–1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), ‘Introduction’. 13 Cited in Jay Berkovitz, The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 73. 14 Cited in Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), 155
at the margin of the regime (Kemp 2010 ). In instances where the presence of non-Jewish migrants has seemed to endure, political actors and the media alike have been prompt to raise the spectre of the ‘demographic threat’ jeopardising the Jewish identity of the state (Kritzman-Amir 2009 ). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the Jewish character of the state was very quickly part
, shift in the spatially mediated politics around the remains resulting from the extermination at Bełzec, embedded unquestionably in a broader transformation of the approach to the Holocaust in post-1989 Poland, manifested itself, first and foremost, in the explicit emphasis on the Jewish identity of the dead. This was entirely erased form the 1963 memorial. The project, aimed at honouring the victims according to their cultural and religious traditions, was therefore to be finalised in deference to Jewish law. The rabbinical prohibition against removing or disturbing
downplaying of Holocaust memory in Ultra-Orthodox communities in the early post-war years. This period posed a multi- levelled challenge to Ultra-Orthodox Jewry: many devoted communities had vanished, thus arguments in favour of the Diaspora’s format for Jewish identity were severely questioned. She illustrates how the later image of Holocaust destruction played a principal role in re- establishing Ultra- Orthodox identity. The Ultra- Orthodox memory of the Holocaust embedded the idea of the substantial Jewish destruction in order to advocate rebuilding of the
much value on their Jewish identity and saw themselves only as good liberals or good socialists. Some created new hybrid identities out of the encounter between Germans and Jews. And some, including Arendt herself, refused to discard their particularity as Jews in order to be accepted as universal human beings. If we are to recover the force of Arendt's argument, we have more work to do. We need to make a distinction Arendt generally did not observe: that
could only be disrupted by the persistence of a distinct and harmful Jewish identity. The apprehension they expressed is that the homogenising sense of national identity into which liberalism was drawn was moving inexorably in racist and antisemitic directions. Lurking within the liberal tradition, Horkheimer and Adorno discerned a potential for prejudice and persecution which found expression in the exclusion of Jews from the national community: ‘The harmony of