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.
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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.
This conference brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines who are engaged in research on all groups of survivors of Nazi persecution, and who explore its aftermath in Europe and beyond. Papers and panels will consider issues of survival, rehabilitation, postwar trials and justice, and memory.
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 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.
This article analyses German responses to the typhus epidemic in German-occupied Poland during WWI and shows the close connection between health policies and antisemitic and nationalist ideological narratives and projects.
Jan Rybak identifies this racialization of disease as a key moment in the development of German antisemitism.
In this seminar Valentina Pisanty asks whether over the last twenty years the simultaneous growth of Holocaust memorialisation and racism are two independent historical threads, or whether there is a connection between them? She asks whether a society which wishes to oppose the current wave of xenophobia should examine this contradiction?
This lecture looks at popular suspicions that Jack the Ripper was a Jewish migrant and the reactions to these accusations among Jews. By looking at contemporary reportage in newspapers we will see how readers and writers used print media to draw attention to the boundaries between ‘Englishman’ and foreigner, fact and fiction, and the limits of religious certitude in the face of inexplicable evil.
Black History Month | Seminar for Scholars
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.
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
