Volume 5, Issue 1

Contemporary left-wing antizionist discourse reproduces with stunning fidelity some of the central tropes of Soviet antizionist propaganda, which demonized Israel and Zionism. The article explores the background of these tropes, looks at the biographies of the rightwing Soviet ideologues who developed them, and examines the mechanisms through which they reached the West. The article concludes that these tropes are inextricably linked to antisemitic conspiracy theory, containing seeds of anti-Jewish violence that we ignore at our own peril.

The antizionism that dominated the 2001 UN “World Conference against Racism” was neither a completely “new antisemitism” nor was it simply the latest manifestation of an ahistorical and eternal phenomenon. During the peace process in the late 80s and 90s, the intensifying focus on Israel as a key symbol of all that was bad in the world had been in remission, but at Durban, the 1970s “Zionism=Racism” culture returned. Many participants internalized and embraced the reconfigured antizionism. Others failed to speak out, even when they witnessed the recognizable older antisemitic tropes with which it came intertwined. The proposal to agree that Zionism was the key symbolic form of racism in the world after the fall of apartheid offered unity across different movements and milieus: post-colonialism, human rights and humanitarian law; the women’s movement, anti-racism, much of the global left and NGOs; even oppressive governments if they positioned themselves as antiimperialist or “Islamic.” Activists, diplomats, and UN personnel at Durban were not passively infected by this antizionist ideology, they chose actively to embrace it or to tolerate it. Based on elements of truth, exaggeration, and invention, and made plausible by half-visible fragments of older antisemitisms, Durban antizionism was attractive because it offered an emotionally potent way of imagining and communicating all that “good people” oppose and that they have difficulty facing rationally. It portrayed racism, and in the end oppression itself, with an Israeli face. Delegates brought this worldview home to where they lived and to the spheres in which they operated intellectually and politically. They worked to make Durban antizionism into the radical common sense of the twenty-first century. There were people at the conference and in anti-hegemonic spaces around the world who understood the dangers of a unity built around opposition to a universal Jewish threat, but they found themselves on the defensive against a self-confident, formidable, and ostensibly coherent ideology or worldview.

This article explains the development and face validity of the Generalised Antisemitism (GeAs) scale, which provides an up-to-date measure of antisemitism consistent with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (generally known as the IHRA Definition). The GeAs scale is comprised of two six-item subscales, each containing a balance of reverse-coded items: the Judeophobic Antisemitism (JpAs) subscale, which tests for endorsement of “classic” prejudicial attitudes towards Jews, and the Antizionist Antisemitism (AzAs) subscale, which tests for endorsement of related attitudes expressed in relation to Israel and its supporters. Both subscales reflect the current state of historical and social scholarship on antisemitism and have already been employed in large-scale survey research with funding from Campaign Against Antisemitism. Findings of a validation study presented elsewhere are summarized, and the scale’s use in future scholarly and stakeholder research is recommended.

In this article we present the results of a qualitative content analysis of online reader comments in British traditional mainstream media. Our aim was to determine the extent to which users respond with antisemitic attributions in the comments under newspaper articles that discuss George Soros. To this end, we selected three events in the year 2020 where reporting on Soros in The Guardian, The Independent, and the Daily Mail triggered discussion. For these events, we examined comments sections on the news websites and the media’s Facebook profiles for antisemitic attributions. With the linguistic form of the attributions as our focus, we used a pragmalinguistic toolbox to analyse implicit, contextual language use. The comments included classic stereotypes, conspiracy theories, victimperpetrator reversal and death wishes. The results reveal the relevance of using an investigative design capable of capturing implicit language use in the analysis of hate speech.

This article explores the Jewish perception of antisemitism in Windsor-Essex by surveying forty-nine Jews living in the area. Those surveyed were asked about their level of concern with the state of antisemitism, possible causes, and how Windsor-Essex compares to other Canadian regions. The researcher found that respondents are moderately concerned with the state of antisemitism. They also identified several dissimilar causes for antisemitism. A majority believe there are similar levels of antisemitism found across Canada. The researcher hypothesizes that demographic factors will impact the respondents’ perception of antisemitism. After a comparative analysis, the researcher finds that there is no such discernable relationship. The researcher believes that future studies need to incorporate factors that go beyond the basic ones to better understand how antisemitism is perceived by Jewish Canadian communities.

The rapid rise in the use of social media and in the dissemination of social media posts during the new millennium has blurred the line between professional publications and communications with the general public. The destructive effects of all forms of online hate speech, including antisemitism, have meanwhile become increasingly apparent. Yet the American Association of University Professors reacted in 2015 by declaring that all faculty statements on social media, including those within a faculty member’s areas of teaching and research, are protected from university evaluation by academic freedom. This reverses a long-standing principle that all statements in a faculty member’s areas of professional responsibility are part of his or her professional profile and subject to professional consequences and potential sanctions. Instead, racist or antisemitic social media posts are now to be deemed immune from consequences for job applicants and candidates for tenure. This development has the potential to undermine public confidence in academic freedom and in higher education’s overall ability to exercise professional judgment. A 2021 proposal went still further, arguing that a faculty member should be able to declare a specific body of work officially off limits, protected from any formal review.

While there are increasing moves by mainstream social media platforms to control far-right activity as well as the prevalence of hate speech such as antisemitism, such regulation has in turn fueled the rise of platforms dedicated to being “bastions” of free speech where regardless of its content, discourse seems completely uncontrolled-one such platform is Gab. This paper seeks to chart the rise of Gab as a location for unrestrained antisemitic conspiracy myths and to demonstrate that there is a spillover of such online discourse into real-world criminal action. In order to do so, the paper’s aims are fourfold: to overview current research on online antisemitism and the role of Gab in it; it will look at cases where online hate was taken offline; it will examine what makes the role of Gab unique in this regard and how conspiracy theories find an open house there; and it will examine the Gab Dissenter, a browser extension that facilitates the circumvention of normal moderation. Ultimately, the paper strives to answer whether Gab serves as an enabler for offline antisemitic violence by allowing and even inviting conspiracy theories on its platform.

To recognize the depths of American antisemitism, this article contends we must dispense with the conventional ways we think about it. This requires a rejection of an “American exceptionalism” in which antisemitism happens elsewhere-in other states, political parties, professions, campuses, and communities. Antisemitism so understood occurs only to the unfortunate, in places we don’t frequent, and at the outer edges of the political spectrum. By contrast, I suggest American antisemitism is so pervasive-so utterly mainstream- that it hides in plain sight.

This article introduces the pilot project “Decoding Antisemitism: An AI-driven Study on Hate Speech and Imagery Online.” The aim of the project is to analyse the frequency, content and linguistic structure of online antisemitism, with the eventual aim of developing AI machine learning that is capable of recognizing explicit and implicit forms of antisemitic hate speech. The initial focus is on comments found on the websites and social media platforms of major media outlets in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The article outlines the project’s multi-step methodological design, which seeks to capture the complexity, diversity and continual development of antisemitism online. The first step is qualitative content analysis. Rather than relying on surveys, here a pre-existing “real-world” data set-namely, threads of online comments responding to media stories judged to be potential triggers for antisemitic speech-is collected and analysed for antisemitic content and linguistic structure by expert coders. The second step is supervised machine learning. Here, models are trained to mimic the decisions of human coders and learn how antisemitic stereotypes are currently reproduced in different web milieus-including implicit forms. The third step is large-scale quantitative analyses in which frequencies and combinations of words and phrases are measured, allowing the exploration of trends from millions of pieces of data.