The fight against antisemitism operates as an international social movement across many countries.

Evidence

But the war on antisemitism also seems to function as an international movement (albeit not quite as an organisation) with its own attributes and particulars, its singular ‘framing’. It has a centre (or more precisely, centres) and a periphery. It operates locally, of course, fighting on distinct battlegrounds that are distributed unevenly in the social cartography, and on the surface of the globe as well. It is conducted as a programme of increased vigilance and discourse that involves heads of states, political and cultural figures, institutions and media, actors, books, journals and countless other sites. It is at work in legislative assemblies and in international courts (witness the often redundant explosion of legislative activity in France, the UK and the USA, often with an international dimension)40; in crowded museums and in Hollywood studios (from Shoah and countless other documentaries to Spielberg’s feature films and the scrutinisation of Mel Gibson’s ‘life and works’, and on to the adaptations, showings of and critical flurry around Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice); and on the streets of New York City (‘Anti-Semitism is Anti-Me’ was the motto of that Anti-Defamation League 2004 campaign I mentioned, which was disseminated throughout the city) or the streets and walls of Paris (contested counts of ‘antisemitic acts’, including a number of embarrassing fabrications; intense and unified emotion and repeated public condemnations; and a 2004 sensitisation campaign by the Jewish Students Organization [UEJF] with the words ‘sale juif [dirty Jew]’ sprayed over a representation of Jesus Christ and other iconic figures), in London and Berlin (with the intensified pursuit of memorialisation, or the controversy over Günther Grass’s past and merit) as well as in Buenos Aires and Caracas, and even in Lincoln and Lynchburg. Moreover, I read numerous reports that a comparable, if highly distinct, set of battles is being fought (or in need of being fought) in Cairo, Beirut and Teheran, Jerusalem and Baghdad, in truth from Casablanca to Kuala Lumpur via Istanbul and Mumbai. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1211

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s broader thesis pairing antisemitism and Islamophobia as parallel transnational movements.