Copublished with the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, this study asks if the European Union (EU) has the capacity or the will to counter antisemitism. The desire to ...counter antisemitism was a significant impetus toward the formation of the EU in the twentieth century and now prejudice against Jews threatens to subvert that goal in the twenty-first.The European Union, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Denialoffers an overview of the circumstances that obliged European political institutions to take action against antisemitism and considers the effectiveness of these interventions by considering two seemingly dissimilar EU states, Austria and Sweden.
This examination of the European Union's strategy for countering antisemitism discloses escalating prejudice within the EU in the aftermath of 9/11. R. Amy Elman contends that Europe's political actors have responded to the challenge and provocation of antisemitism with only sporadic rhetoric and inconsistent commitment; this halfhearted strategy for countering anti-Semitism exacerbates skepticism toward EU institutions and their commitment to equality and justice. This exposition of the insipid character of the EU's response simultaneously suggests alternatives that might mitigate the subtle and potentially devastating creep of antisemitism in Europe.
The author offers a new approach insofar as scholarly considerations of the EU's attempts to combat racism rarely focus on antisemitism, while scholarship on antisemitism rarely considers the political context of the European Union.
To recognize the depths of American antisemitism, this article contends we must dispense with the conventional ways we think about it. This requires a rejection of an “American exceptionalism” in ...which antisemitism happens elsewhere-in other states, political parties, professions, campuses, and communities. Antisemitism so understood occurs only to the unfortunate, in places we don’t frequent, and at the outer edges of the political spectrum. By contrast, I suggest American antisemitism is so pervasive-so utterly mainstream- that it hides in plain sight.
Deciphering the European Union’s (EU) commitment to countering violence against women is challenging. To date, much of its response has been rhetorical. This article opens with a brief consideration ...of the EU’s first few initiatives to counter violence against women before turning to the polity’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention, which defines such violence as a human rights violation. Not least, it offers a critical analysis of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2014 survey on violence against women, the world’s largest international survey of its kind. That inquiry involved 42,000 in-person interviews with a representative sample of approximately 1,500 women (aged 18-74) across all of the EU’s then 28 Member States. After examining the Agency’s survey and its subsequent report in the context of those efforts that preceded it, the article suggests the EU’s rhetoric and related programs for women may conceal the more controversial manifestations of the violence directed at them. For example, the Agency’s survey excluded female genital mutilation from the rubric of violence against women. One finds a similar reluctance on the part of the Agency and other institutional actors across the EU to address the eroticized commodification of violence in prostitution and pornography that pervade the polity’s common market. Despite the EU’s occasional pronouncements to the contrary, it appears violence against women is a human rights violation that the polity deliberately circumscribes and perfunctorily condemns.
Deciphering the European Union’s (EU) commitment to countering violence against women is challenging. To date, much of its response has been rhetorical. This article opens with a brief consideration ...of the EU’s first few initiatives to counter violence against women before turning to the polity’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Council of Europe’s 2011 Istanbul Convention, which defines such violence as a human rights violation. Not least, it offers a critical analysis of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency’s 2014 survey on violence against women, the world’s largest international survey of its kind. That inquiry involved 42,000 in-person interviews with a representative sample of approximately 1,500 women (aged 18-74) across all of the EU’s then 28 Member States. After examining the Agency’s survey and its subsequent report in the context of those efforts that preceded it, the article suggests the EU’s rhetoric and related programs for women may conceal the more controversial manifestations of the violence directed at them. For example, the Agency’s survey excluded female genital mutilation from the rubric of violence against women. One finds a similar reluctance on the part of the Agency and other institutional actors across the EU to address the eroticized commodification of violence in prostitution and pornography that pervade the polity’s common market. Despite the EU’s occasional pronouncements to the contrary, it appears violence against women is a human rights violation that the polity deliberately circumscribes and perfunctorily condemns.
To seasoned observers of antisemitism, comparisons between the 1930s and now inevitably involve the question: what’s new? Although the vectors of the “new antisemitism” include left-wing ...antisemitism, Islamic antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and Israel’s demonization and delegitimization, the long history of each complicates antisemitism’s novelty.¹ What has changed, according to historian Jonathan Judaken, is the geopolitical context within which each manifestation functions.² This chapter considers European integration as a key geopolitical site within which contemporary antisemitism is at once manifest and swiftly denied.
Despite the crucial importance of geopolitics, few scholars of contemporary antisemitism pay sufficient attention to transnational actors in
This article addresses the paradoxical politics of heterosexism within European Union (EU) policy through a critical consideration of matrimony as the primary legitimating link between EU nationals ...and third‐country spouses. It also emphasizes the discrimination experienced by same‐sex couples to whom the protection and privileges of marriage are unavailable and questions efforts to extend state‐sanctioned unions to same‐sex partners. Indeed, it argues against the presumption that relationships (whether spousal, cohabitational, sexual or familial) provide justifiable criteria for citizenship and the privileges associated with it. The article has theoretical implications for those studies in which the themes of citizenship, immigration, family, sexuality and social exclusion are central.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PRFLJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
