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Journal for the Study of Antisemitism Journal for the Study of Antisemitism Special Issue: "Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism in the Shadow of the Holocaust” Guest Editors: Karin Stoegner, Nicolas Bechter, Lesley Klaff , Philip Spencer 2015 As of April 1st 2021, this special issue is subject to a CC-BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Other than as provided by these licenses, no part of this article may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from the publisher or as permitted by law. Open access publication of this issue is made possible by the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, published by Academic Studies Press. Welcome to the Guest Editors When I first spoke to Lesley Klaff about the possibility of JSA hosting ESA conference papers, I was not exactly certain what was involved. For several years, ESA’s roster of paper presentations was top notch and often included key conceptualizations not found elsewhere. I wanted to make certain that some of the field’s best thinkers were receiving their due. JSA was located in North America, ESA was located in Europe and the gap needed to be bridged. My appreciation to Karin Stoegner and her team for their perseverance in making such fine work available to others. The papers have in common a distinct European flavor—they are nuanced and contextual driven. Except for David Patterson, the authors are European offering their perspective from what has become ground zero in displays of the new antisemitism. Europe is also ground zero for the old antisemitism and the context of the Holocaust affords certain insights that North Americans have yet to fully understand. Perhaps an expanded research network can will afford new insights, new focus and new direction. Unfortunately, contemporary antisemitism is not a separate and distinct phenomenon unrelated to the antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust. If we pay attention to the new breed of European antisemitism researchers, no one is doomed to “repeat the past.” Countering the resurgent, globalized anti-Jewish animus will return it to its less inciting political past viz., under the rock from which it came. STEVEN K BAUM, EDITOR SHIMON T SAMUELS, BOARD CHAIR 1 Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism In the Shadow of the Holocaust Karin Stoegner, Nicolas Bechter Lesley Klaff and Philip Spencer* This Special Issue of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism contains a collection of papers that were presented at the International Conference “Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism in the Shadow of the Holocaust”—the midterm conference of the Research Network on Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism within the European Sociological Association. The network was set up over a decade ago with the aim of addressing what was felt to be a serious gap in contemporary social theory, the continuing and indeed growing presence of antisemitism and its connection to other racisms. The conference was particularly important both in terms of venue and timing. In Vienna, as in Austria more generally, responsibility for National Socialism and the Holocaust was acknowledged officially only in the early 1990s. Before that, Austria’s master narrative was that it had been Hitler’s first victim. Those who are familiar with the situation in Austria, with the political as well as with the public discourse know that the past still heavily weighs on the present and that present discourses are in various ways infused by the past, which is commemorated in official events but not actually worked through. In Vienna, the actuality of National Socialism and related forms of antisemitism that are based on defensiveness against guilt can be felt at every turn, which was the reason for us to choose the focus on contemporary antisemitism in the shadow of the Holocaust as the focus for this conference. Today, the question of the actuality and prevalence of antisemitism has become a contested field within academia as well as in a broader public discourse. Debates are going on as to whether antisemitism today is to be regarded as a genuine structural feature of contemporary society or rather as a relic of an ideology which no longer has any relevance in contemporary Europe. Adherents of the latter position suggest that compared to the antisemitism of the Nazis and compared to the Holocaust, to speak of antisemitism today, at least in Western Europe, is an 3 4 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [VOL. 7:7 exaggeration, a refusal to see how far Europe is no longer trapped in its old delusions and barbarism. As Robert Fine has argued in this narrative, “antisemitism is tucked away safely in Europe’s past, overcome by the defeat of fascism and the development of the European Union.” In this case, “antisemitism is remembered, but only as a residual trauma or a museum piece.”1 The either/or logic that Robert Fine explicates is itself part of the problem: it reproduces the exclusive and unmediated juxtaposition of the past and the present and disregards the dialectical relationship between them. If antisemitism is exclusively identified with its genocidal form of National Socialism, latent forms of antisemitism simply go unrecognized. The continuity in the discontinuity is thereby disregarded, as is the possibility that latent forms of antisemitism, even if they are not identical to the genocidal kind may nevertheless be connected to it in important respects. There is a perhaps particularly strong tendency in Germany and Austria, as the post-Nazi countries, to deal with antisemitism only as an historical issue. The task of coming to terms with the Nazi past is narrowed down here to commemorating antisemitism and the Holocaust as mere historic incidents and as questions only of historical responsibility that has to be met by Germany or Austria as successor states of National Socialism. But a consequence of this is that antisemitism is thereby seen as something for museums rather than viewed as a problem of today’s societies. This becomes evident in the vast number of publications and events, both academic and also dedicated to a broader public audience, which deal with antisemitism from a purely historical perspective that lacks any connection to contemporary forms of antisemitism. Antisemitism is analyzed from an external perspective, from the shielding distance of 70 years after the defeat of Nazi terror – the past is seen as self-contained and the Holocaust remembered as an incident that happened “once upon a time.” After 1945 and more particularly antisemitism in our contemporary societies, however, is far less often made a topic for conferences, events and scholarly publications. This reassuring narrative that remembers antisemitism as a relic of bygone times disregards what Walter Benjamin, the great critic of historiography, called the correspondence between the past and the present: that we never remember the past itself, but that memory is always an 1. Robert Fine, “Fighting with phantoms: A contribution to the debate of antisemitism in Europe” Patterns of Prejudice, 43:5 (2009), 463 2015] CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM AND RACISM 5 expression of the past in the present.2 For Benjamin, memory’s central task therefore is to look closely at the marks the past has left in the present. Then we may realize that contemporary antisemitism, far from being a mere relic of bygone times, exhibits some continuity with Nazi ideology in contemporary societies, a “survival of National Socialism within democracy”, which Adorno considered “to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.”3 From this perspective, the Nazi past is not a closed chapter in the history book of civilization but spills over to the present. This can be seen in the prevalence of secondary antisemitism that occurs with explicit as well as latent reference to National Socialism in order to legitimize it and in order to deflect from guilt. So if we take the meaning of working through the past seriously, the way Adorno elaborated on it, we need to stress that antisemitism today is not to be viewed as a remnant of the past but has its very strong roots in contemporary society; we need to think not just about National Socialism, but also about the conditions that made it possible. In as much as these conditions are not overcome, the past still infuses the present. Contemporary antisemitism needs to be analyzed in the shadow of the Holocaust. This is exactly what the authors of this special issue do: from different perspectives, from different backgrounds, by reference to different cases they analyze how contemporary antisemitism relates to the Holocaust and how this connection can be tackled in theory and praxis. The papers in the first section explore Holocaust remembrance in different contexts and in different countries. The papers either explore theoretical concepts or are approaches. Julia Edthofer discusses how the postcolonial debates on antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism are shaped by remembrance of the Holocaust and the colonial and how they both refer to an anti-Israel view on the Middle East conflict. Evelyn Goodman-Thau, also in a theoretical paper, describes the role of myth and messianism in discourses of Holocaust remembrance. Elke Rajal embeds her study of Holocaust education in Austria in Adorno’s theory of society and remembrance. The next two papers deal with postwar antisemitism in Germany. Holger Knothe asks, if there has been a qualitative change in antisemitic resentment and considers the extent to which we can justify talk of a “new antisemitism”. Ljiljana Radonic describes the antisemitic experiences of a 2. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” in Selected Writings Vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press 2003). 3. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models.
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