We set up the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) because we were afraid. Antisemitism had been progressively spreading into academic disciplines in the social and human sciences, and it was becoming more and more acceptable and normal. This was an antisemitism that angrily denied being antisemitic, which was carried by people who thought they opposed racism and who were convinced they were the good guys.
We were afraid because anyone who challenged this antisemitism was more and more likely to be denounced by their academic colleagues as a charlatan who misused their academic talent and perverted their disciplines in an effort to delegitimise criticism of Israel.
Hamas was founded to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. It hoped to destroy the peace process by murdering Israelis in buses and in restaurants in the name of Palestine. Hamas hoped to make Israelis believe that all Palestinians hated them and it hoped this would turn Israeli public opinion away from peace. More recently Hamas has encouraged Palestinians to murder Israelis randomly, using knives or cars, in the hope that Israelis would come to fear any Arab who they encountered. The founding document of Hamas made it clear that it regarded peace with Israel as a violation of the principles of Islam and it repeated Nazi-style antisemitism as though it was embraced by the single, authentic reading of Islam.
David Hirsh, CEO of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
Happily for Hamas, the peace process did collapse, in January 2001. In August 2001, at the World Conference against Racism, in Durban, there was a formidable campaign to reset thinking about Israel from a maker of peace to an entity that was incurably evil. It sought to take us back to the 1970s UN and Soviet era. A week after Durban was the 9/11 attack on the USA, which revitalised antisemitic Islamist politics for the 21st century.
On 7 October 2023, Hamas showed its hand. It broke into Israel and murdered everybody it could find; it perpetrated a campaign of sexual violence; and it kidnapped 250 people. It turned out that by that time, there were enough people around the world who were ready to embrace elements of the Hamas view of the world.
People in our universities glorified the day of Jew-killing as ‘resistance’; they claimed that Israel’s inherently genocidal nature was the real aggression and that the day of Jew-killing was just a small, understandable response; they blamed the victims; and they denied that there was violence against Israeli civilians.
Strangely, all four of these responses to 7 October could co-exist within an individual.
Those of us who thought that Hamas showing its hand would put people off had miscalculated. The 21st century rebirth of antisemitism gained momentum. University administrators, senior police officers, BBC decision-makers and even judges went along with the new antisemitic culture. This was not because they were bad people, or because they secretly hated Jews, but just because those kinds of powerful people are pretty good at reading the culture around them, and at reflecting it back in their decisions. That is how they get into those positions and it is how they stay in those positions.
Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University, testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
If you watched university presidents being quizzed by Congress, you’d see what I mean.
So the antisemitism that we worried about 20 years ago, after Durban, and as we watched fellow academics campaign to boycott our Israeli colleagues, and when Labour people didn’t seem bothered by Corbyn’s record of antisemitism; that antisemitism has been energised by 7 October.
Today it has become normal and legitimate to accuse Israel of deliberately murdering thousands of children, and to accuse Jews who refuse to disavow their relationship with Israel of complicity in genocide.
The centre organises an annual set-piece event towards the end of the year. The Robert Fine Memorial Lecture is named after our greatly missed colleague, mentor and friend.
Israel is not committing genocide, or anything like it, but a significant layer of people around the world have constructed Israeli genocide as fact, and people who don’t agree are treated as one would treat Nazi apologists and Holocaust deniers.
So, when we set up the London Centre, we were not wrong to be afraid. The situation for antisemitism scholars, for Holocaust educators and for academics confronting antisemitism in their own disciplines was serious, and getting worse.
But we are succeeding in organising and institutionalising resistance to antisemitic thinking in academia. We are reconstructing and growing our networks of scholarly community, we are running regular seminars and we are building for our second international conference on contemporary antisemitism, this coming March. Our book series, published by Routledge, allows scholars to publish excellent books on antisemitism. We are nurturing, and growing the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.
The centre organises an annual set-piece event towards the end of the year. The Robert Fine Memorial Lecture is named after our greatly missed colleague, mentor and friend. Last year, only two weeks after 7 October, Howard Jacobson was the first Robert Fine Memorial Lecturer. This year Karin Stögner, one of the clearest and most sophisticated scholars of antisemitism in the world, a professor from the University of Passau in Germany, will give the RFML, on feminism and antisemitism, intersectionality and ‘pinkwashing’.
And after being one of the most brilliant leaders of the journalistic effort to tell the truth about Corbyn, Hadley Freeman will be there too. I am so looking forward to having a conversation with her on stage, at the event on 8 December.
We will be announcing the winners of our two awards. There is a £1,000 book prize, and we hope that the shortlist will be announced in the next few days.
And there is the Pete Newbon Award for the greatest contribution to the public understanding of antisemitism, and the shortlist for that has just been announced by the independent judges:
Heidi Bachram, who built, and each time it was vandalised, re-built, a memorial for the victims of 7 October. She works tirelessly to keep the hostages in the public imagination. She is not Jewish and has been, for many years, a valued ally in the fight against antisemitism.
Alex Hearn, who is director of Labour Against Antisemitism and a knowledgeable social media and journalistic commentator. He has worked with counter-terrorism institutions and has spoken publicly on antisemitism in the Lords, the European Parliament and in the media.
Nicole Lampert, who, as a journalist and broadcaster, has taken a leading role in telling the story of 7 October and the plight of the hostages. She spent time with survivors and families, and she told the story of the victims of sexual violence, which many were unwilling to hear.
And Elica Le Bon, of Iranian descent, who has created a phenomenal social media presence. Her support for the women-led democratic uprising in Iran crashed into a western left and feminist culture that treated oppressors as victims and victims as stooges. Her fiery outrage melds with cool English-accented clarity, not least that the woman-haters and the Jew-haters share an ideology and a powerbase.
Antisemitism is frightening. But come join us on 8 December, have a drink with us, and see what we are achieving inside academia. We need your support. And we think the fight against antisemitism in wider society needs ours too, because to lose the universities would be a profound setback both for Jews and for democratic thought.
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