Volume 7, Issue 2 (2009) Historicizing Anti-Semitism

Proceedings of the International Conference on the Post-September 11th New Ethnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism Maison des Science de l'Home (MSH) Paris, June 29-30, 2007.

The cultivation of the sociological imagination, the pursuit of what the sociology of self-knowledge also seeks in a different way and language, of reflexive understanding of one's (personal and people's) troubles in light of world-historical public issues, is not just a scholarly preference and slogan. Their pursuit can be liberating or their lack deadly. They go to the heart of what may prevent more holocausts subtly brewing amid the lands and peoples we occupy, the ghettos we engineer, the separation walls we build, and the presumably "legal" phosphorous bombs we dump on the innocent civilians we force into ever larger, desperately fragmented, concentration camps and slow-moving "trains" to the neverland. And history is a witness, if only we can learn the right lessons so as not to repeat it amid its manifold, slippery, world-historical typologies germinating anew in our here-and-now everyday lives.