Abstract
Since the inception of Holocaust Memorial Day, the event and its focus have come under considerable attack from a number of quarters, particularly (although by no means exclusively) from some sections of Muslim communities. This chapter analyses some of the arguments advanced and the extent to which they reflect in both the UK and Italy a growing and wider reluctance to acknowledge the centrality of antisemitism to the Holocaust. It suggests that this may be connected to a rearticulation of antisemitism in a new context which both risks silencing survivors anew and is counterproductive for thinking about the problem of genocide today.
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Notes
- 1.
Many others made similar observations. “He who has Auschwitz as devastating tenant inside of himself, will never give birth to it either writing or talking about it but, on the contrary, he feeds it”, Edith Bruck confessed (Bruck 1999, 16).
- 2.
Some sense of the long-term obstacles in the way of eliciting such memories can be found in the recent book by Father Desbois on the killings in the Ukraine (Desbois 2008).
- 3.
For example by Peter Novick (2000).
- 4.
The term “radical evil” in this context comes originally from Arendt (1968). Arendt, in many people’s minds, later abandoned the term radical in favour of banal, in her highly contentious book on the Eichmann Trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1965). There is considerable debate about whether this was an improvement or a regression in Arendt’s understanding. It may make more sense, as Richard Bernstein has argued, to see these two terms as different sides of the same coin (Bernstein 1996).
- 5.
- 6.
We would like to thank Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust in the UK for pointing this out to us.
- 7.
This is not the space to go into arguments about the status of dhimmitude or to rehearse the ups and downs of treatment of Jews in the Islamic world (or, better, worlds). The similarities and differences between Christian and Islamic antisemitism were rehearsed some time ago by Léon Poliakov in his multi-volume History of Anti-Semitism (Poliakov 2003).
- 8.
On the parallels between antisemitism and Islamophobia, see for example, Schenker and Ziad (2006).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
This may modify some of the criticisms made of Holocaust Memorial Day, that it has been distorted by nationalist considerations of one kind of another. See, for example Stone 2006.
- 12.
In a recent survey carried out by Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) of Milan, it emerged that in Italy some 44% of the population is hostile to the Jews, out of which 10% share the classic anti-Jews stereotypes (they are not really Italian, they are not trustworthy, etc., but without prejudices against Israel and the Holocaust) and politically they belong both to the Right and to the Left; 11% adopt modern antisemitic stereotypes (wealth, control on the media and finance, etc.); 11% is constituted above all by persons of the Left, secular and with high levels of education, who have prejudices against Israel and think that the Holocaust is a political self-pitying instrument when, on the contrary, “the Jews behave like Nazis against the Palestinians”, and finally 12% is constituted by genuine antisemites who adopt all the prejudices of the other three groups and belong both to the extreme Right and Left (Mannheimer 2009).
- 13.
For a more extensive discussion of this, see Spencer (2010).
- 14.
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Prosecutor v. Kambanda, Judgment and sentence, ICTR – 97–23-S (4 September 1998), para. 16.
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Spencer, P., Di Palma, S.V. (2013). Antisemitism and the Politics of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and Italy. In: Jikeli, G., Allouche-Benayoun, J. (eds) Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities. Muslims in Global Societies Series, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5307-5_7
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