This questionnaire spotlights research on Jewish/non-Jewish relations, hoping to build connections and engage with current academic debate. Irit Dekel and Esra Öyzürek’s article ‘The logic of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in three cultural shifts’ is published in Parkes Journal, Patterns of Prejudice.
- How would you summarise your article?
Our article “The Fight Against Antisemitism in Germany in three Cultural Shifts” is an outcome of a long and fruitful dialogue on the entanglement of religion and ethnic-based discrimination, memory politics, and the discourses on antisemitism and Islamophobia in present day Germany. Analysing the German federal government’s annual reports of antisemitic incidents, media discussions of antisemitic attacks, and legislative motions with regards to antisemitism, we noted a discrepancy between the actual numbers of Muslims involved in attacks of Jews (about 1% annually) and the heated discussions of their putative involvement in such attacks over the past decade. In our article, published in April 2023 by the Journal Patterns of Prejudice, we analysed German daily media discussions on antisemitism and work by governmental and non-governmental organisations, such as motions by the German parliament (Bundestag), and reports by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism RIAS. Government and non-governmental institutions often dedicate large resources to scrutinising Muslims and other racialised minorities who seldom engage in anti-Jewish hate crimes as putatively dangerous to Jews. Those institutions and media, since 2020, also survey public intellectuals who are white ethnic Germans (including Jews and Christians) that demonstrate solidarity with these minorities. In a previous article we wrote together, What Do We Talk About When We Talk about Antisemitism in Germany? we list a few of the mediated calls for removal from office of Muslim, Jewish, and Black left liberal individuals and mostly women , such as in 2009, Philippa Ebéné, director of the Werkstatt der Kulturen; in 2019, Yasemin Shooman, then director of the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Academy Program, and Peter Schäfer, then director of the Jewish Museum. More recently, seven journalists were fired from Deuthsce Welle Arabic Services in 2021 and Emily Dische-Becker was accused of Antisemitism in her role as an advisor for Documenta 15 art fair in 2022.
We thus investigated what social processes and discursive mechanisms derive and sustain the discrepancy and growth in antisemitism accusations. We additionally examined the emotional investment in the focus on Muslims, as well as politically left and progressive actors who express solidarity with these minorities and support progressive values and a pluralistic democracy. We found that the logic that drives this growth in accusations of antisemitism can be explained by three shifts in the discourse of Holocaust memory: first, from Holocaust memory to antisemitism; second, from antisemitism’s German perpetrators to designated Others; and third, from guilt and responsibility to shame. The article delineates the developments that led to each shift and how they were mutually constitutive.
2. How can we draw out themes from your research that are relevant today?
Our research studies trends in Holocaust memory and antisemitism discussions in Germany, focusing on the past two decades. It analyses current events and their popular representations in order to explain how antisemitism and Holocaust memory discourse partakes in the allocation of social goods in public service, such as in museum jobs; the appointment of states and a federal commissioner whose job is to ‘protect Jewish life and fight against Antisemitism’; in inviting and disinviting contributors to arts festivals; and in the knowledge economy, for instance in research jobs and awards. It also helps uncover how ethnic, gender and religion-based discrimination are sustained by a discourse that is putatively designed to protect the Jewish minority in Germany, thereby also protecting the boundaries of an ethno-national community that rarely consults actual living Jews about their experience, but rather assumes an endangered, religiously visible minority whose safety is presented as a litmus test for the German democracy. Our article helps understand the origins and logics of the debates regarding antisemitism, which has received outsized attention in the German and international press over the past four years. No less important, the phenomena we analyse coincides with the entry of the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD in its German acronym), into the German parliament in 2018. The article is thus helpful in providing an intersectional explanation to the everyday work and justifications for exclusion and discrimination; to understanding memory politics and its inter-connectedness with discourses on minorities and the legacies of German and European colonialism.
As the discussion regarding Germany’s legacies of colonialism, Holocaust memory and antisemitism have intersected in mediated discussions, for instance around the Documenta fifteen festival and the Humboldt Forum, we contend that understanding the logic that derives the discussion regarding antisemitism is to be positioned in the context of discursive shifts in other contested pasts—discussions that often target minorities and women’s roles in putatively endangering correct memory work. To illustrate the entanglement of these debates, we chose as a cover image for this blog post photo that Irit Dekel took on July 22 2022 at the end of her visit in the ‘Berlin Global’ exhibition of the Humboldt Forum, revealing the range of issues that visitors cared about—from women’s rights in other countries, such as abortion rights (in June 2022 the US Supreme Court denied that there is a constitutional right of women to decide about the termination of pregnancy); the war in Ukraine; diversity, tolerance, and feminism; among others—as well as the multiplicity of the languages in which the visitors express themselves.
3. Has your research changed your view of Jewish/non-Jewish relations?
Having carefully looked at the ways in which accusations of Antisemitism shifted through time, we better understand how the Eurocentric Judaeo-Christian myth works by pointing fingers at one or several minorities, specifically the Muslim minority, as those who put another, namely Jewish minority, in danger. We also learned from the writings of German Muslims and German-Jewish authors, some of which are Arab Jews and migrants, about solidarity action in support of plural democracy in Germany. Our research showed that, actually, two competing trends are quite strong in Germany. The first one tries to offload the guilt and shame of antisemitism to racialised others as well as progressive and left-leaning Jews, to show white Christian background Germans as doing the hard work of locating and pointing fingers at antisemites. The second trend is of strong networks of solidarity among racialised groups which work and, in crucial ways, succeed in challenging an ethnic understanding of German identity. This is seen for example in the Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit, where the heads of twenty public cultural and research institutions in Germany joined forces in the fall of 2020 to consolidate their expertise and strengths in order to defend a climate of diverse voices, critical reflection and an appreciation of difference. They have been successful in creating a more inclusive, plural public identity in German society which allows the voices of migrants, Muslims, Jews who criticize Israel’s Policies and other minorities to be heard and counted despite the backlash they receive for defending the rights for free expression, research and culture. They managed to challenge political motions which attempt to delegitimise critique of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and the Occupied Palestinian Territories as declaring them as antisemitic in well-orchestrated political and media attacks.
4. Is there anything that was left on the cutting room floor from your article that you’d like to share?
In our article we wanted to focus more on the discursive use of shame in relation to antisemitism. We set ourselves to examine how public emotions shifted from the discursive field of guilt to shame, expressed toward the existence of antisemitism in the country. In this framework, we argue, and wanted to further develop, how the mainstream white/Christian society projects its shame about the continued existence of Antisemitism in Germany onto Muslims and Others, many of them leftist women, migrant, queer and/or People of Colour. This expressed sense of shame, we show in studying newspaper articles about antisemitic attacks, also comes with a sense of injustice projected onto the majority society. The injustice is communicated as unfair having to deal with antisemitism in Germany after all the work that majority society has performed to atone for the Holocaust by putatively proving that Jews and Christians/Germany reconciled.
In a future publication, we plan to develop the discussion on shame as a socially delimiting emotion when expressed as nationally felt in the German media report on Antisemitic attacks. In the Bundestag resolution to fight Antisemitism from 2018, the mention of feeling shame hinders the freedom of expression. The same mechanism was at work in May 2021 toward demonstrations in German cities criticizing Israel’s state violence against Palestinians in Gaza. We hope to develop further the understanding of the mobilizing effects of evoking shame as a publicly shared emotion toward Muslim, migrants as well as Right extremists in Germany. As the discourse on Holocaust memory in Germany increasingly connects with important issues of German colonial heritage, racism, misogynism and Islamophobia, and more views join in reflecting on the meaning of German belonging, such discussions will proliferate, and it is our hope that the plurality of voices will translate also into enhanced participation of these minorities in the German public discourse on memory and its implications.
5. Please recommend one film/book/piece of music or any other form of media that feels relevant to your research or your understanding of Jewish/non-Jewish relations!
See the following books, articles, lectures and an alliance:
Irit Dekel and Esra Özyürek 2021 What Do We Talk About When We Talk about Antisemitism in Germany? Journal of Genocide Research 23 (3)
Irit Dekel 2022 ‘Philosemitism in Contemporary German Media’ in Media, Culture & Society 44 (4)
Diaspora Alliance is an international organisation dedicated to fighting antisemitism and its instrumentalisation by promoting the values of a multiracial democracy. It builds solidarity and coalitions with other diasporic and minority communities.
Patterns of Prejudice is a peer reviewed, international journal published five times a year, produced in association with the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton, co-edited by Professor Tony Kushner. The journal provides a forum for exploring the historical roots and contemporary varieties of social exclusion and the demonization or stigmatization of racial, ethnic, national or religious Others across the world. It probes the language and construction of ’race’, nation, colour and ethnicity, as well as the linkages between these categories.
Irit Dekel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the author of Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Palgrave 2013) and the article ‘Philosemitism in Contemporary German Media’ (Media, Culture & Society, 2022). Her work focuses on memory politics, and ethnic and religious inequality in Germany, and she is currently researching witnessing and the position of minorities in contemporary Germany.
Esra Özyürek is the Sultan Qaboos Professor in Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is an anthropologist and the author of Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke University Press 2007), Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton University Press 2014), and Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Post-War Germany (Stanford University Press 2023).
The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations 