Abstracts
VASSILIKI YAKOUMAKI
On necessary "sensitivities': Building Jewishness in the Greek public sphere
In this presentation I shall pursue a tentative mapping of the memory building process of Jewish history and identity in the Greek public sphere from the 1990s onwards. This "novelty', I suggest, needs to be viewed as product of emerging conditions for the visibility of difference within the wider Europe, and cannot be attributed to revisionist political mentalities or projects originating within the boundaries of the Greek national space.
The mapping of the visibility of the Jew in Greek public life, reveals the hesitant and non coherent nature of the emergence of difference in Greece. At the same time it reveals the manners in which it is practiced, such as the official adoption of a multiculturalist rhetoric by Greek political figures, the declared changes in the content of school curricula concerning the place of Jews in Greek history, the visibility of Jewish religious celebrations in Greek cities, the integration of a culture of the Holocaust memory in Greek public life, etc.
Such an unprecedented position of political endorsement, constitutes a top-down approach towards a necessary and long overdue acquisition of a public image of "political correctness' for Greece, as political partner within the European context and other related international communities and fora.
