The objective of this cooperative project is to counter anti-Semitism through combining foundational research in cultural studies with applied textbook research and to make the findings practicable for educators of politics and history. Jews and Judaism in Germany should not be primarily viewed as objects of discrimination, prejudice and hate but rather as subjects with plural religions, worldviews and political understandings. The base assumption is that the process of coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has led to a reduction of Jewish history to an ostensibly exclusive experiential framework of persecution, antisemitism, and the Holocaust, and thus to an obfuscation of the pluralism of Jewish life in Europe. The project aims to counter these isolating perspectives and stereotypical perceptions through three project modules that build upon one another and are implemented within an interdisciplinary research and transfer cooperative:
Module I (based at the Dubnow Institute) will culminate in four volumes of essays and a ‘digital catalogue’ documenting knowledge about past and contemporary Jewish life in Germany (project head: Professor Yfaat Weiss; project coordinator: Dr Philipp Graf).
Module II (based at the Georg Eckert Institute) will culminate in a scholarly monograph addressing the objectifying depiction of Jews and Judaism in history textbooks and selected popular history magazines published since the 1970s in Germany (project head: Dr Dirk Sadowski; project manager: Dr Matthias Springborn).
Module III will combine the findings of the first two modules to produce three themed volumes of teaching materials, training for educators and recommendations for textbook authors (project head: Dr Helge Schröder)
The project module based at the GEI:
This research project will examine the dissemination, development and possible interconnection of stereotypical notions of Jews and Judaism in history books and history magazines in Germany since the 1970s. It will question how stereotypical notions become established within the field of education and how they can lead to anti-Semitic bias.
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Aims
Stereotypical depictions of Jews and Judaism can frequently be found in the images and words used in history books; in chapters on the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century and on chapters on Israel in the context of conflict in the Middle East. The risk posed by such content is that a distorted perception of Judaism in the past and in the present is conveyed to students which may subsequently promote corresponding prejudices. The project module based at the GEI therefore begins by analysing the depiction of Jews and Judaism in (federal) German history books.
Popular history magazines also frequently use reductive or even distorting representations when they address Jewish history. As the linguistic and graphic content of such magazines is often strikingly similar to textbooks and many of them directly address an audience of education and training professionals, we may question whether they may act as a reservoir, amplifier or source of reference for possible stereotypical depictions in textbooks. The second part of the project module will therefore be an analysis of representations of Jews and Judaism in popular history magazines.
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Methodology
The project team start with the assumption that there has been a change in the representations of Jews and Judaism in the past decades, and have therefore chosen a diachronic approach. A limited but representative corpus of textbooks and history magazines will be selected to cover approximately three temporal cross-sections. An inventory and analysis of corresponding representations within then will then be carried out along caesuras in the (specialist) public discourse, in the culture of remembrance, and in the discourse related to the relationship with Israel in the Federal Republic.
The resulting samples or corpora for the respective time periods will be qualitatively and quantitively evaluated using digital analysis tools such as MAXQDA to search for specific themes and content as well as the linguistic patterns used. Such tools will also be used later on to identify and analyse potential intermedial relationships between the textbooks and history magazines.
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Results
