LONDON — A three-day conference on “Contemporary Antisemitism” drew 400 academics and others from 20 countries here March 29-April 1. It was the largest such event since the murderous pogrom by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The event featured plenary talks, panel presentations and an exhibit of related paintings.
After the conference the sponsors, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa in Israel, said the event was successful, noting its importance for “the safety and well-being of Jews.” Follow-up conferences will take place in Haifa in 2026 and Philadelphia in 2027.
“I woke up on Oct. 8 and didn’t know what to think — the atmosphere on campus was horrible,” said panelist Dikla Yogev from the University of Toronto.
“As my family in Israel was fearing for their lives,” Anat Beck, a professor in Cleveland, said, posters were going up around campus calling for a boycott of her classes. Her office was daubed with red paint because of her defense of Israel. Dibyesh Anand, deputy vice chancellor at University of Westminster here, described how he was “boycotted for not taking part in a boycott.”
“Today there’s an escalation of what has been simmering for some time,” conference co-organizer David Hirsh told the Militant.
“De-Judification” of Holocaust
In a keynote talk, historian and documentary filmmaker Simon Schama addressed the “de-Judification” of today’s education about the Holocaust. There is a “relentless fascination with the perpetrators as opposed to remembering” the Jews. This undermines the response to Jew-hatred today, which “has become toxic after Oct. 7.” He has produced a new documentary, “Simon Schama: The Road to Auschwitz,” and says that education should start from the more than 1,000 years of antisemitism.
Panelist Naomi Klos from New Orleans echoed the same theme. Anne Frank has become a “universal symbol of suffering,” she said, not Jewish. Frank, a German-born girl recorded her hiding from Nazi terror in Amsterdam in what became a famous diary. Klos drew attention to how Frank’s family, like thousands of other Jews, was denied visas to come to the U.S. Frank’s sentiment before her capture and death at Bergen-Belsen — “Jews will rise again” — is invariably overlooked, Klos said.
The roots of Jew-hatred
Other panels took up what’s behind the rise of Jew-hatred today. Batsheva Neuer from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem traced this back to the 1975 UN decision, spurred by Moscow and Arab regimes, to characterize “Zionism as racism.”
Philip Spenser, from Kingston University here, described how the 2001 UN conference in Durban, South Africa, against racism placed “Zionism is racism” center stage, laying the ground for the boycott, divest and sanctions efforts today. BDS calls for boycotting anything produced in Israel and anyone associated with the country.
Jeffrey Herf from the University of Maryland and writer Matthias Kuntzel discussed how Hamas’ assaults on Jews have their roots in what they call “Islamic antisemitism.” Both have written valuable books that take up Hamas’ continuity with its forerunners who collaborated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.
In his presentation, Jonathan Silberman, director of Pathfinder Books in London and a leader of the Communist League, said that Jew-hatred was integral to the imperialist epoch. “Because of their specific history, Jews are always a target at times of great capitalist crises,” he said.
He urged participants to read The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
He described how Communist League members find a “growing interest in the book as they campaign in working-class neighborhoods, at workplaces, union actions and through their election campaigns.” Many workers are open to recognizing that Jew-hatred is not a Middle East question, but a world question and a class question, he said.
“As the world order put together by the victors of World War II is torn apart in wars, trade and currency turmoil and capitalist rivalry, this becomes clearer,” he said.
Both forces on the left and right of capitalist politics claim that the British government’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised Britain would back a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, reflects the U.K. rulers’ pro-Jewish policy, Silberman said.
But the British rulers were only interested in advancing their own imperialist designs on the Middle East. Silberman described how London imposed aggressive restrictions on immigration of Jews to either the U.K. or to Palestine, before, during and after the Holocaust. It actively opposed the establishment of Israel in 1948 — politically and militarily.
“Defense of British capitalist interests, in which Jews are expendable, remains the course of the current Labour government,” Silberman said.
He contrasted this with the course of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, led by V.I. Lenin, which fought to win workers to see Jew-hatred — and the long record of pogroms against Jews by the czarist regime — as a deadly threat. The Bolsheviks’ approach was an essential part of leading workers and farmers to conquer power in 1917. Following their victory, “they put an end to the pogroms.”
“We can’t look to the U.K. government to fight Jew-hatred,” Silberman said. “But we can emulate the example set by the Bolsheviks and build a working-class party here to do the same thing.”
During the course of the conference 24 copies of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class were sold from a Pathfinder Books table that attracted broad interest.