‘Je suis Juif' : Charlie Hebdo and the remaking of antisemitism

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The attacks of January 2015 on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher were a critical moment. The ways in which they were made to mean from a hegemonic liberal perspective had little to do with any real attempt to unpick the colonial routs that brought the perpetrators to their murderous endpoint. While the backlash has much longer antecedents, there is no way to understand this event without setting it in the context of the backlash against multiculturalism that has framed politics in Europe since the beginning of the twenty-first century (Lentin and Titley 2011). Jewish condoning of Zionism – or, at the other end of the spectrum, self-critique of our comfortable accession to whiteness – while vital, has largely obscured the role of antisemitism in the construction of anti-multiculturalism, which is now, with the election of Donald Trump, a globally hegemonic world view. There is a clear thread that connects the attacks on multiculturalism that came thick and fast in the wake of the ‘war on terror’ to the white identity politics that framed the advent of Trumpism. It was close to unimaginable until extremely recently to consider antisemitism as a tangible threat to all but a tiny, visible minority. It is now time to assess the conjunction between the onslaught on multiculturalism – code for an anti-immigration, anti-Black, anti-queer of colour, anti-Roma, and Islamophobic politics – and social antisemitism as a code for the mistrust of cosmopolitanism, and build new pathways of solidarity.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAfter Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech
EditorsGavan Titley, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Aurélien Mondon
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherZed Books
Pages262-277
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781783609413
ISBN (Print)9781783609390
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Charlie Hebdo attack, Paris, France, 2015
  • antisemitism
  • racism

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