Anti-semitism and Islamophobia

"The apparent resurgence of hostility against Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe. At the same time, the adversities of the continent's Muslim populations have received increasing attention as well. In this pamphlet, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in this debate. He argues against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Instead, he offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion. Anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state; Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. Whereas traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course with the supercession of the nation-state, Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new Europe."--BOOK JACKET.