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  • Obituary
  • Remco Ensel

Evelien Gans was a biographer, activist, and leading Dutch historian of the Shoah, twentiethcentury Jewry, and antisemitism, well known in the academic world and among the general public. She held the chair in modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam and was a long-term fellow at NIOD, the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. She was best known for three studies connected by the theme of antisemitism.

The polemical essay Gojse nijd & joods narcisme (Goyish Envy and Jewish Narcissism, 1994) launched Gans's career as a public voice,1 drawing on sociological, cultural, and historical observation to account for prevalent perceptions of Jews in Dutch society, and touching on most elements of Gans's understandings of postwar Jewish collective action and of antisemitism in the Netherlands. The essay was inspired by a number of notorious incidents, including the ban on the staging of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Garbage, the City and Death in 1987, and film director and columnist Theo van Gogh's taunting of Jewish novelist and filmmaker Léon de Winter for exploiting the Shoah for commercial gain. Gans perceived a complex interplay between public awareness of the Shoah, a growing resentment of this development, and the role of "second-generation" Jews. A group of the latter successfully campaigned to have Fassbinder's play banned—a result that Gans deplored. Her essay provoked considerable debate; criticism by Van Gogh prompting one commentator to observe that while "every age has its own imaginary Jew and its own antisemite … sexual obsessions have come to play an ever-increasing role. … Theo van Gogh is no different from medieval Christians or from the antisemitic French novelist [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline. An interesting case for psychoanalysts." Van Gogh's pornographic jokes and allusions to "greed" provoked Gans's use of the "a-word"—a "conversation stopper" for some. Her adversaries did not appreciate her application to them of the current German notion of Schuldabwehrantisemitismus (an innuendo holding Jews aggressors for reminding the world of the Shoah).

Gans introduced her own term, the "zwaan-kleef-aan-effect," after the Dutch title of the Brothers Grimm tale "The Golden Goose," in which characters get stuck to a goose of which they all want a piece; Gans thus mocked antisemites for the centrality of envy in their hostility. The response was predictable: hypersensitive and egocentric Jews cannot take a joke. Alternatively, others would trot out "freedom of expression" in self-defence, for Gans a lazy argument by those who preferred to evade responsibility for their assertions. The essay's analysis would mark Gans's subsequent approach to the contradictions of Jewish identity and self-representation. The discursive dilemma constituted the "Feuchtwanger effect," Gans's reference to the problematic reception of Lion Feuchtwanger's novel about the court Jew Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (1698–1738), Jud Süss. The effect, Gans explained, ensures that representations of Jews remain caught between age-old stereotyping and innuendo on the one hand, and idealization on the other. Gans addressed as well "the inner Jewish conflict, the disunity of Jews in a non-Jewish culture": one always remains "the hyphenated Jew."

Assimilation and identity were central to the second major work, her PhD dissertation. How did Dutch Jews self-identify after a period in which assimilation had been the main trajectory? What were the responses of socialism, Zionism, and especially socialist Zionism? What future could Dutch Jewry anticipate? In the introduction to the published version, the 900-page De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken (The Little Differences That Constitute Life," 1999),2 Evelien recalled her own long-standing left-wing esprit's clash with a nascent Jewish identity. She decided to recast her personal predicament into the dissertation's research plan ("the opinion that scholars should not write about themes that touch them personally never really appealed to me"). The dissertation presented [End Page 389] prewar views on assimilation, socialism, and nationalism through a collective biography of a group of "difficult, wayward Jewish men" and a few illustrious women. Before the 1930s it was assumed that "the Red Sea" (Communism) provided the route to the liberation of the Jewish proletariat, albeit occasionally combined with...

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