Itay Lotem's Avatar

Itay Lotem

@ilotem.bsky.social

Looks like I’m a historian. Senior Lecturer at UWestminster: wrote a book about the memory of colonialism in Britain and France, and another one about the pitfalls of memory politics in post-WWII Europe. Dogs are better.

3,085 Followers  |  863 Following  |  395 Posts  |  Joined: 12.08.2024  |  2.0884

Latest posts by ilotem.bsky.social on Bluesky


Preview
Matt Goodwin’s Reform UK campaign manager said he ‘would never touch a Jewish woman’ - The Jewish Chronicle Adam Mitula, who is canvassing for the party in Gorton and Denton, also tweeted that the six million who died in the Holocaust only included ‘some Jews’

Has anyone asked Goodwin or Farage about this yet?

Astonishing it wasn't raised at Farage's press conference..

www.thejc.com/news/uk/matt...

17.02.2026 15:34 — 👍 277    🔁 135    💬 28    📌 12

Apropos fiese #Identitätspolitik: Ich könnte sehr gut auf so viele Elemente meiner Identität verzichten, bspw. #Hoyerswerda #RostockLichtenhagen #Mölln #Solingen #Halle & #Hanau... Kann ich aber nicht, denn #Rassismus ist kein therapeutisches Problem. #HanauIstUeberall #BlackHistoryMonth

20.02.2024 07:23 — 👍 107    🔁 18    💬 1    📌 0

Let's not let British voters off the hook. When May made some sense over social care, she got trashed. If Starmer had been honest about the need for income tax raises, he would have lost. The charlatans who brought you 10 years of decline - Johnson and Farage - did so with the backing of the public.

06.02.2026 12:14 — 👍 135    🔁 14    💬 11    📌 4

And I really just can’t stomach idiots spewing how being English is supposedly some kind of an ethnicity. No. You’re drunk. Go home.

05.02.2026 23:25 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I remember pretty clearly this moment in 2008 when, back in Birmingham, I had this odd late night chat over curry with a group of girls going on about how being English meant being truly diverse without “all this Braveheart bollocks,” and we’re all really mongrels and that’s the beauty of it.

05.02.2026 23:25 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

The latest iteration of the Britishness/Englishness debate just seems even more useless and egregious than before. But also - these ideas have always changed.

I grew up thinking “English” felt too home counties and “British” vague enough to be inclusive. But then around the mid-2000s it flipped.

05.02.2026 23:25 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Warum dürfen wir eigentlich keinen Klassenkampf machen aber die CDU schon?

02.02.2026 13:07 — 👍 3239    🔁 861    💬 138    📌 31

(And yes, I did love pulling that wire as a kid).

28.01.2026 17:26 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I think I got radicalised through seeing videos from the NYT cooking section and thinking “any country that calls that food and churns out smug videos that celebrate that type of horror as culture should take a good look in the mirror”. And it’s been a downward spiral ever since.

28.01.2026 17:23 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

I mean, it was really a “you still have that in the US? So cute. It reminds me of that time when people still smoked on public transport” kinda reaction (I do have to come clean on my not-very-wholesome joy in pointing out all 50 shades of wrongness in the US).

28.01.2026 17:20 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 2    📌 0

Hmmm? On buses? Last saw one there around 20 years ago?

28.01.2026 17:15 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Pull a wire though? I think I last saw that as a child in the 80s and back then my mum would pull me up for me to reach that wire? Where do you still have wires?

28.01.2026 14:44 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 2    📌 0

L’islamidation de Marseille. Ahem. Ugh. Le monde me fatigue.

23.01.2026 10:39 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Fascinating how tone deaf US political elites have been towards European anger.

From Newsom among Dems who failed to beat Trump berating Euro diplomacy, Schumer rattling out domestic guff to Graham and Bessent telling Euros to stop being hysterical. Just speeds up European rejection of America

21.01.2026 08:47 — 👍 369    🔁 106    💬 13    📌 7

True. And for all that mess you can’t even do the Flake innuendo to make it worthwhile (also it’s not as tasty as an actual Flake).

21.01.2026 17:26 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I think we got here partly because Americans of all shades and hues don’t do embarrassment 🤷🏻‍♂️

21.01.2026 14:14 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

So much more profound than the weather though!

21.01.2026 11:45 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

What does it say about me that I’m only really proud of being British when I get to partake in the aftermath of Brooklyn Beckham going nuclear on his parents or Coleen Rooney revealing Rebekah Vardy’s treacherous ways?

20.01.2026 21:20 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Also obviously “sending a special force to Greenland to take over the place without thinking about the day after” might not be “gaining Greenland”, but that’s another question.

15.01.2026 15:42 — 👍 6    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Are the two mutually exclusive though?

15.01.2026 15:38 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Officially there is no word count minimum (also to include “diverse outputs”), BUT it then kinda depends on what pieces we’re talking about. For anything that smells of “traditional” writing it’s probably best to think of 6000 words as a good minimum.

15.01.2026 14:10 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0
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La race : toujours un tabou ? - Iméra Itay Lotem, titulaire de la chaire EHESS/Iméra – Etudes transrégionales 2025-2026, organise une journée d'études sur l'état du débat public sur la race en France.

Ce mardi (13 janvier), j’organise une petite journée d’études à l’Iméra avec le but de faire un petit état des lieux sur les débats publics autour de la race en France. Si jamais vous étiez à Marseille, venez nous voir !

www.imera.fr/agenda/race-...

09.01.2026 11:02 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

And probably by now we should kinda realise that the mere use of the F word probably doesn’t actually do that much to dissuade people from actually supporting far right authoritarians today? And that terminology is not going to save us…?

08.01.2026 12:36 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I think the Americans aren’t going to understand the parish ward 😉 again, same issue. I think it’s sometimes just better to stick to original definitions sometimes and explain why we do that (we do it with more “consequential” words, so why not that?).

08.01.2026 11:42 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

You can’t really switch departmental to anything else, as it’s just so intertwined with an administrative system that doesn’t exist in the Anglo world. So translating it to something else changes the meaning. Best to just use a footnote at first.

08.01.2026 11:24 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

People who first saw me at the Copenhagen Memory Studies conference as the weird guy who needed to access the first plenary from behind the speaker with a big boot and crutches and crossed the stage painfully slowly and made everyone wait for the opening speech? That was the reason.

06.01.2026 11:43 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

The nurses at A&E were mostly bummed for me because it was the most boring story they have ever heard… there was a lot of “what, you didn’t even have anything to drink? That’s sad”.

06.01.2026 11:39 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

I walked out of ASDA and walked slowly, minding my own business. I slipped on a nakd bar wrapping (organic, vegan, sustainable), managed to rebalance myself and was proud of not hitting the ground, but… broken foot.

06.01.2026 11:38 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

THIS. Seeing how the UK debate about immigration gets into a dehumanising binary between “immigrants are dangerous” and “immigrants are economic fuel and will do the jobs you hate” is just depressing.

06.01.2026 11:10 — 👍 4    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

And to Paris, and definitely to Berlin (even though there for different reasons), and to Stockholm, and to Warsaw… I mean, it’s kinda everywhere?

03.01.2026 13:58 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

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