Center for Research on Antisemitism

The Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) is a scientific research institution at the TU Berlin . It deals with prejudices and their consequences such as anti-Semitism , anti-gypsyism , xenophobia and racism . It was founded in 1982 and headed by Herbert A. Strauss until 1990 , then by Wolfgang Benz . Stefanie Schüler-Springorum has been running it since 2011 .

History and tasks of the center

The center for anti-Semitism research was founded on the initiative of the then TU president Rolf Berger and the chairman of the Berlin Jewish community, Heinz Galinski .

In June 1982 Herbert A. Strauss of the City University of New York took up his position as founding director of the center and on November 9, 1982 he gave his inaugural lecture on “Research on Anti-Semitism as a Science”. From 1990 to 2011 Wolfgang Benz was head of the ZfA. In 1999 Werner Bergmann was appointed to the second professorship at the ZfA. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum has been director of the ZfA since June 2011.

The work is supplemented by related focal points, German-Jewish history and Holocaust research. The ZfA is involved in teaching at the university. It values interdisciplinarity and educational work for the public. The ZfA is also active as a publisher; for example for the handbook of anti-Semitism . The series “Documents, Texts, Materials” has been published by Berlin's Metropol Verlag since 1991 , in which 88 volumes were published by 2013.

In the spring of 1992 the “Association of Friends and Patrons of the Center for Research on Antisemitism” was founded to give “help in solving financial bottlenecks”; The association's secretary is the historian Juliane Wetzel , who works at the center.

In the winter semester of 2014/15, the research-oriented course "Interdisciplinary Antisemitism Research" started at the ZfA, which leads to the academic degree Master of Arts.

Center library

When the ZfA was founded, the foundation of the library was a collection of 3,500 volumes acquired from a Viennese antiquarian. Anti-Semitic writings from the 17th to the 20th century were included as well as classics of anti-Semitism research. This inventory reflects the spectrum of political, religious, cultural and racist anti-Semitism, especially in Germany, Austria and France.

Another part of the library (750 volumes) comes from the " Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics " in Berlin-Dahlem, which was dissolved in 1947 . The institute was founded in 1926 as an institution of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (publisher of the journal Psychische Hygiene ) and opened in 1927. The collection area “Racism” has been significantly supplemented by this collection. Represented are mainly international and racial science , genetic pathology, eugenics , family, social and racial hygiene .

The library currently has around 40,000 volumes as well as numerous other media such as posters, leaflets and picture sheets. Around 180 magazines are kept running.

Events on Islamic anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

In 2002 the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) commissioned the Center to conduct a study on anti-Semitism in Europe. According to the center, the reason for this commission was a wave of anti-Semitism that broke out in Europe in spring 2002 after the second intifada began in the Middle East in 2000 . The finished study was then initially kept under lock and key by the EUMC and only published online by the center itself.

In December 2005 the center hosted an international conference on "Anti-Semitism and radical Islamism".

The second summer university against anti-Semitism in September 2007 was dedicated to the topic of “anti-Zionism, hostility towards Israel, Islamist hatred of Jews”.

A conference in December 2008 was entitled "Image of the enemy Muslim - image of the enemy Jew" . The program and approach of the conference met with criticism from publicists such as Henryk M. Broder , Clemens Heni , Matthias Küntzel and in several articles in the Jerusalem Post . Among other things, so the allegations, the equal treatment of Islamophobia trivialize the Holocaust and let the urgent problem of combating anti-Semitism, especially Islamist , take a back seat. The German section of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East , an international network of over 20,000 scholars, criticized the unobjective and defamatory tone with which the Center for Research on Antisemitism has reacted to the criticism of its conference Feindbild Muslim - Feindbild Jude to this day. This criticism would u. a. also shared by Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel , Vice Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany , Dieter Graumann, and Holocaust researcher Daniel Jonah Goldhagen . In contrast, the center and its director Benz were defended by the historian Yehuda Bauer and the discussion of Islamophobia was defended at the conference as a reference to the lack of integration among young European Muslims. In February 2009, the ZfA, under the direction of Wolfgang Benz, published the 151-page publication “Islamophobia and its context: Documentation of the conference Feindbild Muslim - Feindbild Jude (positions - perspectives - diagnoses)" .

Employee

The staff at the Center for Research on Antisemitism are:

Felix Axster
Carina Baganz
Udo Bartholdy
Peter Buhr
Jesus Casquete
Bernward Dörner
Isabel Enzenbach

Marcus Funck
Manfred Gailus
Michael Grüttner
Dilek Güven
Carola Haring
Ramona Haubold
Andrea Hopp
Uffa Jensen
Ann-Katrin Kastberg
Tilo Katzmareck

Jonas Knatz
Karen Koerber
Michael Kohlstruck
Jannik Landmark
Winfried Meyer
Thomas Levelow Kaplan
Patricia Piberger
David Ranan
Julijana Ranc

Julika Rosenstock
Gebhard Schultz
Adina Stern
Helmut Tausendteufel
Marija Vulesica
Juliane Wetzel
Marieke Wiese
Ulrich Wyrwa
Xenia Zunik

Former Employees

Alice Brauner
Wolfgang Benz (until 2011)
Max Czollek , 2012 to 2016
Albrecht Dümling
Klaus Fischer , 1985 to 1992
Wolf Gruner
Rainer Erb (until 2016)

Miriam Rürup
Wolfgang Scheffler
Britta Schellenberg
Kurt Schilde , 1997 and 1999 research associate
Wolfgang Schmidt

Yasemin Shooman , 2009 to 2013
Christina Späti , 2001 to 2002 she was a scholarship holder of the Swiss National Science Foundation
Harry Waibel
Werner Bergmann (until 2016)
Peter Ullrich (2014-2015)

Well-known speakers at the ZfA

literature

TU Berlin: Center for Research on Antisemitism (Editing: Wolfgang Benz, Werner Bergmann, Ingeborg Medaris, Juliane Wetzel ), Berlin 1999
Gottfried Plehn: The Berlin “Center for Research on Antisemitism” , in: Pogrom 180 (Journal of the Society for Threatened Peoples), December 1994 / January 1995, page 54
Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Islamophobia and its context: Documentation of the conference "Feindbild Muslim - Feindbild Jude" , Metropol, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-940938-32-9 (= positions, perspectives, diagnoses , volume 3).

Web links

Website ZfA
ZfA chronicle
Should 'Mein Kampf' appear in a commented edition? Pro: Rafael Seligman, Contra: Wolfgang Benz in Jüdische Allgemeine No. 26/08, June 26, 2008
Amory Burchard: More knowledge also about thoughts of revenge. In: Der Tagesspiegel , September 30, 2010 (article about the director Stefanie Schüler-Springorum )

Individual evidence

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/schueler_springorum_prof_dr_stefanie/

↑ see Gottfried Plehn: Das Berliner "Center for Antisemitism Research" , in: Pogrom 180 (Journal of the Society for Threatened Peoples), December 1994 / January 1995, p. 54.

^ Center for Research on Anti-Semitism (ZfA)

↑ On the website it says literally under focal points: The Center for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University of Berlin, founded in 1982, is the only institute of its kind to work in an interdisciplinary manner in research and teaching on prejudices and their consequences such as antisemitism, antigypsyism, xenophobia, racism. / Adjacent focus areas of the work are German-Jewish history, the Holocaust and right-wing extremism.

↑ see holdings of the series in the German National Library at http://d-nb.info/019245335

↑ see page about the friends' association

↑ The library

↑ Juliane Wetzel: The difficult handling of a phenomenon. The EU and anti-Semitism , in Moshe Zuckermann (ed.): Antisemitism, Antizionism, Israelkritik , Wallstein Verlag, 2005 ISBN 3-89244-872-8 , ISBN 978-3-89244-872-3 , pp. 93-94.

↑ Yasemin Shooman: Anti-Semitism and radical Islamism , conference report on HSozuKult , 2006

↑ Conference program Summer University Against Anti-Semitism 2007 on Lern-aus-der-Geschichte.de

^ Mathias Küntzel: The “Center for Research on Antisemitism” on the wrong track , November 25, 2008

↑ Hagalil.com: ZfA / criticism of dealing with critics

^ Yehuda Bauer: Berlin conference didn't lump Islamophobia with anti-Semitism , Jerusalem Post , March 4, 2009

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/axster_dr_felix/

↑ Dr. Carina Baganz ( Memento from July 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive )

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/casquete_dr_jesus/

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/doerner_apl_prof_dr_bernward/

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/enzenbach_dr_isabel/

↑ http://www.tu-berlin.de/fakultaet_i/zentrum_fuer_antisemitismusforschung/menue/ueber_uns/mitarbeiter/funck_dr_marcus/