Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe

by Matti Bunzl

Overview

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. In Anti-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 Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780976147589
Publisher:	Prickly Paradigm Press
Publication date:	09/15/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Matti Bunzl is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and the artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is the author of Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna and Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe.