R. Amy Elman – författare

Copublished with the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, this study asks if the European Union (EU) has the capacity or the will to counter antisemitism. The desire to counter antisemitism was a significant impetus toward the formation of the EU in the twentieth century and now prejudice against Jews threatens to subvert that goal in the twenty-first. The European Union, Antisemitism, and the Politics of Denial offers an overview of the circumstances that obliged European political institutions to take action against antisemitism and considers the effectiveness of these interventions by considering two seemingly dissimilar EU states, Austria and Sweden.  This examination of the European Union's strategy for countering antisemitism discloses escalating prejudice within the EU in the aftermath of 9/11. R. Amy Elman contends that Europe's political actors have responded to the challenge and provocation of antisemitism with only sporadic rhetoric and inconsistent commitment; this halfhearted strategy for countering anti-Semitism exacerbates skepticism toward EU institutions and their commitment to equality and justice. This exposition of the insipid character of the EU's response simultaneously suggests alternatives that might mitigate the subtle and potentially devastating creep of antisemitism in Europe. The author offers a new approach insofar as scholarly considerations of the EU's attempts to combat racism rarely focus on antisemitism, while scholarship on antisemitism rarely considers the political context of the European Union.

Just as feminist scholars began to develop an analysis of "the state" and women in Europe gained access to its political, legal and bureaucratic arenas, increased attention and reliance on European institutions have begun to take precedence over the more parochial concerns of the nation state. With the creation of the European super-state, feminist scholars will have to enhance their understanding of the European Union while activists will increasingly focus their efforts upon its institutions. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of EU policy implications for some of the most burning issues concerning women. This is the first book to transcend the emphasis on economics, the conventional basis for EU public policy discussions, thus providing a basis upon which one can begin to assess the politics of European integration from a feminist perspective.

Just as feminist scholars began to develop an analysis of "the state" and women in Europe gained access to its political, legal and bureaucratic arenas, increased attention and reliance on European institutions have begun to take precedence over the more parochial concerns of the nation state. With the creation of the European super-state, feminist scholars will have to enhance their understanding of the European Union while activists will increasingly focus their efforts upon its institutions. This volume provides a comprehensive examination of EU policy implications for some of the most burning issues concerning women. This is the first book to transcend the emphasis on economics, the conventional basis for EU public policy discussions, thus providing a basis upon which one can begin to assess the politics of European integration from a feminist perspective.

One would expect a welfare state such as Sweden to compare favorably with the United States regarding implementation of public policies and programs. Surprisingly, the author comes to quite different conclusions: in studying the treatment of battered, raped and sexually-harassed women in the two countries, she has found that, contrary to conventional expectation, the ability of the decentralized American state to innovate effectively has been consistently underestimated, whereas Sweden's ability to do the same has often been exaggerated.