ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a number of public and cultural expressions as occasions to critically think through Jewish-Muslim relations in Europe. The case studies include the 2020 and 2021 contributions by Arnold Grunberg and Abdelkader Benali to the national Second World War commemorations in the Netherlands; a 2020 theatre play by Soufiane Moussouli about the adventures of a Moroccan-Dutch young man in Amsterdam, Morocco and Israel; and movies by Phillipe Faucon and Karin Albou about women’s Jewish-Muslim encounters and friendships in contemporary France, and Tunisia during French colonialism and Nazi occupation. As such, these public and cultural expressions touch upon the religion-race nexus in Europe, offering insights into its historically and sociopolitically constructed nature, and thus the possibility of undermining it. The chapter shows how the case studies in different ways do the work of what Gill Hochberg calls a critical ‘remembering of the Semite.’ This chapter thus focuses primarily on rethinking the (dis)connections between the political and religious subject positions of Jews and Muslims, and looks for moments within the particular public and cultural expressions being studied in which stories about religious transformation are being told. In other words, it sees religious transformation as a potentiality enclosed in the rethinking of interfaith relations.
