This panel will address the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the ongoing challenge of defining antisemitism. Coined in 1870 in an age of accelerating racialized mass politics, the term and its ideology metastasized in the mid-20th century as the motivators of Nazi genocide. In the 2020s, the problem of antisemitism has again intensified, with flashpoints of debate, violence, and confusion especially evident in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. How are we to understand the so-called new antisemitism, as well as its alleged counter-discourse of anti-antisemitism? How is the scourge of antisemitism to be distinguished from its political uses? How are the realities of antisemitic violence to be distinguished from potentially tendentious accusations of antisemitism?
The New Antisemitism and the Contemporary Middle East
Noura Erakat, Africana Studies, Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University
Amos Goldberg, Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at the University of California
Raef Zreik, associate professor of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College, Israel; and a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Van Leer Institute.