Contemporary Antisemitism, London 2025, call for papers
This call for panel proposals and abstracts is issued jointly by the London Centre of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism, at the University of Haifa.
What is the significance of contemporary anti-Zionism, how it is shaped into an ideology or a worldview, and its complex and contested connections to various forms of historical antisemitism?
Why do nationalist movements in post-Communist Europe tend to incorporate histories of Holocaust collaboration into their identity narratives?
Does contemporary populism’s re-imagining of a cosmopolitan, globalist, liberal “enemy of the people” echo twentieth century political antisemitism?
Did the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic make new social groups susceptible to antisemitic conspiracy fantasies?
How should we understand the simultaneous tendencies of depicting Jews as both polluters of the “white race” and as the vanguard of colonial “whiteness”?
What is significant about how official Russian discourse targets Ukraine as an inauthentic, Nazi, Zionist-led, creation of anti-Russian imperialism?
The antisemitic violence of 7 October was widely met with denial, trivialisation, normalization and victim-blaming, and exaggerated discourse about Israeli evil has increasingly been treated as legitimate in mainstream spaces.
Contemporary Antisemitism London 2025 will consolidate a community of antisemitism scholarship within which academics will be able to work, discuss and engage. We aim to sustain this community in ongoing networks and in annual conferences.
This call for papers and panels is issued jointly by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (LCSCA) and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa.
We aim to bring together the global community of antisemitism scholarship, people who study antisemitism but also people who engage with antisemitism in their scholarship:
- We will reunite and grow the community of scholars that met at LCSCA’s inaugural conference in September 2022, central to which is also the European Sociological Association’s Research Network 31 on Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism, which will have its own mid-term conference at the University of Passau in September 2025.
- The Comper Center is an equal partner in this conference and we hope that many scholars who work in Israel will join us in London. The following year we hope to host, collaboratively, Contemporary Antisemitism Haifa 2026.
- We warmly invite our colleagues from North America to join us in London to talk things through in a haven from the challenging environment on their campuses and to have an open, frank, and academic discussion about campus antisemitism and other issues affecting American and Canadian scholars.
- The situation is similar, too, in Western, and Eastern and Central Europe, Australia, South Africa, South America and elsewhere, even if the forms of antisemitism are distinct in different places. Please see if you can find a way to be with us in the Spring of 2025.
Please submit papers on any aspect of contemporary antisemitism, including:
- antizionism and its relationship to other, and older, anti-Jewish ideologies and movements
- the significance of the contested definitions of antisemitism
- the enduring impact of 20th century totalitarian antisemitism
- Muslim and Christian antisemitism and antizionism
- antisemitism and antizionism in the Arabic speaking sphere
- antisemitism and its relationship to democracy and to anti-democratic thought
- Holocaust and genocide studies, and the antisemitic challenges they face
- antisemitism in Israel Studies and Jewish Studies, and Jewish antizionism
- antisemitism, racism and anti-racism
- antisemitism’s relationship to gender, LGBTQ+ and green scholarship and activism
- antisemitism, populism and conspiracy fantasy
We are especially open to:
- papers that report and analyze quantitative work on antisemitism and that draw upon big data, machine learning and AI research methods
- papers on antisemitism education and Holocaust education
- papers from postgraduate students and early career academics
- contributions from historians that contextualize the current situation
The conference will leave a legacy:
- We would like to discuss how we might further institutionalize an international network of antisemitism scholarship, both a network of institutions and a network of scholars.
- We would like to discuss concrete proposals for bringing together and funding academic research on antisemitism.
Application information
Write a 300-word abstract for a paper or a panel, and submit it via the conference app, here.
Early bird deadlines:
1 October 2024 for abstracts and panel proposals
1 December 2024 for registration, £140/£70
Final chance deadlines:
2 January 2025 for abstracts
1 March 2025 for registration, £210/£105
Concessionary registrations are available for students and unwaged people; and for people on constrained budgets who are paying for travel and accommodation without institutional support.
There is a limited access fund to help people who would like to participate in the conference but who need financial help to do so; this may include people with childcare responsibilities and people with disabilities.
This is an academic conference, run according to standard academic norms and practices. Non-academics are welcome to submit abstracts and to participate.
There will be opportunities to publish papers in a LCSCA/Routledge book, a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and in the University of Haifa journal, Watersheds.
Details of the precise venues in London will follow.
