In the Netherlands, the Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May 2003 marked a turning point in the judgment of the problematic interpretation of the Holocaust among children of Moroccan immigrants. Disturbances at seven locations in Amsterdam led to a lot of commotion and a heated public debate, not only in Amsterdam, but throughout the whole country. The disturbances ranged from breaking the silence, chanting antisemitic slogans to destroying wreaths. One of the incidents was picked up by the national press under the heading of ‘wreath football’. On some occasions, attendants of the commemorations brought in the conflict in the Middle East chanting slogans or distributing pamphlets. ‘New Antisemitism’, as it controversially came to be called, seemed to have found an outlet at Holocaust and war commemorations.

Resistance against Holocaust remembrance and education became a widespread phenomenon in Western Europe in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but the concept of secondary antisemitism had already been introduced in the late 1950s to describe the supposition that continued references to the Holocaust would obstruct a coming to terms with the past. Only by drawing a final line under the past, as historian Juliane Wetzel pointed out for Germany, ‘could there be a normalisation of the relation between the Jewish minority and the majority society’. The Jews, however, ‘force the Germans to continuously remember’ their shameful past. The concept of secondary antisemitism also allows us to recognise the feelings of guilt and repression and their projection onto Jews in postwar Dutch society. In the early 1980s, Theo van Gogh spoke out against the ‘4 May industry’ targeting, among others, Jewish writer Leon de Winter for thematising the war in his oeuvre and public persona. The same Van Gogh, however, was also concerned about antisemitism among ‘Muslims’ and ‘Moroccans’, especially since, in his view, leftist multiculturalists were turning a blind eye to the threat they posed to Western liberal society.

Evelien Gans introduced the concept of secondary antisemitism in Dutch historiography to refer to phrases, images and acts that express the feeling that Jews exploit, possibly amplify, their suffering. ‘Turning the Holocaust against the Jews’, as Gans put it, to exonerate bystanders, accomplices and perpetrators results in behaviour ranging from disregard and denial to verbal and physical vandalism.