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.
Renowned Memory Studies scholar explores what it means to live with histories of colonial and Nazi violence, and questions of remembrance and responsibility.
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.
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.
How did the changing position of Jews in North American society, and shifting ways of talking about Judeophobia, shape the American wing of the transnational Zionist movement? Douglas Rossinow explains these issues by examining themes and events in US Zionism’s history after 1948.
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.
