Antisemitism Now

This pathbreaking project investigates the extent and forms of antisemitic hate speech on websites and social media platforms in France, Germany and the UK.

In this talk, Dr Becker will outline the project’s approach and its practical application: developing AI machine learning capable of recognizing explicit and implicit antisemitic hate speech.

In this seminar, Sergio DellaPergola will examine the perceptions and experiences of antisemitism following an inductive approach, turning the conventional analyses upside down to focus on the voices and perspectives of the object and victims of hostility and prejudice – the Jews.

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?

In this seminar, Nonna Mayer addresses the question whether “old” antisemitism in France has been replaced by the rise of new forms of prejudice emanating from the far left and from among Muslims, driven by hatred of Israel and Zionism.

Andrea Pető considers how different illiberal governments and political parties are hijacking the memory politics of the Holocaust. She addresses three possible ways of conceiving this turn: namely, distortion, revisionism, and paradigm change.

In this seminar, Marc Volovici and Rebecca Ruth Gould will consider the value and limits of definitions in confronting antisemitism and Islamophobia and the potential merits of alternative approaches.

The massacre and hostage taking carried out by Hamas on the 7th October 2023 has provoked different reactions. In this seminar, Camila Bassi and Yair Wallach examine responses to anti-Jewish violence.

Image: Barbara Rich.

Since the Hamas attacks of 7 October, some US campuses have been in the midst of controversy. In this seminar, Kenneth S. Stern asks what’s going on, and what should be done? 

In this talk, Magda Teter, the author of ‘Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism’, will explore the interplay between Christian theology and law that led to the creation of social hierarchies, legal exclusion of and a denial of equality to Jews and Black people. She will argue that this troubling legacy still haunts us today. 

Drawing on quantitative survey data gathered both before and after the October 7 attacks, Jonathan Boyd will discuss the position of Jews in Britain today, how, if at all, they have been impacted by the Hamas-Israel war, and what the future may hold. 

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. Irit Dekel’s talk brings a new angle on German debates concerning antisemitism.

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.

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.

In this seminar, Adam Sutcliffe will chart the increasing emphasis across the West since the 1990s of ‘redemptive anti-antisemitism’ and consider its problematic role in contemporary politics.

Exploring how Black radicals in Harlem began to articulate a new analysis of race and class which drew them, increasingly, to analyse anti-Jewish violence in revolutionary Russia, Brendan McGeever uncovers a multidirectional account of the pogrom; one that envelops both Black and Jewish histories.