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Paper short abstract

The paper delves into the November 2024 street violence in Amsterdam widely reported as a night of "pogrom" against Jews. In a landscape of polarization over Gaza, and right wing anti-antisemitism campaigns, it examines critical heritage as antidote to racial constructions of minorities.

Paper long abstract

The conflict between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam—commonly revolving around solidarity with Palestine, and that solidarity in turn framed as a form of antisemitism—is widely understood within mainstream society as a foreign import from the Middle East. This paper is grounded in twenty years of living as a minority in the Netherlands, alongside long-term research into “the problem of minorities.” I argue that the tendency to externalize both social polarization and minorities themselves is rooted in a specifically Dutch culture of national remembrance and structured ignorance. Minorities, in turn, are locked into antagonisms in what Étienne Balibar describes as a dynamic of “sociological racisms.” Building on research into diasporic entanglements and a critique of antisemitism discourse, the paper proposes ways out of what Frantz Fanon famously described as a “vicious circle” of the objectification of “the other.”

As an antidote, I foreground non-hegemonic diasporic attachments, facets of Jewish Moroccan heritage, and counter-hegemonic historiography and heritage practices. The analysis advances through a close reading of a complex and overdetermined event: the “Maccabi riots” in Amsterdam in 2024, a moment of social unrest and breakdown of public order that coincided with Kristallnacht commemorations and a Holocaust remembrance ceremony.

The paper ultimately frames the politics of minorities in the Netherlands as part of a broader crisis of democracy. The central challenge, I argue, is not how to stifle, neutralize, or repress difference, but how to sustain a democratic multicultural society capable of holding difference together—maintaining what Ernesto Laclau terms a “chain of equivalences.”