Politics of Hate? Crafting European Belonging through anti-Jewish Hatreds Old and New

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

Is there a politics of hate, productively circulating and crafting boundaries, particularly national boundaries? In post-Holocaust Europe, the management and ideally elimination of certain forms of hate have become crucial to legal and political projects of belonging at both national and European scales. This panel explores the social construction of the forms of affect and action categorized as hate, and particularly anti-Jewish hate, that have become crucial foils for contemporary European political projects of inclusion. How can hate be recognized? What historical moments and forms of hate are singled out? How are these forms of hate understood? Where is this hate thought to be located? HThrough what figures and imaginaries is hate transmitted? What is the relationship between past moments framed as instances of intense and problematic hatred and the present? How are other kinds of aesthetic and political disgust (racism, religious intolerance and intolerance of religion) connected to or disconnected from these socially critical forms of hate? Are there significant national or regional differences in these constructions of hate, as well as their historical continuities and discontinuities? And what might the answers to these questions tell us about the kinds of social and political projects being embraced by and within contemporary European nation-states?

This panel seeks to tackle these questions with comparative data from four different European contexts: the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Spain. At different locations and social scales, each of the four papers on this panel explores the discourses and practices surrounding a form of anti-Jewish hatred that has come to be seen as a critical obstacle to a desired form of political and social community. Each paper explores the way in which this particular form of hatred is understood as a historical genealogy and as a contemporary affect, as well as how it is connected to or disconnected from other forms of aestheticized dislike.

Sub Unit

• Social Science

Chair

• Kimberly Arkin, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• Jews, Muslims, and European Tropes of Hatred: Reflections from the UK - Yulia Egorova, Durham University

• Do Europeans hate silently? Palestinian Protests through the Lens of European Antisemitism - Sultan Doughan

• Hatred of the Self, hatred of the Other: the case of Georges Bensoussan and a Jewish-Muslim relational break-down in France - Samuel Sami Everett, Cambridge University

• Feeling Hate in Sepharad: Perception, Embodiment, and the Politics of Sentiment in Spain - Charles A. McDonald, Rice University

Respondent

• Paul Silverstein, Reed College