To fight antisemitism, we need the power of academic research. We also need to translate this into real-life interventions. This paper explores three examples from the National Holocaust Museum:

I.  A focus on the Holocaust in Europe can render the topic distant and foreign, and create a view of Jews as “white”. I explore how the museum’s programmes use new scholarship on a 2000-year history of antisemitism, including the ethnic cleansing of Jews from MENA countries, to demonstrate the reach, depth and topicality of the problem.

II. Using cutting-edge quatitative methods, with a team of political scientists, we have established that 52% of the UK population believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Most use the world Jewish conspiracy to imagine an invisible global power that secretly runs the world.  Demonstrating that conspiracy theory thinking is now a majority belief helps mobilise a broad colation in defence of democracy.

III. By comparing performative anti-Jewish violence across time, we have developed a hypothesis that the pogrom plays a key mobilsing role in antisemitism: creating a carnivalesque licence to liberate oneself from ethical norms. The resulting feeling maps onto the utopian fantasy of “a world without Jews” as a liberated world. We are now developing psychological experiments to test this hypothesis.

This paper explains the key pillars of the pedagogy that we have developed to combat contemporary anti-Jewish racism through the National Holocaust Museum’s Racism Response Unit:

*       We begin with the Holocaust. This primes the audience intellectually: the Holocaust was partly a result of over 2000 years of anti-Jewish thought with roots in the Catholic Church. It also primes the audience emotionally.

*       Through survivor testimony, we highlight that antisemitism did not end with the Holocaust. The testimony we use in our training sessions relates the survivors’ experiences of antisemitism after 1945, and up to the present.

*       We explore links between the anti-Jewish tropes of the pre-Nazi era, the Nazi era, and the social media age. This ensures that, while we do not start with the current conflict in Israel-Palestine, we sensitise participants to the ways in which old tropes resurface in academic and public discourse about Israel today.

*       We explain how our training draws directly on cutting-edge academic research, especially on conspiracy theory thinking.

*       We make our sessions highly interactive. Half of the training time is given to participants’ discussions of various real-life scenarios, tailored to their own sector. People will remember and act on what they themselves have said, not what we told them.

The long durée history of British political extremism and xenophobia has never been more relevant, contested, and politicised (weaponised) than it is today. Over the past twenty-five years, my approach to research-led teaching on British fascism, political extremism and antisemitism has inevitably adapted to shifts in the historiography, the availability of research materials and archives, the memory boom and new research methods. My Level 3 Special Subject on British Fascism has further benefitted from the proximity and continued growth of the Special Collections on British political extremism in the University of Sheffield Library. As importantly, what I teach and the way I teach it has been informed by the fluctuating and now glaring threat of the radical Right, the resurgence of antisemitism in Britain and globally, as well as institutional opportunities and constraints around archival accessions.

This paper will offer some reflections on pedagogy, my positionality and the pressures (intellectual and emotional) in presenting and framing extremist materials to students and to the public. There are parallel concerns here with delivering Holocaust education, especially at university level and on campuses that have become hostile environments for Jewish students and staff. Charting shifts over time in course content can provide more than a record of the evolving scholarship of the topic. My experience of teaching mid-twentieth century British political extremism and responses to fascism suggest a series of reflections and refractions of contemporary antisemitism.

There has been a growing emphasis on teacher education for inclusion as a field of academic study in the last 20 years (e.g. Florian 2021). As with the wider field, teacher education for inclusion has increasingly moved on from a narrow focus on special educational needs to consider culture, language, sexuality, and socioeconomic diversity. However, there is tension between its aim to effectively engage with difference and include all children, and the international rise in antisemitism in K-12, particularly post 7/10. As some argue (e.g. Herf 2023), the academy’s focus on discourse and deconstruction, following Said’s (1978) call to foreground configurations of power in the study of ideas, risks considering complex issues from Manichean binary perspectives.  As Memmi (1971) seminally noted, the impossibility of fitting Jews into the colonizer vs colonized binary opens a space for fetishistic conspiratorial fantasies of Jews as a negativity. Concomitantly, a review of the literature on teacher education for inclusion on SCOPUS shows no attention internationally to a) antisemitism as  curriculum content, or b) how to conceptualize antisemitism and Jewish experience.  This paper will explore ideas and challenges with including content on antisemitism in teacher education for inclusion, particularly focusing on the UK.