Ivan Kalmar

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Anthropology

This chapter continues to examine parallels between post-colonial and post-communist economies. In both, the local economy is dependent on the former colonial powers of the West. I discuss here the competition between internationally-connected ‘elites’ and ‘national capitalists’ who rely heavily on politicians and other local connections. The ‘nati...

This chapter fact-checks, by citing a wide variety of mostly quantitative data, common prejudices and misconceptions about Central Europe. They include the notion that democracy has failed there, that corruption and crime are much greater than in the West, or that emigration has created a demographic disaster.When comparing Central, Western, and Ea...

Racial capitalism requires that the subaltern periphery, providing cheap labour and new markets, be placed behind an imagined racial barrier, so that the full protection of the liberal state is not extended to it. This has applied also to the ‘Eastern enlargement’ of the EU. The East has had to compete with a much richer and more powerful West. Whe...

The response to neoliberal globalisation in Central Europe has led to populism arising from its brutal transition to capitalism. Kalmar uses examples from popular culture to sport to reject as racist the idea that Central Europe’s cultures are incompatible with liberal democracy.

Not all Central Europeans are racist. To recognize this is a moral necessity. But hate in Central Europe is rampant and dangerous. Its open expression has become more common than in much of the West, both among the general public and at the highest levels of political leadership. At the same time, hate there is not entirely different in form from t...

This chapter attempts to explain why orientalism once included both Jews and Muslims as targets, and then ceased to do so. From the beginning of Islam, Muslims were often viewed in the Christian West as akin religiously and culturally to Jews. During the colonial period, the prototypical Muslim was racialized as an “Arab,” a branch of the Semitic r...

The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union in recent years have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit the public racist, xenophobic and ultra-nationalist urges of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hingeS on di...

In this Introduction to a Special Issue on Islamophobia East/West, we provide a general review of the topic. Despite similarities in Islamophobia between East and West Germany, significant contrasts persist. While scholars have understood them as residues of communist rule, here we argue for the importance of what followed its downfall. First, we s...

Islamophobia in Eastern Germany and in East Central Europe has very similar characteristics to Islamophobia in Western Europe and the USA. The difference, of degree rather than kind, is in the success of Islamophobia as a political instrument. This is somewhat more pronounced in the East of Germany and of the European Union as a whole. It is a mist...

A common popular and scholarly opinion of Islamophobia in the socalled ‘Visegrád Four’ or ‘V4’ (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) sees it as caused by circumstances unique to Eastern Europe. Specifically to blame, it is alleged, is a distinctive local history of intolerance, especially antisemitism, and the fact that under socialism the...

With pressure on Twitter from governments and others intent on preventing the spread of racist, including anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, messages, it appears that some right-wing populist users have moved to Gab, where they are less likely to be censored. There appears to be a split between those who are willing to play by the new rules on Twitter,...

The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and c...

Making accessible academic debates on the history of Christian perceptions of Islam and on Islam and the West, this book is an important addition to the existing literature in the areas of Islamic studies, religious history and philosophy.

Kalmar traces a sort of dialectic of demonization, a kind of a noxious ping-pong game, in the cultural history of representing Jews and Muslims in the West. The image of both had been united in a joint construction with roots in medieval Christianity, and which in the nineteenth century was racialized with the label "Semites." This joint image of J...

Considers the peculiar Jewishness of the ever-fascinating Benjamin Disraeli, nineteenth-century British prime minister and novelist, self-identified as Anglican by religion and Jewish by race. Disraeli, dwelling on the antiquity and Oriental origins of his Jewish ancestors, comes to a conception of the Oriental very different from the image of an i...

Jewish Social Studies 7.3 (2001) 68-100 The Jerusalem Street synagogue is located in uptown Prague, away from the hustle and bustle of the touristy Jewish Town. Still, on Saturday mornings a few stray tourists find their way to the prayer room up the unlit stairs, making sure there is a quorum. This time there is a couple from England and a young I...

Cantonese and non-Cantonese students of the Guangzhou (Canton) Foreign Language Institute took part in a matched-guise experiment, expressing judgments about two samples of speech produced by the same person but presented as coming from two different speakers. In one sample the person spoke good Putonghua (Mandarin), in the other a Putonghua heavil...

Our attitude to computers is informed by what the author calls the Computer Literacy Credo: a pervasive belief that working with computers requires—and creates—a new type of human mind. But there is no empirical evidence for this belief. The Computer Literacy Credo is grounded not in fact, but in a millennarial hope typical of Western culture that...

Talmy Givón. On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press. 1979. Pp. xiv + 379. $24.00 (US). - Volume 25 Issue 1 - Ivan Kalmár

SchweizerA., Problems in the sociology of language in contemporary American linguistics. Leningrad, 1971. - Volume 4 Issue 1 - William J. Samarin, Ivan Kalmar

Theses (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto. Includes bibliographical references. Microfiche.