(Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance

ABSTRACT

This article sets out to discuss the emergence of (anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of governance, and particularly as a field of racial governance. Romeyn’s interest is not so much in the ‘facts’ of antisemitism or ‘new’ antisemitism, but in the ways in which it functions as a ‘power-knowledge’ field in which a cast of actors—global governance actors, such as the United Nations, UNESCO, the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, the European Commission, non-governmental organizations, experts and scholars, and politicians—set out to define, invent measuring tools and technologies, analyse, formulate policy statements and programmes, and develop ‘interventions’ to address and redress (‘fight’) the ‘problem’. Embedded in the new antisemitism as a field of governance are the assumptions that, ideologically, it is imbricated in the universalist anti-racism of the liberal left, and that, culturally, it emanates to a significant extent from within ethnocultural or ethno-religious attitudes peculiar to populations originating from Northern Africa, the Maghreb or, more specifically, from majority Islamic countries. With respect to the latter groups, global governance actors concerned with the fight against the ‘new antisemitism’ instate a ‘regime’ that performatively enacts boundaries of belonging. This regime erects an interior frontier around culture/religion that effectively externalizes and racializes antisemitism.

KEYWORDS:

• antisemitism
• European identity
• Holocaust memory
• Islamophobia
• multiculturalism
• New Right
• racism

Notes

1 Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘ADL officials say anti-Semitism rampant throughout the world’, 6 March 1974, available at www.jta.org/1974/03/06/archive/adl-officials-say-anti-semitism-rampant-throughout-the-world (viewed 18 February 2020); Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ‘The real anti-Semitism in America, by Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter’, Commentary, October 1982, available at www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-real-anti-semitism-in-america-by-nathan-and-ruth-ann-perlmutter (viewed 18 February 2020).

2 Brian Klug, ‘The myth of the new anti-Semitism’, The Nation, 15 January 2004, available at www.thenation.com/article/myth-new-anti-semitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Jonathan J. Judaken, ‘So what’s new? Rethinking the “new antisemitism” in a global age’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 4–5, 2008, 531–60; Matti Bunzl, ‘Between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: some thoughts on the New Europe’, American Ethnologist, vol. 32, no. 4, 2005, 499–508; Antony Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’, openDemocracy, 14 September 2011, available at www.opendemocracy.net/antony-lerman/911-and-destruction-of-shared-understanding-of-antisemitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Antony Lerman, ‘The “new antisemitism”’, openDemocracy, 29 September 2015, available at www.opendemocracy.net/mirrorracisms/antony-lerman/new-antisemitism (viewed 18 February 2020); Amy Kaplan, ‘Stephen Bannon and the old/new anti-Semitism’, Al Jazeera, 30 November 2016, available at www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/11/stephen-bannon-oldnew-anti-semitism-161129145402158.html (viewed 18 February 2020).

3 William Walters, ‘Imagined migration world: the European Union’s anti-illegal immigration discourse’, in Martin Geiger and Antoine Pécoud (eds), The Politics of Migration Management (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave 2010), 73–95 (73).

4 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Afterword: the lesson of Rancière’, in Jacques Rancière (ed.), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. from the French by Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum 2004), 69–79.

5 As discussed in Ann Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: national identity, “mixed bloods” and the cultural genealogies of Europeans in colonial Southeast Asia’, CSST Working Paper 64, May 1991, 3, available on the Deep Blue website at https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/51220/454.pdf;sequence=1 (viewed 18 February 2020).

6 Esther Romeyn, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: spectropolitics and immigration’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 6, 2014, 77–101.

7 Douglas R. Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2000), 68.

8 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘From race to culture: the New Right’s view of European identity’, Telos, no. 98–9, 1993, 99–125 (125).

9 Alberto Spektorowski, ‘The French New Right: differentialism and the idea of ethnophilian exclusionism’, Polity, vol. 33, no. 2, 2000, 283–303 (293).

10 Tamir Bar-On, ‘Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, 199–223 (207); Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (New York and London: Routledge 2000), 214.

11 Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’.

12 Bunzl, ‘Between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’, 502.

13 Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’.

14 Romeyn, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’.

15 Jacques Derrida and Giovanna Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides—a dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2003), 85–136 (94).

16 Ibid., 96–7.

17 Ibid., 103–4.

18 The Race Question in Modern Science: The Race Concept. Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO 1952), 6, available at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073351 (viewed 25 March 2020). For a discussion, see Étienne Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, Actuel Marx, no. 38, 2005, 11–28 (17), English version available at www.cairn-int.info/article-E_AMX_038_0011--the-construction-of-racism.htm (viewed 18 February 2020).

19 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 18.

20 Ibid., 20.

21 The Race Question in Modern Science, 5.

22 UNESCO, Four Statements on the Race Question (Paris: UNESCO 1969), 17.

23 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 20.

24 Derrida and Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity’, 105.

25 Natan Lerner, ‘Anti-Semitism as racial and religious discrimination under United Nations conventions’, in Yoram Dinstein (ed.), Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Israel Press 1971), 103–15 (111).

26 Roberta Cohen, ‘United Nations’ stand on antisemitism: principles, priorities, prejudices’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 2, no. 2, 1968, 21–4; Lerner, ‘Anti-Semitism as racial and religious discrimination under United Nations conventions’.

27 Abba Eban, ‘Our place in the human scheme’, Congress Bi-Weekly, vol. 40, no. 6, 30 March 1973, xxv.

28 Abba Eban, ‘Zionism and the UN’, New York Times, 3 November 1975, available at www.nytimes.com/1975/11/03/archives/zionism-and-the-un.html (viewed 25 March 2020).

29 Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill 1974). See also Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘ADL officials say anti-semitism rampant throughout the world’; and Dawidowicz, ‘The real anti-Semitism in America, by Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter’.

30 Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’.

31 Balibar, ‘The construction of racism’, 14.

32 Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs, Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy (Chicago: Haymarket Books 2015).

33 Abraham H. Foxman, Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco 2003); Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2003); Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books 2004); Alvin H. Rosenfeld (ed.), Resurgent Anti-Semitism: Global Perspectives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2013).

34 Sacks and Dershowitz, quoted in Klug, ‘The myth of the new anti-Semitism’.

35 Taguieff is discussed in the first part of Judaken, ‘So what’s new?’, esp. 534–6, 544.

36 Finkielkraut, quoted in ibid., 548.

37 Slavoj Žižek, quoted in Lerman, ‘9/11 and the destruction of the shared understanding of antisemitism’.

38 Oren Yiftachel and As’ad Ghanem, ‘Understanding “ethnocratic” regimes: the politics of seizing contested territories’, Political Geography, vol. 23, no. 6, 2004, 647–76 (650); Soske and Jacobs, Apartheid Israel.

39 Michael Whine, ‘International organizations: combating anti-Semitism in Europe’, Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 3/4, 2004, 73–88 (77), available on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website at www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-whine-f04.htm (viewed 19 February 2020).

40 Ibid., 84–5.

41 Ibid. See also Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, ‘Statement OSCE conference on tolerance and the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination, Brussels, 13 and 14 September 2004’, available at www.osce.org/cio/36471?download=true (viewed 19 February 2020); Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, ‘OSCE conference on anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance’, 23 June 2005, available at www.osce.org/cio/15778?download=true (viewed 19 February 2020).

42 Whine, ‘International organizations’, 83.

43 Romano Prodi, ‘A union of minorities’, Brussels, 19 February 2004, available on the European Commission website at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-04-85_en.htm (viewed 20 February 2020).

44 Ibid.

45 Esra Özyürek, ‘Export-import theory and the racialization of anti-Semitism: Turkish- and Arab-only prevention programs in Germany’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, 40–65.

46 François Dubuisson, ‘The definition of anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC): towards a criminalisation of criticism of Israeli policy?’, July 2005, 1, available on the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine at www.eccpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/EUMC_Dubuisson.pdf (viewed 20 February 2020).

47 IHRA, ‘Working definition of antisemitism’, 27 June 2016, available at www.holocaustremembrance.com/stories/working-definition-antisemitism (viewed 20 February 2020).

48 ‘P8_TA(2017)0243 Combating anti-semitism: European Parliament resolution of 1 June 2017 on combating anti-Semitism (2017/2692(RSP))’, 2, available on the European Parliament at www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+TA+P8-TA-2017-0243+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN (viewed 20 February 2020).

49 The OSCE conferences, for instance, added impetus to the introduction of Holocaust education programmes in primary and secondary school curricula (developed, inter alia, by the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) which in some cases have specifically targeted pupils from migrant and Muslim backgrounds, as Esra Özyürek has argued in her analysis of such initiatives in Germany. See Özyürek, ‘Export-import theory and the racialization of anti-Semitism’.

50 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007).

51 Jewish Telegraph Agency, ‘Refugees bring anti-Semitism to Europe, warns Hungarian minister’, 16 April 2016, available at www.timesofisrael.com/refugees-bring-anti-semitism-to-europe-warns-hungarian-minister (viewed 20 February 2020).

52 Glenn Greenwald, ‘Growing far-right nationalistic movements are dangerously anti-Muslim-and pro-Israel’, Intercept, 30 November 2016, available at https://theintercept.com/2016/11/30/growing-far-right-nationalistic-movements-are-dangerously-anti-muslim-and-pro-israel (viewed 20 February 2020); Cnaan Liphshiz, ‘Austria held Europe’s largest conference on anti-Semitism under far-right party’, Jewish Chronicle, 9 March 2018, available at https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/austria-held-europes-largest-conference-on-anti-semitism-under-far-right-party (viewed 20 February 2020).

53 Natan Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 2011), 87–92, 107, 114–20.

54 Nasar Meer, ‘Semantics, scales and solidarities in the study of antisemitism and Islamophobia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 3, 2013, 500–15 (500).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esther Romeyn

Esther Romeyn is Associate Lecturer in the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida. Her current work focuses the place of Holocaust memory in discourses on migration and refugees, and the entangled histories of Jews, Muslims and other migrants in Europe. She has published articles on these topics in Citizenship Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Theory, Culture, and Society. Email: [email protected]