Anti-antisemitism lacks a cultural model or narrative of its own subjectivity

Evidence

And while there are ‘claims that develop’ in other spiritual narratives, which ‘frequently require that people appear as quite individualistic within their own stories’; while one can understand these narratives and ‘representations as staking out claims and possibilities for a certain kind of authentic and authoritative experience’, nothing of the sort needs be said or invoked about the struggle of which I am part. There are numerous and excellent reasons to consider that this absence of history or reflexivity corresponds simply to the very realities we confront, the conditions of the struggle against antisemitism. Then again, much as individual accounts have the potential to hide larger social forces, this peculiar situation too may conceal ‘participation in a history that was carried in practice rather than in other forms of memory’. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1201

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why does the struggle against antisemitism resist autobiographical narration while other spiritual or emancipatory struggles generate individualistic self-accounts? Could compare with narratives of the civil rights movement.
• XREF: Connects to the puzzle of why movements produce founding myths and personal conversion narratives — echoes of Walter Benjamin’s work on tradition and memory, and to the general question of absence in movement historiography.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 1201