Abstract
This chapter traces the intertwining of the images and narratives of antisemitism with ideas about gender—that is, about what women and men are and do—especially in the context of the concept of citizenship as it develops in modernity. Beginning with the French revolution and its expansion of citizenship eligibility and ending with contemporary American popular culture, the article looks at the uncanny resemblance of tropes about women and tropes about Jews during periods of social and political instability, and the way that gender functions as a signifier in the discourse of antisemitism.
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Notes
- 1.
As Bauman notes, the term “allosemitism” was coined by the Polish Jewish literary historian Artur Sandauer.
- 2.
In another context, Sander Gilman (1997) observes that Europeans criticized circumcision as a sign of Jewish self-isolation, and at the same time, as a biological and naturally occurring (that is, racial) aspect of embodied Jewish difference.
- 3.
For example, in calling for a coalition of women of oppressed minorities, Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldúa explicitly excluded Jewish women. She upbraids the “white Jewishwomen” in her seminar for feeling that they “‘belonged’ more to the women-of-color group than they did to the white group” (1990, p. xx).
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Horowitz, S.R. (2021). Gender. In: Goldberg, S., Ury, S., Weiser, K. (eds) Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51658-1_9
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