Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
11 - ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
Summary
Following one of the leitmotifs in this volume, namely how and why the Shoah was turned against ‘the Jew’, one inevitably lands in the football domain too. ‘The Jew’ has always been an issue in Dutch football, also before the outbreak of the Second World War. But it did not end with the war. Since the 1980s, the antisemitic identification of Jews with gas and gas chambers, which started in Dutch society directly after 1945, has become common in the ‘football world’ – not only in the Netherlands. It should be mentioned that there is an ongoing debate about whether one should use the term ‘antisemitism’ in this context, or rather rely on terms such as ‘rivalry’, ‘vandalism’ and ‘provocation’. This chapter will analyse both the phenomenon itself and the debate. It will also address the role of the (alleged) Jewish image of the world famous Amsterdam football club Ajax and its supporters. What is their part in the game? And how did Jews themselves, in and outside of the stadium, react to on the one hand the supposed Jewish image of Ajax, and on the other anti-Jewish chants, slogans and banners? In this chapter we start with a football scandal in 1982 and will then kick the ball backwards through history right up to the present again.
Jewish football players are ‘Jewed’
On 2 May 1982, FC Utrecht supporters, on their way to a match against Ajax, took at least two remarkable banners with them. One showed a capital J, a Star of David and a swastika and the word ‘Death’. The other one was written in rhyme:
Hé Adolf Hey Adolf
Hier lopen er nog elf Here's another eleven
Als jij ze niet vergast If you won’t
Doen we het zelf We will gas them to heaven
Initially, the police denied having spotted the banners. Het Parool then published a photo showing a police officer looking at the first banner. The commander, standing directly below the second banner in the Ajax stadium in Amsterdam, said that police non-intervention had been a ‘matter of weighing up the benefits and risks’. It was clear that the police considered order maintenance more important than tackling antisemitism.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society, pp. 287 - 314Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016