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.
Latest Update: Welcome to the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism website. Browse our podcasts, research and events.
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.
In this seminar, Nonna Mayer addresses the question whether “old” antisemitism in France has been replaced by the rise of new forms of prejudice emanating from the far left and from among Muslims, driven by hatred of Israel and Zionism.
In the global present, antisemitism thrives on conspiracy theories, yet to date scholars have paid little attention to their content. This project will provide a pathbreaking inventory and analysis of global antisemitic conspiracy theories and their claims to comprehend power relations both locally and globally. It will shed a unique light on the contemporary threat to democratic life and its connection to antisemitism.
In this lecture, Professor Subotic will explore the ways in which the memory of the Holocaust in post-communist Eastern Europe has been used to represent other types of historical crimes. Specifically, she will examine the extent to which this instrumentalization of Holocaust memory has fed the rise of nationalized, particularized, and populist remembrance practices, and has helped produce a crisis in Holocaust memory globally.
Throughout the twentieth century, Britain used its network of imperial holdings as sites of detention, not only for migrants and refugees, but for civilians and political insurgents. One of the largest cohorts to be interned across the Empire were European Jews. This research project seeks to uncover the neglected histories of these detention sites and explores interconnections with the legacies of empire and decolonisation.
This interdisciplinary research project brings together a team of historians and literary scholars working in English and Yiddish, and two archives, the Jewish Museum London and the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive to explore, through new sources and approaches, the multi-relational character of Jewish immigrant culture in 19th and 20th century London.
In James Baldwin’s protracted and ambivalent engagement with Holocaust history and memory in the 1960s, Baldwin coded moral orientations toward the Holocaust to political orientations toward Black oppression and revolt.
In the upheavals, wars, and revolutions that shaped Central and Eastern Europe in the long nineteenth century, Jews found themselves both as victims of violence and as active participants. Dr Jan Rybak analyses the recurring phenomenon of Jewish armed self-organisation and self-defence. Jews participated in the violent transformation of the region, fighting simultaneously for their own protection and their emancipation and to reshape the societies in which they lived.
The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is a respected source of independent advice and comment on antisemitism, contributing to policy formation and public debate.