Jews, Muslims and Mass Media: Mediating the Other (Routledgecurzon Jewish Studies Series)

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Are They Still the Enemy? See All Customer Reviews. Shop Textbooks. Read an excerpt of this book! Add to Wishlist. USD Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Temporarily Out of Stock Online Please check back later for updated availability. Overview This text looks at the ways in which Jews, Muslims and the conflict between them has been covered in the modern media. Product Details Table of Contents.

Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies

Show More. Average Review. Write a Review. It might have been expected, in this victorious glow, that the country would feel confidently able to return to a state of security.

Apparently however — if paradoxically — it is only necessary to set up a department of Homeland Security when a country feels insecure. In a country of insecurity — and the dimensions of that insecurity were to be researched and teased out over the months and years to come — there are likely to be some people who feel more or less secure. What might the reasons be for people to feel fearful in their own country? The discourse of terrorism has created and revealed significant divisions in Australian society, apparently unequalled since the Vietnam draft if the size of the public protests before the Iraq War, and the polarisation of opinion since, is a gauge.

However, when researchers become aware of such discourses it becomes important to ask why some stories are hidden from view. Specifically, this paper pays attention to the fact that a national survey of levels of fear, comparing broader community Australians with Australian Muslims, found unexpectedly that the group which recorded the highest fear levels of all was the small number of people identifying themselves as Australian Jews.

While the finding was from a sample of only 7 respondents, and while a cell size such as this is in line with acceptable statistical expectations for a sample of see below , another 63 people identifying as Jewish voluntarily contacted the research team when they heard about the survey, with the aim of expressing their views.

A further eighteen people, expressing extreme anti-Semitic sentiments, also voluntarily contacted the team. Thus of the 92 public callers to Mark Balnaves, the Chief Investigator who was the contact point for responses to the survey, 81 constructed Jewishness and Jewish identity as a relevant prompt for their comment.

In terms of the original project, people were interviewed over the telephone and agreed to complete a survey assessing their levels of fear.

Of these respondents, Australian Muslims were disproportionately sampled with respondents identifying themselves in this way although only interviewees actually gave their faith as Islamic indicating that a significant proportion might have been secular, or non-practicing, Australian Muslims.

This community was over-represented in order to obtain a statistically robust sample for analysing discourses of terrorism and the other. These small Jewish Census numbers have to be read with caution. It is not unusual for respondents to censuses who are fearful of possibly unpredictable futures to not disclose their religious or cultural affiliation.

Nonetheless, this is clearly not a statistically-significant sample. It was to avoid such small numbers that the survey had been set up to over-sample Muslim respondents in terms of their proportional representation in the Australian population. While it was not self-evident prior to undertaking this research that Australian Muslims would necessarily present as more fearful than broader community Australians, this is in fact what happened.

The results from Australian Jews and the overwhelmingly Jewish-focussed public responses to the survey, however, were totally unexpected by the researchers — none of whom is Jewish. Green and Balnaves invited Bloustien, a cultural anthropologist, to join them in interrogating these issues around Jewish-ness in Australia. The authors started by exploring several related questions in this preliminary paper: firstly, whether these findings might be representative of a generalisable outcome and, if so, the factors which might explain it.

Secondly, why these findings had been so unexpected to the researchers in a study of Australian community perceptions of fear: what clues might have been overlooked and why? Thirdly, how could we start to unravel the complex emotion of fear and understand what it means for different citizens and communities in contemporary Australia?

As indicated above, the majority of the 92 calls from Perth and interstate, enquiring about the survey while it was being conducted and when it had a high news profile, were from Jewish 63 and overtly anti-Semitic 18 members of the community. In addition to causing massive loss of life, the attacks spawned a host of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that implicated the Jews and Israel in the bloodshed.

As it turns out, those canards were not fleeting expressions of paranoid fantasy that dissipated once they were debunked. The 81 Jewish-related calls from the community noted above do not count as a statistically representative probability sample of any defined sampling frame. However, they highlight the fact that Jewish communities are a section of the Australian population who, historically, have an interest in shifts in public opinion that lead to social isolation.

The first enquiry to Mark Balnaves following national publicity about the survey was from an elderly Australian Jewish Perth resident. He had heard about the survey from friends and was concerned that public opinion in Australia was turning against those who were perceived as different. People make judgements about whether they are in the majority or a minority concerning a specific issue and if they think they are in the minority, and the issue is important to them, they will often keep silent for fear of social isolation.

Public opinion polls, interestingly, cannot for the most part pick up the spiral of silence because people are responding to their perceptions of what the majority think, or against the questions the pollster has put Altheide; Fletcher; Foyle. In truth, the results should — in a country like Australia — show almost no-one perceiving themselves as fearful of living in our society.

Why might Jewish people particularly feel so fearful in their own country?

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In this respect it might be said that Australian Jews were equally concerned, along with Australian Muslims, but this is not necessarily so, and was certainly not what was indicated in the public responses to Mark Balnaves. The disproportionate response to the survey findings indicated that Australian Jews were highly concerned: possibly because the discussions were only in terms of Australian Muslims.

Even though the media and commentary predominantly focused on Muslim identities, it seemed to be the case that people identifying with Judaism felt equally — or, possibly, even more — isolated than Muslims did. Questions raised by the unexpected results and reactions to the survey are only surprising if one considers that the majority of people in Australian should feel safe, and that there is no reason for them to feel otherwise.

That is, it is making an assumption that once people come to Australia they can leave behind their cultural backgrounds and align their fears and perceptions with those held by the majority. While many Jewish Australians are involved, very active, well-established and indeed celebrated members of their communities and professions, history has taught Jewish communities, possibly more than any other, that circumstances can alter rapidly. However well Jewish people considered they were assimilated, the past has shown that political climates can change — and in doing so can change that sense of security and sense of belonging over night.

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Even in democracies, public opinion can become suddenly negative and translate itself into legislation and repressive laws. When particular communities experience such labelling inter-generationally and first hand, and suffer its outcomes, it is not surprising that many do not readily experience or express a secure sense of belonging, in old or new countries.

When considering the reasons for the high levels of fear expressed by the Jewish respondents and the later voluntary callers who identified as Jewish, it is relevant to acknowledge the ongoing existence and impact of anti-Semitism. We can address the impacts of anti-Semitism under two main headings:.

Many if not most of the Jewish population in Australia — perhaps including the elderly caller whose comment is contained in the title of this paper — would be living survivors of or descendents of the Holocaust; or refugees from pogroms in other countries post Second World War. Persecution of Jewish populations did not start with Nazi Germany, nor did it stop at the end of the Second World War. In fact, some of the worst state-sanctioned examples of Jewish persecution occurred in Europe after Geller; Stephen Roth Institute.

UN Watch, a non-governmental organization based in Geneva and partly funded by US Jewish organisations, whose mandate is to monitor the performance of the United Nations, published a November report on the overall inaction and indeed sometimes the complicity of the UN on issues of anti-Semitism UN Watch report. This is partly because authoritarian Communist regimes tended to keep expressions of extreme nationalism and religious fervour in check Urban.

While Jewish individuals and communities come to Australia believing that they have the opportunity for religious and cultural freedom in a welcoming and democratic country, previous experience has taught many to be wary. For some, anxiety is never far away, and is re-confirmed even in Australian daily life. For example, in the Stephen Roth Institute report on Australia, reports of anti-Jewish violence, vandalism, harassment and intimidation were logged in , represented the highest total since national record-keeping began in Such anti-Semitism does not seem to be restricted to right-wing groups as the report indicates:.

It raises anxiety among Australian Jewish communities that becomes particularly acute when public discourses reiterating old stereotypes and exclusionary ideologies circulate through the media and the public sphere. The notion of Jewish communities being under threat is not solely a perception, but the result of repeated direct experiences. These direct experiences are in the form of documented physical attacks on individuals and organisations as recorded by The Stephen Roth Institute, for example.

Individual high profile members of Jewish communities receive death threats; grave sites are vandalised, and buildings such as schools and synagogues are fire-bombed. Following the failure of the Oslo Accords signed in , the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada and then the attacks on the US on September 11 , violence aimed at Jewish people and property increased — in Australia and around the world:.

The Canberra Jewish centre was fire-bombed four times between September and September Individual Jews, particularly men wearing skullcaps, were physically attacked, while community leaders received death threats. Violence and Jew-hatred manifested themselves in the pro-Palestinian rallies of and , with the burning of Israeli and US flags.

Such outbursts created fear and anxiety amongst Australian Jewry and the wider community. Attacks do not have to be physical to have the effect of raising anxiety in a smaller community and creating a sense of exclusion from the broader community. As with almost every cultural group apart from those living in their traditional lands, communities which identify as Jewish regard themselves as belonging to a global diaspora. Here he foregrounds the work of the individual subject in drawing upon a range of influences to construct personal histories which inform the practices of the self.

Processes involved in identity formation include such socially-constructed parameters as age, gender, class, ethnicity, cultural context, sexual orientation and religious affiliation. Identity creation is an ongoing individual activity which produces the individual subject through the negotiation of the range of alternative discourses. Some aspects of available discursive identities will be appropriated while others will be confronted or rejected.

Within these contexts, people can be seen to practice a range of identities. These constructed understandings integrate the global identity in the context of a shared past. To such media can be added everyday practices — such as those of cooking and eating — and rite of passage rituals marking birth, coming of age, marriage and death.

Relevant elements of material and social culture include newsletters, icons, photographs, travel, worship, meetings and greetings and web-based interactions — often consumed in a local context. In an environment where difference has been made problematic, engagement with such media and participation in such practices may increase the tension between the global and the local; and between the diaspora and the host nation of which they are a part and in which they live.

They integrate the historic and global Jewish community over time and across space — differentiating that community from some dominant traditions of the local, Australian nation. Most non-Jewish Australians do not realise the breadth of ethnic backgrounds that are incorporated under the umbrella of Jewish culture. Within these mixed populations are communities which identify with particular religious traditions such as Hassidic, Orthodox, Progressive, Reform, Re-constructionist and also those who consider themselves secular but who still identify with Jewish culture and tradition.

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Doubling the number of repetitions does not translate to doubling the number of people in the know. Arguably, stimulus intensity also affects the half-life of information and knowledge — lessons learned painfully, and often, become deeply ingrained and it may be hard to move on from these; even given a change of country, a new start, or even a new generation. We are aware that perceptions of risk are firmly linked to bio-social markers. The notion that historical experiences can heighten a sense of risk for an Australian community in the present, in the absence of specific drivers for this, is significant since many cultural studies approaches to dealing with contemporary political issues may not fully acknowledge the creation of new understandings through the integration of news and information with existing historical and cultural knowledges shared within the diasporic community.

What we tell ourselves about the causes, consequences and cures of fear constitutes a significant proportion of the media product currently consumed by Australian audiences. To a diasporic community which constructs itself as having a particular experience of isolation and exclusion — whether in Australia or abroad — continual media repetition of the fear motif would be an invitation to a spiral of concern. In Western democracies like Australia the mass media have considerable freedom accorded to them in the expectation that they will both diffuse political information and act as watchdogs on the custodians of the body politic — governments, departments, institutions and the like.

Aldoory, for example, found that government messages of reassurance have often failed because the context in which those messages are to be received is poorly understood at a sub-cultural level. Clearly, however, the processes by which information is adopted and diffused have an important effect on how public opinion is formed within communities.

In the Australian context, an understandable recent research focus on Australian Muslims should not obscure the relevance of pervasive fears which deeply concern Australian Jews.

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