Editor’s Introduction

the theme on which this issue focuses is one that unfortunately seems ever present and is becoming increasingly more virulent. If “never again” is the mantra that follows each epic and grotesque case of genocide, whether it is the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or Armenia, or elsewhere, the lesson that we have learned is not “never again” but rather “again and again.” Xenophobia does not go away!

In the United States and in Europe, particularly Poland and Hungary, in China and India, and almost everywhere else, there is a visible resurgence of hatred of “the other,” of those who are not “us.” In the United States we are witness to seemingly endless numbers of Black men killed by the police, an unjustifiable huge cohort of Black men withering away in prison, and a growing number of restrictions on voting rights aimed at disenfranchising Black voters, and all this despite the rise of Black Lives Matter. At the same time, we also are witness to continuing lethal attacks on synagogues, attesting to the ever-presence of antisemitism, despite “never again.”

In Poland and Hungary, but elsewhere as well, we are witnessing an increasing number of cases of vicious antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ acts, while around the world we are seeing growing acceptance of open aggression, repression, and physical and verbal racist attacks on Indigenous peoples, as well as on Muslims, Uyghurs, Kurds, Baha’i, Rohingya, and other religious and ethnic minorities.

The reasons for this wave of xenophobia are undoubtedly multiple and complex, and addressing them will be correspondingly complex. We realize that a single journal issue cannot possibly provide a master theory to explain what is happening, but we hope that by providing a set of case studies, through which our authors draw connections between the situation in their own home region and other, perhaps similar, cases, we can give our readers a prism through which to begin to draw their own conclusions.