Code and Conspiracy: Antisemitism in Denmark After 1945 (ASIDE)

The project proposes a principal hypothesis of a dual post-1945 development: an accelerated dissemination of antisemitic conspiracy theories paralleled by a semantic blurring and coding of antisemitic language causing both continuity and renewal of historical antisemitic argumentation adapting to changing contexts.

The key objectives of the projects are:

1. an essential investigation of historical and contemporary antisemitic patterns and how extremist antisemitic manifestations interact with mainstream public debate;
2. an innovative, multidisciplinary analytical model for studying semantic forms of antisemitism in post-1945 society, including coded, subtle, and structural antisemitism; and
3. a theoretical approach to antisemitism refining the latest research on conspiracy ideologies.

Sub-study A (PI Sofie Lene Bak) contributes with a broad media analysis of antisemitic tropes and arguments in Danish mainstream public debate about Jews focussing on the articulation of the Holocaust, contention in the history of Israel, and the perception of Jewish rituals. Through a systematic and chronological investigation of antisemitic conceptions in digital newspaper databases, specific media debates on Jews in Denmark are identified enabling subsequent thematic and vertical analyses of media sources thus identifying both continuity in antisemitic codes and the origins of distinct post-Holocaust tropes, both crucial to the understanding of contemporary antisemitic arguments.

Sub-study B (postdoc Charlie Krautwald) expands the investigation into the realm of political extremism exploring how stigmatised knowledge and conspiracism regarding the Holocaust have been used in forging, legitimising and publicly disseminating radical politics and antisemitic tropes in Denmark from around 1970 to the present among Palestianian solidarity movements and key Holocaust revisionists and far-right extremist groups. The sub study also attends to the historical roots of the current hybridisation of extremist thought.

Sub-study C (PhD fellow Emma Pretzmann Feil) expands the investigation empirically into the exclusively contemporary digital realm focusing on the recipient perspective. The case study explores mainstream and context dependent antisemitism on social media, i.e., how contemporary forms of antisemitism are experienced by both Jews and non-Jews and will through the analysis develop a set of ideal types of online antisemitism. The study is conducted through ethnographic fieldwork with an interactive approach.

• Terje Emberland (Research professor, Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies).
• Lars M. Andersson (Senior lecturer, Forum for Jewish Studies, Uppsala University).
• Maja Gildin Zuckermann (Special advisor, Centre for Documentation and Counter Extremism).