{"title":"Who counts? Anti-antisemitism and the racial politics of emotion","authors":"Adam Sutcliffe","doi":"10.1177/14687968241256974","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the rise of anti-antisemitic discourse in Britain over the past fifteen years. It explores the relationship between the increasingly emotional tone of public discourse in Britain and other western countries and the miring of anti-antisemitism in dynamics of competitive victimhood and ethnic antagonism. The development of this dynamic is traced from the bitter arguments over the representation and reporting of the Palestine/Israel conflict at the time of the Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip in early 2009 – with special attention to Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children – through to recent anti-antisemitic interventions such as David Baddiel’s bestselling polemic Jews Don’t Count (2021) and Jonathan Freedland’s verbatim play recently staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre (2022). These interventions, the article shows, call for the ‘normal’ treatment of anti-Jewish prejudice while simultaneously appealing on exceptionalist grounds for public sympathy with Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. The exceptional moral authority widely accorded to anti-antisemitism has made the cause an attractive one for those who resent what they believe to be the unwarranted priority accorded to non-white victimhood. Various forms of anti-antisemitism, such as Baddiel’s, have thus become front-line arguments in shrill culture-war tussles suffused with intellectual confusion and racially tinged rhetorical combat. This racialization, politicization and emotionalization of anti-antisemitism has reached new heights, the article concludes, following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023.","PeriodicalId":47512,"journal":{"name":"Ethnicities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ethnicities","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968241256974","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ETHNIC STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article focuses on the rise of anti-antisemitic discourse in Britain over the past fifteen years. It explores the relationship between the increasingly emotional tone of public discourse in Britain and other western countries and the miring of anti-antisemitism in dynamics of competitive victimhood and ethnic antagonism. The development of this dynamic is traced from the bitter arguments over the representation and reporting of the Palestine/Israel conflict at the time of the Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip in early 2009 – with special attention to Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children – through to recent anti-antisemitic interventions such as David Baddiel’s bestselling polemic Jews Don’t Count (2021) and Jonathan Freedland’s verbatim play recently staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre (2022). These interventions, the article shows, call for the ‘normal’ treatment of anti-Jewish prejudice while simultaneously appealing on exceptionalist grounds for public sympathy with Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. The exceptional moral authority widely accorded to anti-antisemitism has made the cause an attractive one for those who resent what they believe to be the unwarranted priority accorded to non-white victimhood. Various forms of anti-antisemitism, such as Baddiel’s, have thus become front-line arguments in shrill culture-war tussles suffused with intellectual confusion and racially tinged rhetorical combat. This racialization, politicization and emotionalization of anti-antisemitism has reached new heights, the article concludes, following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023.
期刊介绍:
There is currently a burgeoning interest in both sociology and politics around questions of ethnicity, nationalism and related issues such as identity politics and minority rights. Ethnicities is a cross-disciplinary journal that will provide a critical dialogue between these debates in sociology and politics, and related disciplines. Ethnicities has three broad aims, each of which adds a new and distinctive dimension to the academic analysis of ethnicity, nationalism, identity politics and minority rights.