This document offers a new approach to the struggle against the considerable increase in manifestations of racism in the last few years by focusing on connections between various forms of racism aimed at different groups. Recent attempts at advancing definitions focused on antisemitism or Islamophobia marginalize connections and entanglements that have stood at the center of current research on these phenomena.[1] Due to their narrow focus, such definitions have been weaponized to silence and intimidate other groups in various ways, as has been documented in relation to the “working definition of antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).[2] This, then, divides groups that often face related attacks, hampering cooperation and solidarity that are crucial in the struggle against racism in all its forms. Indeed, racism functions also to pit racialized groups against one another. The perpetuation of this logic creates the conditions to exacerbate both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The following paragraphs, by contrast, show that a one-sentence definition of antisemitism could apply in its basic structure also to Islamophobia, in both cases in order to center the broader framework of racism, its history, and its key manifestations today. Paragraphs 1-3 below may therefore function as a definition, with the rest of the document providing context and examples.

1.     Antisemitism is a form of racism directed at individuals who identify as Jews or are identified by others as Jews, which is closely related to the exclusionary drive against other groups based on structural racism and/or religious/ethno-nationalism.

Islamophobia is a form of racism directed against individuals who identify as Muslims or are identified by others as Muslims, which is closely related to the exclusionary drive against other groups based on structural racism and/or religious/ethno-nationalism. Anti-Arab and specifically anti-Palestinian racism, aimed at people regardless of their religious identities, is often expressed alongside Islamophobia.  

2.     The broader racist exclusion often stems from ideas about belonging, loyalty and security, and purity. As such, it is manifested in prejudices, demonization, and dehumanization; discriminatory laws and policies; and various forms of social and state violence, both verbal and physical. The aim of these attacks is not only to mark differences and suppress but to push for the removal, by various means, of people perceived as dirty and polluting, not belonging, disloyal, and threatening.

 
3.     Attacks against Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Black people, Arabs, Asians, Latinos, Indigenous people and other racialized people often also target religious, educational, and communal institutions, organizations, and sites. These attacks seek to erase and destroy histories, cultures, ways of life, and markers of identities of groups.

***

4. Recent scholarship has traced the emergence of antisemitism as a modern phenomenon in the context of European imperialism and colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century, which placed Jews as central in discourses about race and otherness and infused anti-Jewish conspiracies with new economic and ideological meanings. Thus, North African Jews could be identified by French colonial thinkers as primitive and uncivilized, similar to colonial characterizations of other Arabs and colonized peoples. At the same time, Jews who served in European colonial administrations could be seen by European racists as suspiciously powerful and conspiring for Jewish domination on a global scale. Antisemitism was thus immediately entangled with racism against other groups when it emerged.[3]

5.     Research has also addressed the rejection of Jews as essentially foreign by the nation state system that emerged after World War I.[4] The struggle against antisemitism is therefore rooted historically in the struggle to protect a persecuted group under attack primarily by states (or by people acting on behalf of the collective they believe the state represents, as in the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). It is thus egregious when states weaponize this struggle today to further their political, diplomatic, and economic interests or to shield themselves from criticism of their policies. This document thus differentiates between people and states, between Jews and Israel or between Muslims and Saudi Arabia, to take just two examples.

6. The weaponization of the struggle against antisemitism specifically “silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives,” which defines anti-Palestinian racism. [5]

7.    The violent effect of the weaponization of anti-antisemitism by states can also be seen in the case of some states in Europe today that profess commitment to Holocaust memory and the struggle against antisemitism through their membership in IHRA, though at the same time allow and promote antisemitism and other forms of racism, especially Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Roma racism. One example is Hungary, a IHRA member state, where the ruling Fidesz party led in 2018 a crude antisemitic election campaign, using Nazi images to portray philanthropist and Holocaust survivor from Hungary George Soros as seeking the destruction of Hungary by supporting the arrival of migrants and refugees.[6]

8.    Indeed, the insidious Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Jews seek to destroy western societies by bringing into them large numbers of “non-white” migrants and forcibly displaced people is widespread on the political Right today. This idea directly links antisemitism with racism against other groups, including specifically in the context of the United States Islamophobia and anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-Asian, and anti-Latino racism.

9.    The case of Hungary is further instructive, for in 2015, when Hungary served as rotating chair of IHRA and hosted the organization’s meetings in Budapest and Debrecen, state authorities were engaged in an attack against Roma in the city of Miskolc, depicting them as criminals, harassing them, and evicting them from their homes and demolishing them.[7] The IHRA meetings proceeded without a word about this, even as Roma had faced genocidal violence in Hungary and elsewhere in German- and Axis-occupied Europe during World War II, driven by anti-Roma racism that was—and continues to be—entangled with antisemitism, particularly views of both groups as essentially foreign and disloyal to states.  

***

This document, then, forefronts contexts—both historical and contemporary—as key in crafting effective responses by state authorities, policymakers, communal leaders, and educators to racist policies and attacks. The goal of such responses should be, in view of the connections and entanglements highlighted in this document, to protect specific groups in ways that promote a truly democratic state and society, one that is based on the recognition that everyone who lives in a certain place deserves equal rights and the same recognition of their belonging, dignity, and humanity.

[1] For an important example, see Ethan B. Katz, “An Imperial Entanglement: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism,” American Historical Review 123, no. 4 (2018): 1190–1209.
[2] For a list of documented examples, see https://www.ijvcanada.org/ihra-definition-at-work/.
[3] See, for instance, Dorian Bell, Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
[4] For an early and still relevant contribution on this issue, see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East-Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
[5] Arab-Canadian Lawyers Association, “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations,” April 2022, 4, quoted on the website of the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism: http://antipalestinianracism.org/.
[6] Shimon Stein and Moshe Zimmermann, “The ‘Laughing Jew’: The Nazi Backstory of Hungary’s Anti-Soros Poster Campaign,” Haaretz, July 13, 2017.
[7] Bernard Rorke and Orsolya Szendrey, “Miskolc Mayor Remains Defiant on Roma Evictions Despite Latest Court Ruling,” European Roma Rights Centre, February 15, 2016: https://www.errc.org/news/miskolc-mayor-remains-defiant-on-roma-evictions-despite-latest-court-ruling.

Sincerely,

Organizations:

Scholars with relevant expertise:

Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor of Modern Genocide, Stockton University

Sinan Antoon, Associate Professor, New York University 

Lydia X.Z. Brown, Assistant Teaching Professor of Disability Studies, Georgetown University; Founding Executive Director, The Autistic People of Color Fund

Nancy Coffin, Senior Lecturer, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

John Cox, Director, Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Julia Elyachar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University

John L. Esposito, Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University

Mohammad Fadel, Professor of Law, University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, New York University

Bassam Haddad, Associate Professor, George Mason University  

Nader Hashemi, Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Marianne Hirsch, Professor Emerita, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, Columbia University

Marion Kaplan, Professor Emerita, New York University

Anna Kesson, Associate Professor, African American Studies, Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, Emeritus, Columbia University

Ebrahim Moosa, Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies, The University of Notre Dame

Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York

Rob Nixon, Professor of English, Princeton University

Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, The University of Notre Dame

Shira Robinson, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Max Weiss, Associate Professor of History, Princeton University

Andrew Woolford, Professor, University of Manitoba

Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University

Additional scholars:

Nina Berman, Professor of Journalism, Columbia University

Fahmeed Hyder, Professor, Yale School of Medicine

Sheldon Pollock, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University