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 website of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, formerly the Pears Institute.
The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (formerly the Pears Institute), was established in 2010 by Birkbeck, University of London and Pears Foundation.
Our founding principle informs our vision and our work: that the study of antisemitism is vital to understanding other forms of racialization, racism and religious intolerance.
We are an internationally recognized centre for innovative research and teaching.
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.
Awarded the 2021 British Association for Jewish Studies Book Prize and 2020 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for History. The first monograph to analyse the Bolshevik response to antisemitism. Brendan McGeever also uncovers the explosive overlap between revolutionary politics and antisemitism, and the capacity for class to become racialized in a moment of crisis.
Leading scholars in a variety of fields trace the history and scholarly debates around a key concept. Each chapter presents an original argument, points to avenues for further research and provides a method of investigation.
This book charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism responds to two current and troubling developments. First, the rising threat from antisemitism in Europe and the United States. Second, the growing disconnect between opposition to antisemitism and advocacy for universal human rights and antiracist politics.
Jewish activists were a conspicuous presence in the U.S. New Left of the 1960s. This paper looks at one subset – Jews who built their lives in intimate connection to Black liberation and anti-colonial resistance movements. For these white Jews, support for these movements was both a necessary act of solidarity and a personal expression of the search for a political and cultural home.
How we memorialise and study the past is being questioned today in new ways. The global reverberations of the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020 and the growing demands to ‘decolonise’ knowledge from within and without higher education challenges anyone who seeks to engage with a contentious present and troubling past.
Drawing on historical materials and contemporary interviews, Shirli Gilbert will explore Jews’ diverging perspectives on victimhood: their own victimhood, that of others, and how the two may or may not intersect.
For the last four years there has been an intensified debate—at least in Europe and North America—about the ethics and politics of historical comparison. Michael Rothberg offers preliminary reflections on this spate of recent controversies while also situating them in relation to selected earlier disputes.
The founding principle of the Institute is that the study of antisemitism is vital to understanding racialization, racism and religious intolerance.
