Global academics converge in London ‘safe space’ to dissect post-Oct. 7 antisemitism
Four-day conference this week sees scholars, artists and activists from India to Finland come together to share findings about widespread shunning amid Gaza war
LONDON — Academics from around the world gathered in London this week for a landmark conference that promised to be a “safe space” to discuss antisemitism.
Delegates, who traveled from as far afield as India, Brazil and Finland, spent three days debating everything from antisemitism in the era of social media and AI to how the Muslim Brotherhood influences higher education at the Contemporary Antisemitism London 2025 conference in the city’s JW3 Jewish cultural center. The conference ran from March 29 to April 1.
Hosted by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of Haifa, the event was also open to activists, artists and the public.
Academics were invited to submit papers and subjects for panel discussions where they were promised “a serious and supportive community of scholarship” by organizers.
David Hirsh, academic director and CEO of the London Centre for Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, told The Times of Israel of the pressures academics in contemporary antisemitism studies have been experiencing — particularly since the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
“It’s really difficult to sustain a career in academia doing this work,” said Hirsh, who said the two centers are planning follow-up conferences for Haifa and Philadelphia in the next two years.
“People have not been able to publish, people were not able to do the things that you need to do in order to build a career in academia,” said Hirsh. Meanwhile “early career academics” are struggling to land gainful employment, which means some are “working hand to mouth,” he said.
Conference highlights included keynote lectures from acclaimed British historian Sir Simon Schama who spoke about Holocaust memory and the rise of contemporary antisemitism; Pamela Nadell, who served on the US Congress committee for combating antisemitism, and Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa who was threatened by the Polish government for writing about Polish collaboration during the Holocaust.
The current pressures are not restricted to those working in the field of contemporary antisemitism — or even academics — as a panel discussion entitled “The Experience of Being Boycotted” revealed.
Host Prof. Dibyesh Anand, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Westminster, described how he was “boycotted for not taking part in a boycott” at his institution. He described the BDS movement as an “attack on the humanity of Jews,” as well as on democracy and liberal values.
Panelists included South African writer Ivor Chipkin who told of how a conference he organized in Johannesburg last September was “vigorously attacked” and driven out of its original venue. He said the experience, which rendered him “persona non granta in all sorts of places,” was a “profound assault” on the country’s “deepest democratic principles.”
Joining him was Mercédesz Czimbalmos, a doctor of philosophy at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, who said her workplace and the University of Helsinki caved into a social media smear campaign about an antisemitism conference she was organizing. This led to the cancellation of a scheduled lecture by Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism and contemporary left antisemitism, who also joined the panel. Tabarovsky said that as a former Soviet citizen she was “deeply familiar” with this kind of silencing.
Dr. David Barak-Gorodetsky, director of the Comper Center, said there’s a “lack of research” into contemporary antisemitism.
“Many people are not encouraged to write about antisemitism — it’s not necessarily the best career path to be focused on antisemitism,” he said, adding that “it’s very difficult to talk about antisemitism within academia.”
The aim of the conference, he said, was to “enable” such conversations. “We want to be a safe space for that kind of research as many of the people that do that kind of research find it difficult to publish.”
It was also important to create a network so “people can share their experiences,” he said, particularly in the post-October 7 era. “Many of the scholars here have personal experience of being extremely surprised by the way their colleagues shunned them after October 8, by the way the discourse so quickly moved to an anti-Israel discourse.”
“They feel very isolated and very lonely in their home universities, so we also offered them a space to be together,” he said.
The shockwaves since October 7 have obviously not been restricted to academia, as opera singer Ilona Domnich described in the boycott session.
The British-Israeli singer, born to Russian and Ukrainian parents, said she has had no work for over a year as a result of the response to her social media activity since the fall of 2023. She said she is largely ignored, although she admitted that “a few honest people have said, ‘If you stop posting that stuff we will employ you.’”
“I’m not going to stop because this is what I believe in,” she said. “I believe that we as Jewish artists have the power to influence and to make a difference.”
Maya Amrami, a British-Israeli artist and a doctoral student at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute (CCI), no doubt agrees. During a presentation on antisemitism and the arts, she described how she transformed the hate directed towards her into creativity.
Amrami, whose “Hate Self Portraits” were on display at the conference alongside works by fellow Israeli artists Mina Kupfermann and Benzi Brofman, said: “Instead of solidarity or even basic compassion I was met with hostility and a wave of hateful myths about me and my identity, often expressed through comments.”
“The silence from acquaintances and institutions was equally striking. What began as an absence quickly gave way to targeted harassment, particularly online,” Amrami said.
When she published two posts about Hamas’s sexual assaults against Israelis on and after October 7, she received more than 7,000 “violent and hateful” comments and messages “flooded my digital space.”
“It was shocking, intrusive and profoundly traumatizing,” she said.
The Times of Israel Community.