The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is a centre of innovative research and teaching on antisemitism, racialization and religious intolerance. It contributes to knowledge and understanding, policy formation and public debate.
The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism was established in 2010 by Birkbeck, University of London and Pears Foundation.
We are the only university centre in the UK dedicated to the study of antisemitism and one of only two in Europe. The Institute is renowned internationally for its innovative research and teaching.
Our work is framed by our conviction that antisemitism is a distinctive form of racism. Through our research and public activity we establish points of connection between the problem of antisemitism and the challenge of racisms more broadly.
Our scholarship contributes to public debate on antisemitism, racialization and religious intolerance and we provide expertise and advice to a wide range of institutions in the UK, Europe and the wider world.
The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is both independent and inclusive.
The antisemitism unleashed during the Dreyfus Affair transformed the nature of Jewish identity, changing how Jews saw their place in the world and their relation to other Jews.
In this seminar, Adam Sutcliffe will chart the increasing emphasis across the West since the 1990s of ‘redemptive anti-antisemitism’ and consider its problematic role in contemporary politics.
This report shows how antisemitism is a stain on UK society but current responses to tackling the problem are not working. The report calls for a new approach to both thinking about and combating antisemitism; one that is based on building alliances between Jewish people and other racialised minorities and employs a 360-degree anti-racism.
The Eighth international, multidisciplinary conference is to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, and The Wiener Holocaust Library, London from 7-9 January 2026.
The conference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution. The call for papers is now live: click here to find out more.
In this talk, Omer Bartov will explore the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians.
Rebecca Clifford explores the individual and collective journeys of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust: from ‘lucky’ children who managed to live through genocide, to ‘child Holocaust survivors’ with a profound new understanding of their own pasts.
Matthew Bolton explores how UK anti-discrimination law has constructed Jewish identity as a mode of ‘ethnicity’ and encouraged the essentialisation or dehistoricisation of Jewish identity.
Our work shows how antisemitism has often been intertwined with anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-black and anti-Irish bigotries. Antisemitism and other racisms should not be considered in isolation and still less in competition.
Professor David Feldman, Director
