The fierce debate over conversion to Judaism raging in Israel today has been fuelled by the Israeli Law of Return and the resulting immigration of large numbers of non-Jews to Israel from the Soviet Union. It has precedents, however, in earlier rabbinic literature. This paper traces the conversion debate from its Talmudic origins, through the nineteenth century halakhic polemic, to the present day. It demonstrates how the processes of secularization and nationalism that have affected the Jewish community have impacted on a changing balance in the roles of religion and nationalism in the definition of “who is a Jew” and “who is a convert?” It also shows how halakhic rulings are affected by social changes and how the ideologies of halakhic authorities impact their decisions.     

ON THE TENACITY OF CHRISTIAN ANTI‐JUDAISM1

Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son and Spirit demonstrated that the supersessionist gambit Christianity had introduced against Judaism is a logic any successor can employ. Modernity (cf. modo, “now”) is constituted by a relentless supersessionist logic; the modern issue is less supersessionism than a conflict of supersessionisms. Christianity has repeatedly overspiritualized God's “bodily covenant” with Israel (Wyschogrod). This distortive tendency is intensified in modernity by Christianity's anxiety that it too will appear old/“Jewish” vis‐à‐vis a new New Testament of infinite spiritual freedom (cf. Romanticism.) One corrective would be for Christianity to return to a more Jewish understanding of election.     

The Lieberman Syndrome: Public and Private Jewishness in American Political Culture

Shortly after the Second World War, Jewish communities in the Czech lands began to remember the Jewish victims of the conflict through a ceremony called the “tryzna”. This article investigates the structure and timing of tryzny to understand how Czech‐Jews memorialized the tragedy that had recently befallen their community. By 1952, it became standard practice for Jewish communities to host a tryzna in March to commemorate the Nazi liquidation of the so‐called “Czech family camp” at Auschwitz‐Birkenau in 1944. The proliferation of tryzny ensured that Czech‐Jews mourned and commemorated the dead of the Second World War in a religious and then increasingly public way. What began as small community events, coalesced and grew into national mourning ceremonies. Tryzny link a national story of loss and an awareness of the larger Jewish genocide with Jewish funerary practices. These tryzny evolved within a communist state, in a world where the concept of the “Holocaust” had not yet entered international consciousness.     

ORTHODOXY AND THE CHALLENGE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM

Traditional Jewish theology and practice are predicated on belief in the divinity of the Torah. Biblical criticism has posed increasingly formidable challenges to this belief in modern times. To the extent that Modern Orthodoxy has addressed the problem, it has generally attempted to refute the findings of scientific scholarship on its own terms. This article will suggest that such an approach represents a misplaced framing of the question, by viewing all religious truth claims cognitively as simple statements of fact. Instead of questioning whether the doctrine of Torah from Heaven is true empirically, its “truth” is established via its function within the context of the “form of life” (in the Wittgensteinian sense) that it engenders.     

Multi‐group acculturation orientations in a changing context: Palestinian Christian Arab adolescents in Israel after the lost decade

Grounded in a contextual approach to acculturation of minorities, this study examines changes in acculturation orientations among Palestinian Christian Arab adolescents in Israel following the “lost decade of Arab–Jewish coexistence.” Multi‐group acculturation orientations among 237 respondents were assessed vis‐à‐vis two majorities—Muslim Arabs and Israeli Jews—and compared to 1998 data. Separation was the strongest endorsed orientation towards both majority groups. Comparisons with the 1998 data also show a weakening of the Integration attitude towards Israeli Jews, and also distancing from Muslim Arabs. For the examination of the “Westernisation” hypothesis, multi‐dimensional scaling (MDS) analyses of perceptions of Self and group values clearly showed that, after 10 years, Palestinian Christian Arabs perceive Israeli Jewish culture as less close to Western culture, and that Self and the Christian Arab group have become much closer, suggesting an increasing identification of Palestinian Christian Arab adolescents with their ethnoreligious culture. We discuss the value of a multi‐group, multi‐method, and multi‐wave approach to the examination of the role of the political context in acculturation processes.     

THE RETURN OF THE DEAD SOULS: THE GERMAN STUDENTS' MOVEMENT AND THE GHOSTS OF AUSCHWITZ

The intellectual history determined by the 1968 students' revolt sometimes appears as a ghost scene, emerging from the strong identification of the radical students with Jews and Judaism. This essay wishes to demonstrate the inner connection between the messianic political theology of the movement and the psychological effects of this over-identification, leading to a leftist anti-Semitism. While the revolutionary students saw themselves as the true successors of Jewish revolutionary messianism, they accused the real Jew, the one who settled in Israel, of being an imperialist traitor. The essay reconstructs the metamorphosis of these ghosts in a “phenomenology of the spirits” as a “Geistergeschichte” behind the official “Geistesgeschichte.” Against this pathological path the essay presents Jürgen Habermas's reflections on the ethics of memory as its best therapy.     

MAINTAINING AMBIVALENCE: RELIGIOUS PRACTICE AND JEWISH IDENTITY AMONG ISRAELI TRADITIONISTS—A POST-SECULAR PERSPECTIVE

Based on personal interviews with 102 Israeli Jews who identify themselves as “traditionists” (I shall argue below on the merits of this neologism as the proper translation of the Hebrew noun masorti), the paper studies the meanings traditionists associate with their Jewish practice, and endeavours to decipher and reconstruct the unwritten (and often unformulated) code guiding traditionist practice. This code, the paper argues, revolves around the preservation of a valid, “thick” sense of modern, ethnonational Jewish identity. The first part of the paper examines the tendency to present traditionism as lacking a consistent guiding logic, and addresses the question of whether it should be dismissed as the simple preference of “comfortableness” and easiness over the demanding observance of strict Orthodoxy. The second part enquires into the issue of the guilt arising from the supposed inconsistency between traditionists’ ideas of the role of religious practice and their “selective” attitude towards it. The paper thus argues against the (mis-) understanding of traditionism as deficient religiosity. Arguing that such dismissal is nurtured on the dichotomous world view propagated by the secularization thesis, the paper suggests that a post-secular epistemology is better suited for the interpretive understanding of this phenomenon.