Eastern Europe

Far-right antisemitism and Holocaust memory in Eastern Europe

Far-right, Nazi-style antisemitism never died, but in democratic states it was pushed to the margins of society and became widely discredited as absurd and disgraceful. In the post-communist states of Russia and Eastern Europe the taboo was not so strong, and after the fall of communism, far-right antisemitic movements appealed to some as plausible and vibrant. 

While Russia lurches away from democracy, populist politics is successful even in some of the newly democratic Eastern European states of the European Union. 

This research agenda seeks to understand the enduring appeal of far-right antisemitism, it seeks to facilitate the maintenance of networks of antisemitism scholars in those countries and it seeks to participate in in the academic work to understand and to challenge this variant of antisemitism. 

It is also keenly aware of the coming together of some of the discourses of far-right, Nazi-style antisemitism with some of the ostensibly left-wing, Stalinist-style antisemitism of the official communist states that ruled in these countries until the late 1980s.