New Book: Rosenfeld, Deciphering the New Antisemitism

Rosenfeld, Alvin H., ed. Deciphering the New Antisemitism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

new antisemitism

Deciphering the New Antisemitism addresses the increasing prevalence of antisemitism on a global scale. Antisemitism takes on various forms in all parts of the world, and the essays in this wide-ranging volume deal with many of them: European antisemitism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel. Contributors are an international group of scholars who clarify the cultural, intellectual, political, and religious conditions that give rise to antisemitic words and deeds. These landmark essays are noteworthy for their timeliness and ability to grapple effectively with the serious issues at hand.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction Alvin H. Rosenfeld

Part I. Defining and Assessing Antisemitism
1. Antisemitism and Islamophobia: The Inversion of the Debt – Pascal Bruckner
2. The Ideology of the New Antisemitism – Kenneth L. Marcus
3. A Framework for Assessing Antisemitism: Three Case Studies (Dieudonné, Erdoğan, and Hamas) – Günther Jikeli
4. Virtuous Antisemitism – Elhanan Yakira


Part II. Intellectual and Ideological Contexts
5. Historicizing the Transhistorical: Apostasy and the Dialectic of Jew-Hatred – Doron Ben-Atar
6. Literary Theory and the Delegitimization of Israel – Jean Axelrad Cahan
7. Good News from France: There Is No New Antisemitism – Bruno Chaouat
8. Anti-Zionism and the Anarchist Tradition – Eirik Eiglad
9. Antisemitism and the Radical Catholic Traditionalist Movement – Mark Weitzman

Part III. Holocaust Denial, Evasion, Minimization
10. The Uniqueness Debate Revisited – Bernard Harrison
11. Denial, Evasion, and Anti-Historical Antisemitism: The Continuing Assault on Memory – David Patterson
12. Generational Changes in the Holocaust Denial Movement in the United States – Aryeh Tuchman


Part IV. Regional Manifestations
13. From Occupation to Occupy: Antisemitism and the Contemporary Left in the United States – Sina Arnold
14. The EU’s Responses to Contemporary Antisemitism: A Shell Game – R. Amy Elman
15. Anti-Israeli Boycotts: European and International Human Rights Law Perspectives – Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias
16. Delegitimizing Israel in Germany and Austria: Past Politics, the Iranian Threat, and Post-national Anti-Zionism – Stephan Grigat
17. Antisemitism and Antiurbanism, Past and Present: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches – Bodo Kahmann
18. Tehran’s Efforts to Mobilize Antisemitism: The Global Impact – Matthias Küntzel

List of Contributors
Index

ALVIN H. ROSENFELD holds the Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University Bloomington. He is editor of Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (IUP, 2013) and author of The End of the Holocaust (IUP, 2011), among other books.

 

New Article: Shroufi, The Gates of Jerusalem: European Revisionism and the Populist Radical Right

Shroufi, Omran. “The Gates of Jerusalem: European Revisionism and the Populist Radical Right.” Race & Class 57.2 (2015): 24-42.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306396815595799

 

Abstract

In late 2010, the ‘European Freedom Alliance’, a group of four European politicians from populist radical right parties: Heinz-Christian Strache, Chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ); Filip Dewinter, a senior leader in Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB); René Stadtkewitz, founder of Germany’s Die Freiheit; and Kent Ekeroth, the International Secretary for the Sweden Democrats (SD), travelled to Israel and the West Bank. Their trip culminated in the signing of the ‘Jerusalem Declaration’, a document conveying their staunch support for Israel and its right to defend itself against ‘Islamic aggression’. The author analyses key interviews and the Declaration to demonstrate how the event is indicative of a reformed and realigned populist radical Right. Open anti-Semitism, he argues, has been replaced by calls to prevent Islam’s supposed contamination of the nation’s cultural heritage and new positions are being adopted on post-national cooperation and European identity. Also, wider transformations in Western European politics have resulted in the populist radical Right increasingly framing the electorate’s insecurities as evidence of the cultural erosion of the nation state. Through comparing the experiences of Israelis with those of non-Muslims living in Europe, the Alliance argues for the need to toughen Europe’s defence against a common enemy.

 

 

ToC: Tikkun 30.3 (2015)

Table of Contents for Tikkun 30.3 (2015):

 

Letters

Editorials

  • RABBI MICHAEL LERNER

Repenting for What Israel Did to Gaza—Without Condoning the Wrongs Committed by Hamas

Tikkun (2015) 30(3): 5-7

Politics & Society

SAM ROSS-BROWN

  • JESSICA BENJAMIN

Acknowledging the Other’s Suffering: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Trauma in Israel/Palestine

Tikkun (2015) 30(3): 15-16

  • PETER GABEL

The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice: Transforming the Legal Arena

Tikkun (2015) 30(3): 17-23

 

VANDANA SHIVA

Special Section: Nonviolence in Foreign Policy

Strengthening Local Economies: The Path to Peace?

Tikkun (2015) 30(3): 34-38

Rethinking Religion

JOY LADIN

Culture

Books

RAMI SHAPIRO

PHILIP TERMAN

The Poetry of a Jewish Humanist

Tikkun (2015) 30(3): 56-58; doi:10.1215/08879982-3140236

Poetry

Chana Bloch

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Wiseman, Alexander W. “Representations of Islam and Arab Societies in Western Secondary Textbooks.” Digest of Middle East Studies 23.2 (2014): 312-44.

URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dome.12047/abstract

Abstract

Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the textbooks in Arab and Islamic nation-states have been carefully critiqued for any content that Westerners view as promoting hate or violence against non-Muslims. Very little has been said, however, about the portrayals of Islamic and Arab society in Western textbooks. This report investigates the perspectives and ideologies concerning representations of Islam and Arab societies in textbooks worldwide, and specifically in Western countries’ national education systems. Seventy-two textbooks from 15 Western countries and Israel were examined to investigate the included and excluded content related to Islam and Arab societies. This research found that those countries with either an immediate stake in the Middle East (e.g., Israel) or an immediate past stake in the region (e.g., the United Kingdom) were the most likely to include coverage of Islam and Arab societies in secondary textbooks. The major findings of this research, however, are that content related to contemporary Islam and Arab societies in Western secondary-level textbooks is overwhelmingly related to terrorism and terrorists, the Arab/Israeli conflict, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The majority of content related to contemporary Islam and Arab societies represents Muslims and their communities as: 1) socially, politically, and economically repressed; 2) religiously and ideologically oppressed; and 3) both typically and frequently violent.

 

Cite: Aburaya, Islamic Sacred Texts and Muslims’ Political Conduct: The Israeli Dominant Elites’ Conception

Aburaya, Issam; Abu-Raiya, Hisham. “On the Connection between Islamic Sacred Texts and Muslims’ Political Conduct: The Israeli Dominant Elites’ Conception.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5.2 (2012): 101-115.

 

URL: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/mjcc/2012/00000005/00000002/art00002

 

Abstract

This essay provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed examination of Israeli elites’ discourse on Islam, in general, and its conceptualization of the relationship between Islamic sacred texts and the political conduct of Muslims, in particular. It argues that the Israeli elites’ discourse, for the most part, is not only unhistorical and lacking in a sociological basis, but, most importantly, emphasizes Islamic religious texts while reducing their Muslim readers into uniquely choiceless beings. This conceptualization, we contend, leads to unnecessary and unjustifiable theoretical inconsistencies concerning the broader topic of the relationship between human agency and religious texts. We conclude by suggesting that the above mentioned Israeli discourse teaches us less about what Islam and Muslims `really are’ than it does about the Israeli self-idealized image as members of a secular western society and the desires and anxieties this image expresses and represses.

Cite: Davidson, Islamophobia and the Israel Lobby

Davidson, Lawrence. “Islamophobia, the Israel Lobby and American Paranoia: Letter from America.” Holy Land Studies 10 (2011): 87-95.

 

URL: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2011.0005

 

Abstract

The phenomenon of Islamophobia has now surfaced as a factor in American politics. While disturbing and damaging of people’s lives and reputations, the phenomenon is not unique. It can be seen as but the latest eruption of paranoid political thinking that periodically arises in American history. In turn, seeing the fate of the nation threatened by conspiracies and anti-American elements is made easier and more destructive by high levels of ignorance and insularity among large numbers of Americans. This latest round of paranoid politics, coming now in the form of Islamophobia, was triggered by the attacks of 11 September 2001 and quickly exacerbated by American Zionist groups, both Jewish and Christian, whose dislike of Muslims also has a long history.

Cite: Ben-Dror, Benny Morris and the Case for the One-State

Ben-Dror, Oren "Benny Morris, Islamophobia and the Case for the One-State Solution." Holy Land Studies 9.2 (2010): 229-237.

 

URL: http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/hls.2010.0106

Abstract

Review article of Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israeli/Palestine Conflict, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009). Pp. 240. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-300-12281-7