Antisemitism in post-Communist Hungary, with András Kovács

Anti-Semitism appeared in Hungary in 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism and the introduction of free speech and a free press. The phenomenon caused great concern and heated debate. It was feared that the inevitable economic and social difficulties of the transition would render people receptive to anti-Semitic ideologies. Several research projects have been carried out in the following decades in order to measure the proportion of anti-Semites in Hungary, to identify the most common anti-Semitic views and the typical characteristics of people who were inclined to be anti-Semitic. A further important aim was to determine the form in which anti-Semitism appears in the political arena and whether or not anti-Semitic prejudice was likely to turn into a political ideology. The lecture presents the most important survey data from the last decade and seeks to analyze the direction and dynamics of changes observed in recent years.

András Kovács, sociologist, professor at the Nationalism Studies Program and the academic director of the Jewish Studies at the Central European University in Budapest/Vienna. In the last decades he served as visiting professor and researcher at several universities and research institutes, among them as Humboldt-fellow at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the TU Berlin (2004, 2008, 2013), at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for Jewish Studies in Potsdam, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and as Ustinov-Professor of the City of Vienna at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, Austria (2009). He lead several large scale research projects on Jews and on antisemitism in post-Holocaust Hungary (Jews and Jewishness in contemporary Hungary, 1999-2000; 2016-2018; Jews and Politics under Communism in East-Central Europe, 2010-2016; Longitudinal analysis of antisemitic prejudices in Hungary, 1995-2018), and collaborated as principal investigator in others, like Identity al la carte: Jewish identities in five European countries (2008-2009); Discrimination and Hate Crime against Jews in selected EU member States” (2012/2013 and 2017/18), promoted by the Fundamental Rights Agency (EU). Selected publications
- The Stranger at Hand. Antisemitic Prejudices in post-Communist Hungary. Brill, Leiden, Boston 2011.
- Antisemitic Prejudice and Political Antisemitism in Present-Day Hungary. In: Journal for Study of Antisemitism, Volume 4, Issue #2, 2012,
- The Post-Communist Extreme Right: the Jobbik party in Hungary. In: Ruth
Wodak, Brigitte Mral, Majid Khosravinik (Eds.), Right-Wing Populism in Europe. Politics and Discourse, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney 2013
- The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later (Ed. with R. L. Braham) Central European University Press, 2016.
- Communism’s Jewish Question. Jewish issues in Communist archives (Ed.). De Gruyter, Oldenbourg, 2017.
- Religiosity, Religious Practice, and Antisemitism in Present-Day Hungary (with ldiko Barna), Religions, 2019-09, DOI: 10.3390/rel10090527