Workshop "Gender and Antisemitism" - University of Sheffield (original) (raw)
Related papers
Connecting Conversations on Antisemitism, Holocaust, Gender, and Colonialism talk on 4 December 2023
This talk is based on the collaborative OSUN network course taught together with David Feldman (Birkbeck College, University of London), Yair Wallach (School of African and Oriental Studies), Merle Williams and Adam Levin (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg). It addresses topics that are of urgent global importance in our era of continuing discrimination, forced migration, socially sanctioned violence – and war. It promotes new teaching and thinking about the relationships among four distinct, but overlapping, historical, cultural, and political phenomena: antisemitism, the Holocaust, colonialism, and gender. Each of these terms becomes a lens through which to examine exclusion, prejudice, discrimination, race, and hate in their historical and contemporary manifestations. These questions are widely discussed in their individual contexts, with antisemitism and the Holocaust treated as conceptually and historically distinct from forms of racism rooted in colonial legacies. This talk aims to map how this OSUN course reframes vital discussions (such as investigations of the Holocaust and gender discrimination) that currently take place in parallel or are even pursued in an antagonistic manner.
Studia Hebraica, 2009
The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the multilayered intersections of stereotypes regarding Jews and women in the cultural critique of pre-Nazi Germany. It follows the use of concepts such as nature, race, gender and sexuality in discourses which are significantly both anti-Jewish and misogynist and which advocate a cultural and national revival based on racial and sexual purity and a supremacy of “masculine” values. In order to narrow down the area of investigation I have chosen to examine only texts which explicitly link Jewishness with femininity and cultural decadence. Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903) and Hans Blüher’s Der bürgerliche und der geistige Antifeminismus [The Civil and the Spiritual Antifeminism] (1916) and Secessio Judaica (1922) provide a central focus, while several other works by authors related to the esoteric movement Die kosmische Runde [The Cosmic Circle] are also briefly considered as illustrations of a more sophisticated and ambiguous form of bias. What all these discourses seem to have in common is a declared repudiation of reason and established institutions in favor of irrational impulses and vitalistic forces. In fact, as I shall argue in this paper, they only manage to reinforce already existing constellations of power. In highlighting their distortions and inconsistencies I am trying to confront both the paradox that lies at the center of these theoretical constructs and the potential of any anti-rationalist discourse to reproduce the structures of the system it means to subvert
Critique of Labour and Antisemitism 4academia
Political Quarterly, 2020
In their 2020 Political Quarterly article 'Labour and antisemitism: a crisis misunderstood', Gidley, McGeever and Feldman argue that the Labour Party's responses to its antisemitism crisis have been misguided because its understanding of antisemitism is wrong. We must look less at cases of individual antisemites and more at the 'reservoir of stereotypes and narratives', in which the long (but unacknowledged) history of left antisemitism has deposited its ideas-and from which they can be easily retrieved. This response challenges the reservoir concept as ahistorical, and culturally adrift, lacking the components necessary for cultural understanding-of being rooted, contextualised, complex and contradictory, evolving and regressing, but always home to inconsistent, yet coexisting, ideas and prejudices. The authors simply ignore the political dynamics of this crisis which have allowed antisemitism to be weaponised and made it all but impossible to have a calm, serious, rigorous reflection and public debate about antisemitism, and about Israel/Palestine. Such a debate is long overdue. ________________ In "Labour and Antisemitism: a Crisis Misunderstood" (Political Quarterly, Vol 91/2, 413-421) Ben Gidley , Brendan McGeever and David Feldman offer a particular diagnosis of "Labour's antisemitism". Everyone involved in the bitter dispute about Labour's alleged 'antisemitism problem', they argue, sees antisemitism as "a poison" or "a virus" i.e. an exogenous force which contaminates the political body it inhabits. This misdiagnosis leads to universal misunderstanding of what antisemitism is, and-therefore-to misjudgments in dealing with it. In contrast, the authors present antisemitism as "a deep reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which people can draw with ease." [416] I have no argument with the authors' criticism of the "virus" metaphor which seems to be premised on the idea that antisemitism would be eradicable by a world class track, trace and isolate system. But I take issue both with their critique of Labour's own arguments and their attempt to replace the "virus" with a "reservoir". And I find their suggestions of how to move forward worryingly vague and misleading.
Manifestations of Antisemitism in British Intellectual and Cultural Life
Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, 2013
From Alvin Rosenfeld, ed., Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (Indiana University Press 2013). This paper examines the growth of antisemitism among British public figures. It considers four qualitative measures of this tendency: 1. “Israel Derangement Syndrome” 2. Stereotypes of Jewish power 3. Tolerance of, and excuses for, alleged antisemites 4. Distortion of the Holocaust. The paper was written before Jeremy Corbyn's election to the Labour Party leadership. The avalanche of reports of left-wing antisemitic outbursts since then has confirmed the paper's predictions.