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.
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.
In the mid-1980s, Swedes often regarded the relative absence of assistance for abused women as evidence that it was unnecessary. The Swedish state no longer dismisses the prevalence of abuse. ...Instead, it rigorously emphasizes the actions it has taken against it. This follow-up study, completed nearly a decade after the first nation-wide survey of battered women, examines the character of Sweden's policy shift by exploring its consequences. The principal question of this project is: What changes, if any, have resulted from the increased expenditures and additional reforms the state has pursued in its recent efforts to prevent violence against women? The results of this survey of battered women in shelters suggest that while police and prosecutors appear to be somewhat more responsive to abused women, social workers have not improved. In general, significant obstacles remain for women in need of assistance and protection from the men who abuse them.
One distinct feature of antisemitism today is its demonization of the State of Israel. Older ideas also feature Jews being blamed for all the world's ills, thought to possess almost supernatural ...levels of power and wealth, and conspiring to harm the non-Jewish other. These and other ideas forming the background to antisemitism in Europe and North America are unpacked in this book with a view to understanding-and thereby combatting- contemporary antisemitism.
Scholars of European antisemitism often puzzle over the factors that explain its persistence while rarely investigating the effectiveness of the European Union’s (EU’s) stated efforts to ameliorate ...it. Antisemitism’s recent resurgence (and increasing convergence with anti-Zionism) throughout the region since 9/11 provides a fitting moment to reflect on how the EU has chosen to respond.
Although the EU insists that it “takes every opportunity to condemn racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and other related
intolerance,”¹ one cannot assume that its condemnations render (Europe’s) Jews less vulnerable to prejudice. Indeed, the underlying reality may be that the polity’s pronouncements, reports and legislation on
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