By Lianne Kolirin
Scholars from as far as India, Rwanda and China have been gathering in Oxford for a conference on the academic study of antisemitism. About 100 people flew in for the annual event hosted by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (Isgap).
It is the highest attendance for the two-week summit that has been running for a decade, titled Isgap’s summer institute for curriculum development in critical contemporary antisemitism studies. Its popularity comes as no surprise to its founder Dr Charles Asher Small.
“It’s been the best of times and the worst of times,” he told the Religion Media Centre, during the first week of the conference at St Catherine’s College. “There’s much more interest and I think finally after 25 years of banging on the doors of academia that maybe they’re beginning to budge a little.”
He is talking about the recognition of antisemitism within the world of higher education institutions around the world and the need for the study of critical contemporary antisemitism as a new academic discipline.
In an introduction to delegates, Dr Small writes: “In effect, we are beginning to break the taboo and the silence surrounding the issue. We must turn the tide of antisemitism that has been normalised, not only on the encampments of our universities but, more importantly, within our classrooms and curriculum.”
Dr Small works with some of the world’s leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge — where he is a research fellow. What he set out to do, when he first established the initiative, has taken on an increased urgency since the Hamas attack on 7 October, he believes.
While the number of attendees is higher than ever, “the opposition is greater and more outspoken”, he said. “For the first time we have physical security guards all over the place.”
The unprecedented attack by Hamas sent shockwaves through the global Jewish community, while triggering the war in Gaza. Since then, antisemitism has surged, while conflict on campuses continues to gather momentum.
Visitors attended in-depth lectures and debates from a range of high-profile speakers, among them Natan Sharanksy, a former Soviet dissident who went on to become an Israeli politician and to chair of Isgap; Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; and David Harris, former head of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), once described by Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president and Nobel laureate, as “the foreign minister of the Jewish people”.
Attendees are not just from the Jewish community, however, as organisers are adamant this is an issue for everyone. Also attending are Dr Darryl Aaron, senior pastor of the Providence Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Fatemah al-Harbi, a bestselling Bahraini author and peace activist who works as the Gulf Affairs director at Sharaka, a partnership set up in 2020 to shape a new Middle East, built on dialogue, understanding and friendship.
Overall, the goal of the programme is to educate professors and help them to create courses, Dr Small explained. “It isn’t a cookie-cutter approach and courses vary greatly,” he explained. “It’s a group of scholars from different disciplines — we provide materials on antisemitism from an interdisciplinary perspective and we help them to create their own course, using their expertise with our materials.”
Almost no such thing existed when the initiative was first set up, Dr Small said, but today there were almost 600 courses across more than 35 countries.
Isgap offers a fellowship training programme on critical antisemitism studies, discrimination and human rights at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge and hopes to replicate the model elsewhere.
The rise of antisemitism, he argues, is in part down to the “demonisation of Israel”. “This stuff is coming out of the university classroom,” he said, citing Isgap’s research into funds allegedly been funnelled into the US university system from Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Any scholar who identifies with Israel, any scholar that deals with issues of antisemitism has scars,” he said. “They don’t get promoted, they don’t get tenure, they get fired, they get harassed — it’s universal.”
The problem does not stop with staff, however, as a growing number of Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on campus, research shows. “These universities have been negligent, irresponsible, criminal, in abandoning their very sacred mission of providing young people who come to their institutions to learn to be citizens, and they have traded this sacred duty for two pieces of silver,” he said.
The hatred is growing throughout society but universities are key, he argued. “Academia was the tip of the spear,” he said. “The universities were at the forefront of the war against the Jewish people. By teaching that Jews are white supremacists, that Israel is an apartheid-occupying entity.”
It is a dangerous echo of history, he said. “The foundations of antisemitism and Nazism [in pre-war Germany] came out of the best universities. Jews were perceived as not white, as poisoning the white Aryan race — and had to be removed.
“In less than two generations, leading intellectuals teach that Jews are white. And it’s not that we’re white and ‘welcome to the club and we’re terribly sorry to what happened to you’ — we have become the embodiment of white supremacy, of apartheid, of colonialism, of occupation, and when the Hamas Iranian-backed murderers came to commit a genocide, we’ve inverted it in days to accuse Israel and the Jewish people of supporting genocide.”
He talks about the democratic centre coming under attack from all sides. “This is not a parochial problem for the Jewish community and for Israel — this is a form of hatred that knows no bounds,” he said.
“There’s a global economic crisis in the world, societies are fragmenting, some societies are failing, there’s a massive refugee crisis because of failing economic conditions in many parts of the world. The migration is causing dislocation in the West, in the United States and Europe. This is causing a backlash. The right and populism is growing,” he said. “We’ve seen this film before.”
Interestingly, Dr Small believes that the British and other European governments have taken the issue “quite seriously and developed policies and best practices”. In the United States, the situation is very different.
“It took the American political establishment, policy establishment and Jewish organisations completely off-guard and they don’t have the policies and understanding and best practices in place,” he said.
While optimism may be in short supply — “I don’t see an end to it, I wish I did” — Dr Small said the summer institute is “inspiring”. “We have a lot of colleagues from Muslim countries,” he said. “These are decent people who have respect for our difference, who want to live in peace with Israelis and other groups of people and they’re scholars.”
He added: “The good thing is that in every crisis there’s tremendous opportunity, so we have to take a pause and think. There are opportunities here. One of the amazing things that’s happened is that young Jews around the world are going to shul [synagogues], they’re putting on mezuzahs [parchment inscribed with Torah verses affixed to doorposts] and stars of David. They want to be proud and they want to be engaged. So there’s a shift.
“I think there’s a consciousness re-emerging in the Jewish people, connecting to our wisdom and our identity and that’s a beautiful thing. Tragic it took this to do it but it’s happening and that’s very positive.”
