Confronting Allosemitism in Europe

Only a few decades after the Holocaust, Belgian Jews, like most European Jewries, are under the attack of forces stemming from a variety of sources. How do they confront and stand these new hardships? Research done all over Europe from 2012 through 2013 tried to answer this question. Among the cases investigated, the Belgian Jewry is one of the most interesting. It is both versatile and representative, revealing essential components of the general experience of European Jews today. Conceptual considerations pave the way to the study of their plight that has been, by any criterion, anything but “usual". Belgian Jews, it appears, are “like” many other Jewries in Europe but “a little more”. They highlight the question: is allosemitism at all surmountable?

Eliezer Ben-Rafael is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Tel-Aviv University. His main areas of research are ethnocultural cleavages in Israel, collective identities, and sociology of languages. He has published extensively in these fields and he received the Landau Prize for his life achievements in Sociology and was President of the International Association of Sociology.