The Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism holds seminars, workshops and conferences for scholars, and lectures, discussions and film screenings that are open to everyone.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s counterattack on Gaza, there is a rise in antisemitic attacks in Germany. German politicians have defined the protection of Israel as Germany’s ‘Staatsraison’ because of Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust. Focusing on the role and concept of the witnesses and witnessing to explain the rush to protect Jews together with varied Jewish responses, Irit Dekel’s talk brings a new angle on German debates concerning antisemitism.
Between 1947 and 1949, debates about Palestine within the United Nations pulled dozens of countries into the determination of the land’s fate – national interests and transnational sympathies shaped attitudes towards the partition of Palestine and the ensuing Arab-Israeli war. The war riveted the attention of the world – for reasons that still apply in our own day.
Historians have recognized the wide range of sexual fantasies underlying attitudes toward Jewish men and women that have developed over the centuries. However, those fantasies about Jewish women, enacted over centuries in horrific acts of sexual violence, most recently in Israel on 7 October 2024, have received far less attention. In this context, Susannah Heschel will argue that antisemitism requires reinterpretation as a culture of sadism.
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 founding principle of the Institute is that the study of antisemitism is vital to understanding racialization, racism and religious intolerance.
