Max Silverman

Jews, Arabs and the Theorisation of Racism in Britain and France

Until recently theories of racism in Britain have largely been constructed within a black/white and anti-colonial paradigm. However, over the last few years this has changed considerably. Today, new paradigms have emerged which have widened the discussion of racism to include, among others, Jews and Arabs. In France, on the other hand, the black/white paradigm has played a more marginal (if growing) role, whereas Jews and Arabs have for long been central to theorisations of racism.

The Violence of the Cut: Michael Haneke’s Caché and Cultural Memory

Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005) treats the cut in a number of ways. There are the violent physical cuts that punctuate the film, violent cuts in the ties binding one character to another, the cuts that mark out the dividing lines between the protected zone of Georges’s bourgeois life and the outside world, and, finally, the filmic cut which splices up the world into disconnected images. In this article, I will argue that the cut is central to Haneke’s presentation of the real and of memory: cocooned in a world of dislocated images, we are cut off from our contact with the real and from our past. Exposure to the violence of the cut re-establishes connections that have been severed, returns us to an ethical position with regard to the other, and reinscribes human action within history.

Memorializing the holocaust in Britain

The aim of this article is to question the establishment of the Holocaust Memorial Day as the only annual date in Britain relating to issues of racism and genocide. By doing so, we do not mean to question the need to learn and know about the holocaust per se. Indeed, as both of us are Jews and many of our relatives were murdered by the Nazis and their local helpers in Lithuania and Prague, this is the last way in which we would like this article to be understood. Moreover, in our own personal histories, learning about nazism and the holocaust has played a major role in our politicization. However, politicization for us means that commemorating the holocaust should be conceived, primarily, as a part of the fight against racism.1 Thus, the issue we want to examine in this article is whether the way in which the Holocaust Memorial Day has been established in Britain is conducive for this purpose. The decision to establish this memorial day followed an international trend, campaigns of several Jewish NGOs, and a Ten-minute Rule Bill by the British Labour MP Andrew Dismore, following his visit to AuschwitzBirkenau as part of a delegation of 150 teachers organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was announced by the then British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, in January 2000, coinciding with an intergovernmental conference – the Stockholm Forum on Holocaust Education, ‘Remembrance and Research’ – whose delegates committed their governments to the establishment of such memorial days. The date chosen for the Holocaust Memorial Day was 27 January, the date on which Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. The first Holocaust Memorial Day was marked by a national ceremony in Westminster Hall in London, which was broadcast live on BBC television. D E B A T E