Anti-Semitism in a Transnational World: Recurrences and Changes

In recent decades, complex systems of interrelations have developed on different planes- global, regional, national and local- enhancing the expansion and intensification of interactions in an increasingly mobile and transnational world. Primordial and elective identities, collective affirmation and individualization processes, secularization and de-secularization, draw novel scenarios in which “transnational ideological packages” circulate. New convergences between seemingly different and even opposing social actors and political currents lead to an interplay of diverse motivations and arguments which overlap at the meaning-making level. Their impact on the social representation of the Other is both subjective and behavioral as well as related to structural constraints and institutional arrangements. Diverse sort of prejudice, symbolic violence and anti-Semitism display differentially along shared regional traits and local singular configurations. Latin America’s recent resurgence of antisemitism stems from a complex combination of geopolitical shifts and trends. An examination of such changing patterns reveals several of the less obvious social and political forces.

Emerging tensions, contradictions and dysjunctures between the national, the regional and the transnational dimensions allow to recover old paths of prejudice and redefine (not only) symbolic violence. Thus, whereas we witness a greater conceptual awareness of the complexity of anti-Semitism, we still need more clarity when analyzing related contemporary expressions of prejudice, rejection and exclusion. Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism ( differingof legitimate critique of a government or State policy) are singular yet overlapping phenomena at the meaning-making level. The ways they are produced and reproduced discursively pose conceptual and empirical challenges -to define, to measure and to combat it. This paper aims to approach several of these challenges from a Latin American and global perspective.