Rachel Gordan, “1940s: The Decade of Anti-Anti-Semitism”
Related to her project, “How Judaism Became an American Religion,” Gordan discussed the anti-anti-Semitism literature of the 1940s, and its pivotal role in teaching Americans to feel sympathy for the victims of anti-Semitism. A few novels like Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement and Saul Bellow’s The Victim are still remembered, but some are largely forgotten, including Jo Sinclair’s (aka Ruth Seid) 1946 novel, Wasteland.
Although these novels do not deal directly with the Holocaust, Gordan reads them as a response to it. For example, Wasteland, a prize-winning, popular novel about anti-Semitism held wide appeal because it compared anti-Semitism with other forms of discrimination and the experience of the victim with other victims. With the backdrop of violent European anti-Semitism, American writers thought about their own problems with racism and oppression. “Cleaning up” American anti-Semitism became central to postwar American liberalism.
By framing Judaism as an “American religion” these novels situated Jewish integration as part of the American democratic project. First, as members of a “religion” and not “racial others” Jews could stand a better chance at integration. Second, positioned as “American novels” and not “Jewish novels,” these middlebrow works appealed to a wider audience. In both ways, these novels made the integration of Jews and Jewishness in America not a “Jewish problem,” but part of achieving American democratic ideals.
Esther Romeyn, “Holocaust Memory and Migration Politics in the Netherlands”
Romeyn studies the intersection of Holocaust memory and migration politics in the Netherlands. She argues that one way the presence of migrants and their descendants is problematized is through the supposed lack of a “shared” past, in particular WWII and the Holocaust. In the Netherlands, and in Europe in general, the Holocaust has been redeemed as the crucible for moral values upon which European and Dutch identity is based. The anti-migrant discourse deems migrants and in particular Muslim migrants incompatible with these values. Holocaust education therefore has become a “test” for Muslim belonging.
On the one hand, there are a number of initiatives that actively try to include migrant and their descendants in Holocaust memorialization and the moral landscape it signifies. But an alarmist discourse about resistance to Holocaust education and antisemitism due to anti-Israel sentiments among Dutch Moroccan youth has focused much attention on Holocaust educational initiatives in schools with high concentrations of minority students.
Romeyn analyzes the curriculum of one such initiative that attempted to connect the Holocaust to the Middle East conflict. She also argues that the single minded focus on antisemitism among Muslim youth constructs antisemitism as a foreign “import” from the Middle East and fails to address antisemitism among Dutch alt-right movements.