Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition

Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition

Author: David Feldman

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-06-05

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 3031162668

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This book, the first to explore the politics of definitions from an interdisciplinary perspective, encourages readers to reconsider the value and limits of definitions in confronting antisemitism and Islamophobia. In recent years, definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia have become central to the struggle to combat the hostility, harassment and discrimination experienced by Jews and Muslims. Yet these definitions have also provoked fierce controversy: critics have questioned whether they are fit for purpose, or have criticised them as unwelcome attempts to restrict freedom of expression. In this edited collection, historians, social scientists and philosophers reflect on definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia in both the past and the present. Its contributors investigate the different historical contexts which have shaped definitions and examine their different political purposes and meanings, as well as addressing contemporary debates, and identifying ways for us to move beyond our current impasse. This book therefore provides a broad and new perspective from which to comprehend present day minority politics.


Islamophobia and Racism in America

Islamophobia and Racism in America

Author: Erik Love

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-05-23

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 147986482X

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Choice Top Book of 2017 Confronting and combating Islamophobia in America. Islamophobia has long been a part of the problem of racism in the United States, and it has only gotten worse in the wake of shocking terror attacks, the ongoing refugee crisis, and calls from public figures like Donald Trump for drastic action. As a result, the number of hate crimes committed against Middle Eastern Americans of all origins and religions have increased, and civil rights advocates struggle to confront this striking reality. In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love draws on in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American advocates. He shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion. A unique and timely study, Islamophobia and Racism in America wrestles with the disturbing implications of these findings for the persistence of racism—including Islamophobia—in the twenty-first century. As America becomes a “majority-minority” nation, this strategic shift in American civil rights advocacy signifies challenges in the decades ahead, making Love’s findings essential for anyone interested in the future of universal civil rights in the United States.


Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism

Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism

Author: Hillel Schenker

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, based on often interchangeable historic stereotypes, fan the flames of fear and hatred against the other. Thus Jews and Muslims serve as convenient scapegoats for many of society's ills and leaders' misguided agendas. In the post-9/11 world, the Iraq War, the breakdown of homogeneous societies in Europe, the rise of fundamentalism, and the lack of a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have only served to exacerbate Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are breeding hatred and creating more difficulties in the face of any serious effort to solve the Israeli-Palestian conflict. They are threatening to transform it from a political into a religious conflict and thereby cloud the judgment of anyone attempting to resolve it, both in the region and in the broader international arena. In this context, a group of Israeli and Palestinian scholars and journalists joined together to start the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture. Their goal is to clarify the positions of both sides and work toward a solution. Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism furthers the debate on these topics in its full complexity, marked at once by sharp differences and considerable common ground."


Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism

Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism

Author: Sol Goldberg

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-02

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 303051658X

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This volume is designed to assist university faculty and students studying and teaching about antisemitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice. In contrast with similar volumes, it is organized around specific concepts instead of chronology or geography. It promotes conversation about antisemitism across disciplinary, geographic, and thematic lines rather than privileging a single methodological paradigm, a specific academic field, or an overarching narrative. Its twenty-one chapters by leading scholars in diverse fields address the relationship to antisemitism of concepts ranging from Anti-Judaism to Zionism. Each chapter not only traces the history and major scholarly debates around a key concept; it also presents an original argument, points to avenues for further research, and exemplifies a method of investigation.


Anti-semitism and Islamophobia

Anti-semitism and Islamophobia

Author: Matti Bunzl

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13:

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The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent's Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in these ongoing problems. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion. According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.


Islamophobia/Islamophilia

Islamophobia/Islamophilia

Author: Andrew Shryock

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2010-06-30

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0253004543

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"Islamophobia" is a term that has been widely applied to anti-Muslim ideas and actions, especially since 9/11. The contributors to this provocative volume explore and critique the usefulness of the concept for understanding contexts ranging from the Middle Ages to the modern day. Moving beyond familiar explanations such as good Muslim/bad Muslim stereotypes or the "clash of civilizations," they describe Islamophobia's counterpart, Islamophilia, which deploys similar oppositions in the interest of fostering public acceptance of Islam. Contributors address topics such as conflicts over Islam outside and within Muslim communities in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia; the cultural politics of literature, humor, and urban renewal; and religious conversion to Islam.


Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust

Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust

Author: Nathan A. Kurz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1108834922

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Nathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nation-states. In the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, however, Jewish activists discovered they could no longer promote the same norms, laws and innovations without fear they could soon apply to the Jewish state. Using previously unexamined sources, Nathan Kurz examines the transformation of Jewish internationalism from an effort to constrain the power of nation-states to one focused on cementing Israel's legitimacy and its status as a haven for refugees from across the Jewish diaspora.


Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition

Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition

Author: David Feldman

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2023-06-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031162657

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This book, the first to explore the politics of definitions from an interdisciplinary perspective, encourages readers to reconsider the value and limits of definitions in confronting antisemitism and Islamophobia. In recent years, definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia have become central to the struggle to combat the hostility, harassment and discrimination experienced by Jews and Muslims. Yet these definitions have also provoked fierce controversy: critics have questioned whether they are fit for purpose, or have criticised them as unwelcome attempts to restrict freedom of expression. In this edited collection, historians, social scientists and philosophers reflect on definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia in both the past and the present. Its contributors investigate the different historical contexts which have shaped definitions and examine their different political purposes and meanings, as well as addressing contemporary debates, and identifying ways for us to move beyond our current impasse. This book therefore provides a broad and new perspective from which to comprehend present day minority politics.


German as a Jewish Problem

German as a Jewish Problem

Author: Marc Volovici

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1503613100

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The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews, representing different—often conflicting—historical currents. It was the language of the German classics, of German Jewish writers and scientists, of Central European Jewish culture, and of Herzl and the Zionist movement. But it was also the language of Hitler, Goebbels, and the German guards in Nazi concentration camps. The crucial role of German in the formation of Jewish national culture and politics in the late nineteenth century has been largely overshadowed by the catastrophic events that befell Jews under Nazi rule. German as a Jewish Problem tells the Jewish history of the German language, focusing on Jewish national movements in Central and Eastern Europe and Palestine/Israel. Marc Volovici considers key writers and activists whose work reflected the multilingual nature of the Jewish national sphere and the centrality of the German language within it, and argues that it is impossible to understand the histories of modern Hebrew and Yiddish without situating them in relation to German. This book offers a new understanding of the language problem in modern Jewish history, turning to German to illuminate the questions and dilemmas that largely defined the experience of European Jews in the age of nationalism.


Islamophobia

Islamophobia

Author: Peter Gottschalk

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780742552869

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In the spirit of Edward Said's Orientalism, this book graphically shows how political cartoons-the print medium with the most immediate impact-dramatically reveal Americans demonizing and demeaning Muslims and Islam. It also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the Muslim world in general and issues a wake-up call to the American people.