Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2024, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies
Azmi Bishara’s article “On Antisemitism and the Student Protests: When a sociologist abandons tools of rational inference and resorts to the unconscious” is a response to Eva Illouz’s article, published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, in which she answers the question of whether the university protests are antisemitic in the affirmative. Bishara asserts that his response to the article does not stem from any negative feelings towards this particular author, but, because her essay goes from mere incitement to an attempt to prove her allegation, it offers a fine opportunity to discuss the subject.
10.13140/RG.2.2.21364.73604, 2023
One of the most significant fallouts after the October 7 Hamas’ attack on Israel was the rise of antisemitism in the Diaspora. The situation on university campuses became political and militant, bringing a spotlight to a long-ignored issue.
2023
The situation in Canada has become dire in the last few weeks. Antisemitism is on the rise in Montreal, where two months after the attack, there have been over 300 hate crimes, and other similar events have been reported to the police. The community is afraid—afraid to show they are Jewish, afraid even to have their mezuzahs on their house. The police are constantly driving through predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. The Montreal Jewish community is in a panic for good reason, as firebombings and shootings of schools, synagogues, and community organizations have become everyday occurrences. Parents of Jewish children are afraid to send them to school; rabbis want armed police to protect Jewish buildings. Two Jewish schools were shot at, and one of the schools was targeted on two separate occasions. Bullying is prevalent among schoolchildren, workers face harassment from their colleagues, and university students are targeted based on their pro-Israel stance. Additionally, businesses owned by individuals of Jewish descent were subjected to acts of vandalism as well as online harassment and provocation. Police in Montreal say they have control, but only one person and only twenty people in Canada have been charged. The university administrators' tepid responses have forced students and faculty to go to the courts to seek protection and resolutions. 7 There have been several intense protests directed towards Israel, which a surge in antisemitic sentiment has accompanied. Almost every other weekend, the city is witnessing protests against Israel, calling Israel's actions "genocide" and chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free," to obliterate Israel's existence. One extremist imam called upon Allah to address the "Zionist aggressors" and eliminate the "enemies of the people of Gaza.
This Week in Palestine , 2024
“Semitic” and “antisemitic” are both fundamentally defective concepts, as is made clear by analyzing their biblical origins and their applications. As a label, “antisemitism” is bandied about so much these days, and even against the backdrop of the rampage in Gaza, it is still employed along with other propaganda and deceptive rumors to justify Israel’s genocidal campaign, to silence and intimidate any criticism of Israeli practices. I question the terminology altogether, and suggest replacing it. Its mythic underpinnings also raise questions about associated elements in the Zionist claim system, based on narratives adapted from regional antecedents that should be seen as traditions to be respected as such, not as literal facts. Though questioned as unhistorical by scholarship and discoveries, some narratives are aggressively employed in Zionist ideology, as they were in earlier colonial projects, to justify notions of entitlement to a land long inhabited by its indigenous people over many millennia.
2021
Although it seems that with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, antisemitism on university campuses seems to be a new phenomenon, it has been a problem on Canadian university campuses for over a century. I argue that McGill University went from a Philo-Semitic approach when Jews were just an exotic exception at the university to condoning and actively engaging in antisemitism in the post-First World War years. In 1849, the university hired Abraham De Sola as a professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages. However, by the First World War, the administration began looking to limit the number of Jewish students attending the university. From the late 1920s until the post-Second World War, McGill instituted a quota system, as did many North American universities. However, as much as one wants to believe that antisemitism ended with the dwindling of the quota system and the creation of the Department of Jewish Studies in 1968, instead came the rise of anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism, almost concurrently with the founding of the modern state of Israel. What students now continually face on campus is the fallout of this rise in anti-Zionism that began 75 years ago. Campus anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist attacks and harassment have only skyrocketed after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel that have left 1,200 Israelis dead, which included women, children, and 40 infants. They also abducted 240 civilians, with over 150 individuals still being held captive. Additionally, they caused numerous injuries and launched rocket attacks on Israeli cities. The resulting destruction and brutality surpassed what has been witnessed in conflicts within the Western world. The attack that occurred on October 7 can be likened to the severity of the 9/11 attack and is considered one of the most devastating acts of violence against Jews since the Holocaust. This manuscript examines McGill's long history of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, arguing that the administration allows this perpetual hatred on campus through the official policy of the quota system and now implicitly by not stopping student activism and harassment, claiming free speech as their excuse.
2020
This rhetorical frame analysis uses a combination of rhetorical theory and frame analysis to examine the rhetorical framing strategies of the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. This project investigates how both official and vernacular BDS activist-rhetors frame the movement and their goals, how they frame their responses to evolving rhetorical situations and challenges, how they tailor these frames for different audiences, and how resonant these frames are likely to be for targeted audiences. The results of this study suggest that BDS activist-rhetors typically frame the BDS movement as a nonviolent movement to achieve Palestinian rights and hold Israel accountable for an ongoing system of oppression, discrimination, and settler colonialism against Palestinians. This framing relies on the values of justice, freedom, equality, joint struggle, and individual and collective agency—values that strongly overlap with social and racial justice activist discourses that focus on intersectionality and justice for marginalized and oppressed peoples. Thus, these framing strategies likely resonate most strongly with audiences comprised of networks of social and racial justice activists, especially black American activists and other activists of color in the US, and to a significant degree with younger liberal and leftist Americans, including many young Jewish American racial justice activists. In response to the shifting rhetorical situations and challenges they face, including sensitivity to antisemitism, BDS activists regularly denounce antisemitism, emphasize Jewish support for the BDS movement, and draw comparisons to other familiar struggles for justice and liberation. BDS activists emphasize certain frames for particular audiences while maintaining a strong consistency in overall framing strategies between Palestinian official BDS discourse and the more vernacular student-generated discourse of US college activists. To address common critiques of the movement and expand support for BDS, BDS activist-rhetors could express more empathy with Jewish fears of antisemitism and clarify some BDS goals and demands, both of which could help wider audiences transcend the affective rhetorical obstacles and predictable uptakes to promote more productive discussions about Palestinian rights and help achieve a more just and sustainable resolution to this intractable conflict.
Israel Affairs, 2023
This article examines the close relationship between the consistent practice of lethal journalism (in this case reporting Palestinian war propaganda as news) among Western journalists, and the sudden appearance of the 'new antisemitism' at the turn of the last millennium. It looks closely at two case-the al-Durrah 'murder' (September 2000) and the Jenin 'massacre' (April 2002), and the manner in which this allegedly professional journalism opened the door to a host of postmodern antisemitic themes, from Holocaust inversion to progressive supersessionist projections, and the manner in which Jihadists bent on destroying the West have used through this unacknowledged hostility to Jewsit's merely criticism of Israel-as the West's soft underbelly.
2017
Antisemitism has been around since the existence of Jews. Recently, it has manifested itself worldwide in a contemporary form. New antisemitism refers to the use of double standards towards the State of Israel, demonizing its acts as well as questioning the country’s raison d’etre. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, present in many aspects of everyday life from trade to academia, is widely regarded as the most obvious type of new antisemitism. While there are several studies focusing on the emergence of new antisemitism in the Western world, there is a lack of academic research regarding its existence and forms of manifestation in Central and Eastern Europe. There are even fewer reports examining the phenomenon from a regional perspective based on a uniform set of criteria. This research fills this gap by examining the different forms of anti-Semitism in the Visegrad countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), with a particular focus on new anti-Sem...
2019
The unofficial number of Turkish Jews in Turkey is estimated at 10,000 Jews. The community itself reports a higher number which is unlikely to be correct. A slow but steady wave of emigration from Turkey has been part of Jewish community's life, thus the community is shrinking with each passing year. Most of the Jews have immigrated to Israel but some left to the U.S. and Canada. About 2,000 Turkish Jews have applied for Portuguese citizenship after Portugal’s government decided to grant nationality to descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Portugal and Spain in the 15th century.203 The nationalist and Islamist push of the AKP (Justice and Development Party), the party of President Erdoğan, worries the small Turkish Jewish community, mainly concentrated in Istanbul. With the rise of violence and antisemitism, many are considering leaving the country.204 The community faces antisemitic manifestations on an almost daily basis in the media, especially by nationalist and Islamist national and local newspapers such as Yeni Akit and Milli Gazete and especially when Israel is on the news. The consequences of the 2016 coup attempt caused fears amongst the Jewish community, and the deterioration of the Turkish economy strengthened the unstable feeling and push Jews out of Turkey. With a most powerful Erdoğan, and especially due to his rough assertions against Israel and his antisemitic approach, the position of the average Turkish Jew is complicated. It should be stressed that Erdoğan is definitely the main reason for the growing antisemitism in Turkey. Polls clearly confirm this assertion, and the legitimacy that anti-Israel sentiments receive as well as the support antisemitic journalists and columnists receive from the current government further reinforces it.
Middle East Critique, 2024
In this paper, I focus on the cultural and political work the IHRA definition of antisemitism carries out to explain why it has been adopted by hundreds of actors. I offer three key reasons to explain its effectiveness: First, it operates on an affective level, interpolating people who identify as Jews to also identify with Israel and Zionism; Second, it ties the right to Jewish difference with a Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty; Third, the definition provides a defence of a regime I call 'democratic apartheid'. The analysis reveals that the IHRA definition of antisemitism serves as a counterinsurgency tool aimed at shielding Israel from resistance to its oppressive form of racial governance and, following its recent war on Gaza, from accusations of genocidal violence.
Canadian Dimension, 2024
Esther Webman, ed., Antisemitism Worldwide 2019 and the Beginning of 2020 (Tel Aviv: Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, Tel Aviv University), 2020
2015
Center for Security, Race and Rights, 2023
Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity
Antisemitism in North America, 2016
Touro law review, 2005
Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, 2013
Bulletin de l'Observatoire international du religieux N°47, 2024
The Jewish Review of Books, 2024
Fathom Journal, 2023
Studies in Political Economy, 2010
Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, 2013
Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 31:2, 191-207, 2013
International Journal of Higher Education, 2021
Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: The Dynamics of Delegitimization, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld , 2019
Literature & Aesthetics , 2020
Journal of Visual Culture, 2021
Journal of Genocide Research, 2024
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Diderot, 2020
Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, 2020
Perceptions of the Holocaust in Europe and Muslim Communities, 2013
New Politics, 2023