My current research project examines what the sociologist Lawrence Bobo calls “antiminority populism” in light of classical and contemporary social theory. On the one hand, this project aims to clarify the social bases of right-wing populism, especially in the US context, but always with a comparative perspective in mind. My recently published work turns to critical and psychoanalytic theory to understand the political appeal of Donald Trump in the US and analyzes survey data to understand the social bases of rightwing populism in the United States at the state level (Wisconsin). Another paper (not yet published) distinguishes and tests three different theories that attribute Trump’s political success, respectively, to economic grievances among the white working class, alienation from political institutions, or what the political scientist Rogers Smith calls “ascriptive Americanism” in American political culture. On the other hand, my current research project extends an older researcher agenda on the sociology of antisemitism by investigating the relationship between antiminority populism and antisemitism. A recently published article applies the sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander’s civil sphere theory to explain the current resurgence of antisemitism in the US. Another paper (not yet published) reinterprets the doctrine of cultural pluralism developed by the American-Jewish social and political theorist Horace M. Kallen. Yet another paper in progress explores the relationship between contemporary populism and contemporary antisemitism. Drawing on scholarship by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, among others others, it seeks to elucidate the internal symbolic structure and binary logic of populism as a cultural formation. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, it conceptualizes historical and contemporary antisemitism as a form of proteophobia: not resentment of what is different (as in most forms of racism and xenophobia), but rather resentment of “something or someone that does not fit the structure of the orderly world, does not fall easily into any of the established categories.”
Following Bauman’s assertion that “the conceptual Jew … has been located astride virtually every barricade erected by the successive conflicts that tore apart the Western society at its various stages and in various dimensions,” the paper aims to show how this remains true in the current populist Zeitgeist.

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