Anti-semitism and Islamophobia

by Bunzl, Matti

• ISBN13: 9780976147589
• ISBN10: 0976147580
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-09-15
• Publisher: Prickly Paradigm

Summary

The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent's Muslim population have received increasing attention. InAnti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in these ongoing problems. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion. According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions,Anti-Semitism and Islamophobiaenables us to see these forces anew.

Author Biography

Matti Bunzl is associate professor of anthropology and history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.  He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna.

Table of Contents

Anti-semitism and Islamophobia	p. 1
Reflections on anti-semitism and Islamophobia	p. 47
A contradiction in "the New Europe"	p. 54
Comment on Bunzl	p. 61
Power and the politics of prejudice	p. 69
Xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism	p. 77
Comment on Bunzl	p. 90
Response	p. 105
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