Debating the Zeitgeist and being Second Generation

This book gives a voice to 12 British-born children of refugees from Nazism - the ‘second generation’. In the current zeitgeist of Brexit and beyond, exacerbated by Covid-19, the authors want to ensure that nothing like Nazism and its deeply embedded antisemitism ever happens again. They are all committed to gender, social and sex-based equality, human rights, anti-racism and support for refugees today as the basis of social transformation. They explore how far being the child of a parent who had fled fascism affected their political leanings and made them into the passionate anti-racists and human rights campaigners that they are. They also consider how their heritage gave them a feeling of ‘being distinct’ and contributed to their political legacy. The book is highly topical, given the contemporary conversations about Britishness and/or Englishness post-Brexit, and the ways that migrants and refugees are now ‘othered’, marginalised or made to feel different. This is despite the fact that they or their children may have been born in Britain. The authors all empathise with the plight of current migrants and refugees, and most celebrate their own European Jewish heritage.

Miriam E. David is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Education at University College London Institute (UCL) of Education. She is renowned for her feminist scholarship. She is the daughter of a German Jewish refugee to England. Merilyn Moos, the daughter of anti-Nazis who fled Germany, became a lecturer and has published books about both the nature of Nazism and resistance to it, and on the second-generation children of refugees from Nazism.