Abstract
This essay employs societalization theory to explain the disturbing renewal of publicly antisemitic beliefs and actions in contemporary Western societies. These new explosions of anti-Jewish hatred are caused, not by increases in antisemitic feelings, but by the weakening of prohibitions against their public expression. Since Western civil spheres introduced such prohibitions in the early nineteenth century, there have been waves of societalization stigmatizing antisemitism and continuous backlash movements against them. The German backlash culminated with the Holocaust and triggered a powerful societalizing movement that allowed massive Jewish incorporation into Western societies. This post-Holocaust societalizing movement, however, was highly variable, both temporally and spatially, and in recent decades the deleterious effects of such incompleteness have been exacerbated by declining Holocaust memory, new symbolizations of Israel, and shifts in progressive ideologies. Utopian hopes for “never again” have been dashed. Yet, even as antisemitic narratives are once again providing cultural fodder for backlash movements, another wave of societalizing protest is gathering force inside Western civil spheres.
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Notes
See Chad Goldberg’s contribution to this symposium.
In so doing, our approach diverges from the recent Society Forum: Decolonising the Holocaust? (2022). Addressing the “Possibilities and Limits of New Attempts to Understand and Situate the Holocaust in Comparative Contexts” (Hess 2022), contributors to the forum focused their attention on recent debates from Left oriented scholars that challenge existing perspectives about the Holocaust and suggest alternative frameworks such as addressing the Holocaust in a colonial perspective.
They have also shared in the same process of materialization, for the pollution of Jewishness is iconic as well as discursive. The culture structure of antisemitism expresses itself aesthetically, e.g., Jews give off a repulsive odor; they have ugly physiognomies, such as small eyes, long noses, an overabundance of body hair.
In their contribution to this symposium, Zuckerman and Feldt discuss how Denmark’s assimilative mode of Jewish incorporation—powerfully inclusive yet, at the same time, patronizing and limiting—has affected that nation’s societalizing reaction to earlier and contemporary outbreaks of antisemitic violence.
By the time the Bill was debated in Parliament, fighting against the discrimination of Britain’s black communities occupied the attention of a majority of politicians. However, the legislation was also shaped by the need to protect the Jewish community from fascism, its success relying on the lobbying efforts of British Jewish communities (Schaffer 2014).
SPCJ Report on Antisemitism in France in 2013, p. 8.
As with any generalization, one can find significant exceptions, for example the philo-semitism that has emerged in Krakow, Poland, as a counterpoint to the national trend (Zubrzycki 2022).
French historian Jacques Julliard has gone so far as to say: “The new antisemitism in France today is a Muslim antisemitism. But it is not being said, because people are afraid of stigmatizing Muslims or setting off a wave of Islamophobia.” https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/05/03/599515300/alarm-grows-in-france-over-antisemitic-violence. We do not agree with this self-serving characterization; we present it, rather, as an indication of the anti-antisemitism of the non-Islamic core group of the French civil sphere.
Public antisemitism in Sweden—slowly diminishing between 2005 and 2020 (The Living History Forum 2020)—has been characterized as “Israel-derived antisemitism” (Dencik and Marosi 2017; Enstad 2017). “In no other country,” according to Denick and Marosi, “do the Jews feel that they are blamed ‘all the time’ for anything done by the Israeli government as frequently as in Sweden” (2017, p. 19).
Antisemitism on the Left is not an entirely new phenomenon. For instance, one of Lipset’s arguments in his 1959 article on authoritarian personality types is that even Western Europe’s Marxist Socialist movement was not immune to antisemitism.
For an extended discussion on what has been termed the Catechism Debate, see the New Fascism Syllabus May 25–June 2, 2021, also Spencer 2022).
For detailed reconstruction of waves of societalization in Denmark, see Zuckerman and Feldt’s contribution to this symposium.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Maja Gildin Zuckerman for initiating the Association of Jewish Studies panel “Antisemitism as cultural processes: Cultural sociological framings of the rise in antisemitism,” in which the three papers were first presented.
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Alexander, J.C., Adams, T. The return of antisemitism? Waves of societalization and what conditions them. Am J Cult Sociol 11, 251–268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-023-00184-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-023-00184-7