One-Way Street
All roads lead to the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin, in Strasbourg.
Less well-known, but no less important. Max Horkheimer, in Stuttgart.
Archived entries for Max Horkheimer
Branding anti-Racism
Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes it’s object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an expression of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different times.
Reading the mountain of op-eds this week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of larger trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?
Or was it because the critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never redefined itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’ came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians.
Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. They would be outsiders within the bourgeoisie, as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.
They Call It Mimesis
One of my favorite parts of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno‘s account of German anti-Semitism is their emphasis upon the the role of mimesis, or imitation, in racism. The Nazis did not want to destroy Jewish identity as much as take it over, they argued in their masterwork, The Dialectic of Enlighenment.
The strength of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument does not just lie in the correctness of their analysis. It is also present in its applicability to other instances of racism, apart from that which discriminates against Jews. Take this Northern League poster here in Milan as but one example.
Warning Italians that they risk becoming the equivalent of Native Americans confined to future reservations, this poster encourages voters to fear the demographic threat of foreign immigration. That many of these immigrants are actually indigenous Americans, from Latin America, is it’s own mimetic moment.
In the first installment of Everywhere But There, a new column I’ve begun writing for Zeek, I discuss tensions over race in Italy, from the vantage point of the Arab-Israeli conflict.