The survivor ideal obscures the war on antisemitism’s actual history and success

Evidence

Neither master nor slave, the survivor is at once the paradigmatic figure of modernity and the privileged memory of the struggle against antisemitism. As a metonymy of the crowd (in its disastrous disappearance), he accounts for the inchoate nature of the social movement that has occupied me here, while signalling its collective force. … Interrogating the figure of the survivor, engaging in the kind of reflective or critical attitude that would lead to questioning its authority and its effects, should lead to a recognition of the peculiarly fragmented, unrecognised, yet potent character of the struggle against antisemitism. To uphold the survivor as a political ideal, on the other hand, is already to partake of the war on antisemitism (and vice versa), albeit without recognising its history, its political import, nor indeed its political successes. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1223

Categorization

• DEFINE: The survivor is set up as a metonymy — a figure standing in for the crowds that once fought antisemitism but now vanishing.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what empirical work tests whether the ‘implied relations’ of this metonymy actually hold?