South African Jews and Apartheid

Jews were overwhelmingly over-represented among Whites in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. At the same time, the Jewish community remained inwardly focused on narrowly Jewish concerns; Jewish communal institutions, until relatively late, remained distant from the struggle against racial injustice, if not wholly complicit with the apartheid regime. In this essay, Adler attempts to account for both responses, activism and compliance, by examining the dilemmas faced by South African Jewry as a relatively small group of suspect Others living at the sufferance of the dominant and traditionally antisemitic Afrikaners. Anti-apartheid activism, he argues, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture and values, regardless of how secular the forms that it took were, and how disturbing it might have seemed to a fearful Jewish community pre-occupied with its own interests.     

The nation under threat: secularist,racial and populist nativism in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Right-wing discourses and issues of belonging and collective identity in Europe’s political and public spheres are often analysed in terms of Islamophobia, racism and populism. While acknowledging the value of these concepts, Ke?i? and Duyvendak argue that these discourses can be better understood through the logic of nativism. Their article opens with a conceptual clarification of nativism, which they define as an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the nation due to its ‘foreignness’. This is followed by the analysis of nativism’s three subtypes: secularist nativism, problematizing particularly Islam and Muslims; racial nativism, problematizing black minorities; and populist nativism, problematizing ‘native’ elites. The authors show that the logic of nativism offers the advantages of both analytical precision and scope. The article focuses on the Dutch case as a specific illustration of a broader European trend.     

The post-war paths of occult national socialism: from Rockwell and Madole to Manson

Kaplan takes an in-depth look at the religious and cultic aspects of American national socialism in the post-war era. Beginning with the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in the late 1950s, he follows the development of occult beliefs and practices in the tiny and fractious American neo-Nazi movement. He emphasizes as well the brief turn to revolutionary violence in the 1970s through an examination of the National Socialist Liberation Front, and, finally, examines the attraction of Charles Manson and his followers to the occult fringes of the national socialist 'movement'. The article is built primarily on fieldwork, in-depth interviews with adherents of occult national socialist beliefs, and primary source materials from the 1960s to the present.     

Teaching Obama: history,critical race theory and social work education

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.     

Radical-right narratives in Slovakia and Hungary: historical legacies,mythic overlaying and contemporary politics

ABSTRACT

In the last several years, radical-right rhetoric has gained further ground in the political discourse of Slovakia and Hungary. This increasingly overt spiral of tension has been fuelled not only by radical-right actors, such as the Slovenská národná strana (SNS, Slovak National Party) and Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary), but also by mainstream parties such as SMER in Slovakia and Fidesz in Hungary. The legitimizing radical-right frames have mostly been founded on politicized historical narratives related to the intertwined processes of nation- and state-building in both countries. Pytlas seeks to describe and analyse this phenomenon, focusing on historical legacies, their mythologized reinterpretations as well as their application to contemporary politics. The debates on the Slovak language law of 2009 and the Hungarian citizenship law of 2010 shall be used as empirical examples of this ‘mythic overlaying’ mechanism.