Lars M Andersson to receive award from the Association of Holocaust Survivors

“I am extremely honoured and very proud that the Association of Holocaust Survivors has decided to award the January 27 Prize to me. If the survivors can talk about their experiences, year in, year out, after all they have been through, the least I can do is to take what opportunities I have to educate the public and to tell them what a plague antisemitism is. Moreover, the fight against antisemitism is not and must not be regarded as some ‘Jewish problem’ – it’s a problem for the majority society that affects Jews,” Andersson says in the press release.

Crucial contributions

Lars M Andersson is a senior lecturer at the Department of History and Director of the Forum for Jewish Studies at Uppsala University. He is also chair of the independent Institute for Holocaust Research in Sweden.

The press release announcing the award reads: “In his research, he has made crucial contributions to increasing understanding of the origins, development and dissemination of the poison of antisemitism, particularly in a Swedish context. His clear voice is also often heard in the discussions with antisemitic overtones that recur with a degree of regularity in the Swedish debate.”

The press release goes on to say:

“Lars M Andersson has played a major role in clarifying how the hatred of Jews differs from other racism and other prejudices against minority groups. He explains that the Jew can be used in all manner of ways in the antisemitic tradition. The Jew can be said to stand for all evil and the opposite of all that is regarded as good. In this way, the Jew can be both socialist and capitalist. The Jew can be said to lie behind the coronavirus pandemic while at the same time being responsible for spreading the ‘lie’ that there is a pandemic.”

Anders Berndt