Antisemitism and Racism – Comparisons and Contexts

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.

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.

When did national self-determination become the conventional means to rectify the grievances of oppressed peoples? This transformation took place in the latter years of the Great War and had a momentous impact on the global political ideas of a post-Ottoman ‘Middle East’, the nationalist Jew, and the nationalist Arab. It was, James Renton will argue, a victory for the political thought of the Second International and its most significant legacy.

Intersectionality is a methodological approach in the social sciences that investigates the multidimensionality of power relations. Why does this framework routinely exclude antisemitism?

Antisemitism often mixes a sexualized horror regarding Jews with a specific kind of sexual titillation. Drawing on both Critical Race Theory and Porn Studies, this paper examines what these disciplines can add to the study of antisemitism, and places antisemitism within the larger history of race, gender, and sexuality. 

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.

‘Antisemitism’ and ‘Racism’ are highly contested terms today, with little consensus on their definitions, and even less on how they may or not relate to each other. This talk will argue that there have been two distinct modes of anti-racism in Britain since the 1960s with their roots in the creation of the first Race Relations Act in 1965.