Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
18 - Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
Summary
‘The war’ and the Shoah: they remain subjects of endless discussion – reflected in the ‘story’ about them –, historiography, academic and public debate. The notion mooted in 2010 that it might be time to ‘pension off’ the war (‘De oorlog met pensioen?’) turned out to be premature, or a rhetorical question. Memory and commemoration are in perpetual flux. The same turbulence applies to the position of Jews and Judaism, including all the variant forms of antisemitism. And last but not least, the cauldron of views and actions relating to the establishment, the functioning and the continued existence of the state of Israel is constantly being stirred and boiling over. And this is only to look at the way all these issues surface, develop and become enmeshed in the Netherlands. Still, the rest of the world is never far away. This book has also dwelt at length on two main ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: Dutch people of Moroccan and Turkish descent. The international dimension is further enhanced by the multi-faceted involvement of many Jewish and non-Jewish people with Israel, and by the role of the internet.
At the heart of this book is the proposition that the Shoah and Israel have come to function as the two most important new – i.e. postwar – points of fixation for expressions of antisemitism. Both, in their very different ways, continue to work against the Jews. At the same time, they provided the signposts for twentieth-century Jewish history and identity. This curious mirror image is not in any sense, of course, exclusive to the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the Dutch – so often mythologised as a tolerant, broadminded people – occupy a central position here, viewed from a multicultural perspective. The following pages will suggest certain connections between themes listed in earlier chapters and a number of new elements and recent developments.
The leitmotif is the tension that exists between universalism and particularism. The British sociologist Robert Fine (b. 1945) has said that today's crisis-ridden universalism may make Jews more frequent targets of aggression. Universalism has always had two faces, he writes:
Its emancipatory face has been manifest in movements for legal recognition of Jews as equal citizens and for social recognition of Jews as equal human beings.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society, pp. 499 - 544Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016