‘The war’ and the Shoah: they remain subjects of endless discussion – reflected in the ‘story’ about them –, historiography, academic and public debate. The notion mooted in 2010 that it might be time to ‘pension off’ the war (‘De oorlog met pensioen?’) turned out to be premature, or a rhetorical question. Memory and commemoration are in perpetual flux. The same turbulence applies to the position of Jews and Judaism, including all the variant forms of antisemitism. And last but not least, the cauldron of views and actions relating to the establishment, the functioning and the continued existence of the state of Israel is constantly being stirred and boiling over. And this is only to look at the way all these issues surface, develop and become enmeshed in the Netherlands. Still, the rest of the world is never far away. This book has also dwelt at length on two main ethnic minorities in the Netherlands: Dutch people of Moroccan and Turkish descent. The international dimension is further enhanced by the multi-faceted involvement of many Jewish and non-Jewish people with Israel, and by the role of the internet.

At the heart of this book is the proposition that the Shoah and Israel have come to function as the two most important new – i.e. postwar – points of fixation for expressions of antisemitism. Both, in their very different ways, continue to work against the Jews. At the same time, they provided the signposts for twentieth-century Jewish history and identity. This curious mirror image is not in any sense, of course, exclusive to the Netherlands. Nonetheless, the Dutch – so often mythologised as a tolerant, broadminded people – occupy a central position here, viewed from a multicultural perspective. The following pages will suggest certain connections between themes listed in earlier chapters and a number of new elements and recent developments.

The leitmotif is the tension that exists between universalism and particularism. The British sociologist Robert Fine (b. 1945) has said that today's crisis-ridden universalism may make Jews more frequent targets of aggression. Universalism has always had two faces, he writes: