Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah

[Jewish Political Studies Review] Clemens Heni - Research on anti-Semitism must be vigilant to develop new strategies to fight a new brand of Jew-hatred, secondary anti-Semitism. Its core principle is the refusal or rejection of remembrance of the unprecedented crime which Germans committed during the Second World War, namely the Shoah. Secondary anti-Semitism has a specific dimension in Germany where it is widespread and basically reflects the country's unique political culture. Three categories of soft-core denial are: distortion, universalization and projection of guilt-relativization-trivialization. People who generate such a soft-core denial do not often refer to the Holocaust as a lie or fabrication by Jews or their sympathizers, but are much more subtle. Dr. Clemens Heni is a post-doctoral associate at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism at Yale University.


2008-11-07 01:00:00

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