AUTHORS: Dejan Jovanović, Dušan Radonjić
The Zionist idea of creating a state of all the Jews came to fruition only after World War II. That is why this idea failed to prevent the great suffering of the Holocaust. The Founding Fathers of Israel will build a new national identity on the basis of the collective memory of this political violence motivated by antisemitism in order to prevent it from ever happening again. The political metanarrative that the basic duty of Israel is to prevent a new Holocaust by all state mechanisms has been present among the leading Israeli statesmen from 1948 until today. Contemporary threats have been assessed, and are being assessed today, by constantly drawing historical parallels with previous attempts to collectively destroy the Jews. This Israeli metanarrative has been reproduced over the years through the politics of state institutions, but also through the personal experiences of members of the political and military elite. The State of Israel faced its first existential threat immediately upon its establishment. Since then, Israel has gone through six conventional wars with the Arabs, Islamist suicide terrorism, through threats of chemical weapons of mass destruction. The current Iranian nuclear threat is the third one it faces. Israel has successfully navigated through all the mentioned security threats owing to its state structure, which was built in accordance with the Israeli state-building idea. The political identity perceived in this way is under critical scrutiny by the New Left. Contemporary research shows that the antisemitism in the Middle East is rooted not only in politics but interpretations of religion as well. Based on that, the thesis is presented that resolving the Palestinian issue will not lead to the disappearance of antisemitism in the Middle East.
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Faculty of Science and Faculty of Philosophy at University of Novi Sad, in cooperation with Archive of Vojvodina will publish a collection of scientific papers entitled “SYNAGOGUES AND JEWISH HERITAGE IN SOUTHEAST EUROPE” in June. The collection will include 18 scientific and professional papers on the topic of Jewish cultural heritage, which will be presented at a scientific conference that will be held at the end of June in the premises of Archive of Vojvodina. In order to bring it closer to the scientific and professional public, but also to all those interested in the topic of papers in the collection, we publish summaries of all scientific papers on the website of Archives of Vojvodina, which will be in printed and electronic version of the collection of papers in June. The research and preparation of the collection with the Archive of Vojvodina was assisted by the Provincial Secretariat for Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Government of Vojvodina, with the project number 142-451-3211 / 2020-03. The editors-in-chief of the collection in front of the scientific institution and the publishing institution are Dr. Rastislav Stojsavljević and Dr. Nebojša Kuzmanović
