Based on ethnographic observations of government supported Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs targeting Muslims, I show that Europeanization of Holocaust memory and fight against anti-semitism goes hand in hand with racialization of anti-Semitism as a mainly Muslim, hence not German/European, disposition. In my presentation I will give a detailed account of how in these trainings Muslim background youth are first educated about anti-semitism in their ancestral countries and then taught to go beyond these stereotypes. This approach that attributes a hereditary quality to anti-semitism does not see this youth as part and parcel of German society.
I conclude that racialization of anti-Semitism serves the interconnected purposes of redefining a new Europe, and a new Germany, as a place that has fully liberated itself from any antidemocratic tendencies surviving from its Nazi past, and singling out the already racialized minorities in Europe as unfit for this new Europe. This double discourse creates the illusion of a white German/European opposition to antisemitism and a Muslim/immigrant propensity to it. As a result, the recent German and European commitment to tolerance and human rights thus ends up being a racializing project in its application.
