HO, BIANCA; DOYLE, KIERAN

From the document: "Pro-Palestine demonstrations involving students in the United States have nearly tripled from 1 to 26 April compared with all of March, ACLED [ [Armed Conflict Location and Event Data]] data show [...]. New York has been one of the main student protest battlegrounds since the Israel-Palestine conflict flared up in and around Gaza last October, and the arrest of more than 100 students at Columbia University in New York around 18 April heralded a new wave of campus demonstrations."

ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION & EVENT DATA PROJECT. 2 MAY, 2024. 5p.

By Linda Maizels

Following the October 7 Hamas attack, some parts of the left not only blamed Israel for the aggression, but also expressed hostility toward Jewish supporters of Israel because of their assumed privilege.

• This type of animosity is not new. It began during the 1960s and 70s, especially after the Jewish State’s victories over a coalition of Arab nations in the 1967 War, and it can be linked to the ideology of some parts of the New Left, which included recurring attempts to link Israel with European colonialism and Jews with whiteness and privilege.

• Analysts of the period responded to these tactics by describing a “new antisemitism” that illustrated the parallels between hostility towards Israel’s legitimacy as a state and hostility toward the authenticity of the American Jewish community as a minority ethnic group.

• In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of the political left trended toward promoting multiculturalism and diversity. This tolerance was not all-inclusive, however, and the animosity toward Israel demonstrated by some factions within the left was coupled with hostility toward Jews, who were seen not only as white and privileged, but also as a particularly malicious example of some of the worst elements of whiteness.

• Against the backdrop of the second intifada and the rise in violence that characterized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the opening years of the 21st century, vocal factions of the left on American college and university campuses labeled Israel a racist and illegitimate state founded through settler colonialism and fueled by apartheid.

• At the same time, Jews were denigrated both for supporting Israel and for their supposed white privilege.

• Critics claimed that these attacks on Israel, Zionism, and Jews often crossed the line into antisemitism. They also pointed out a seeming double standard in which hostile rhetoric toward Jews – whether it was connected to Israel or to whiteness – was framed as protected political speech, while hateful language towards other minority identity groups was more likely to be condemned and silenced.

• The conclusion of this analysis is that some elements of the left have deep, serious, and systemic issues, not only with Israel but also with Jews.

  Washington, DC: George Washington University Program on Extremism. 2024, 23pg

By: Dik van Arkel

Antisemitism is an exceptional historical phenomenon. Its history goes back at least 2000 years and has manifested itself in many countries and in a wide range of societies. However, it is not a universal phenomenon. Many countries have no tradition of anti-Semitism and even in those where anti-Semitism periodically raises its head, there have been long periods where it appears to have lain dormant. But it has never altogether disappeared, and all the large-scale social changes of the past two millennia have given it extra impetus. This definitive study tackles the complex roots and manifestations of anti-Semitism over the centuries, tracing the rise of anti-Jewish stereotypes and the circumstances in which racial prejudice may have tragic consequences. This book will quickly become a classic text for students and researchers in this persistent and worldwide prejudice.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 592p.

By The Anti-Defamation League, Center for Technology and Society

The question of who is accountable for the proliferation of antisemitism, hate, and extremism online has been hotly debated for years. Are our digital feeds really a reflection of society, or do social media platforms and tech companies actually exacerbate virulent content themselves? The companies argue that users are primarily responsible for the corrosive content soaring to the top of news feeds and reverberating between platforms. This argument serves to absolve these multi-billion-dollar companies from responsibility for any role their own products play in exacerbating hate.

A new pair of studies from ADL and TTP (Tech Transparency Project) show how some of the biggest social media platforms and search engines at times directly contribute to the proliferation of online antisemitism, hate, and extremism through their own tools and, in some cases, by creating content themselves. While there are many variables contributing to online hate, including individual users’ own behavior, our research demonstrates how these companies are taking things from bad to worse.

For these studies, we created male, female, and teen personas (without a specified gender) who searched for a basket of terms related to conspiracy theories as well as popular internet personalities, commentators, and video games across four of the biggest social media platforms, to test how these companies’ algorithms would work. In the first study, three of four platforms recommended even more extreme, contemptuously antisemitic, and hateful content. One platform, YouTube, did not take the bait. It was responsive to the persona but resisted recommending antisemitic and extremist content, proving that it is not just a problem of scale or capability.

In our second study, we tested search functions at three companies, all of which made finding hateful content and groups a frictionless experience, by autocompleting terms and, in some cases, even auto-generating content to fill in hate data voids. Notably, the companies didn’t autocomplete terms or auto-generate content for other forms of offensive content, such as pornography, proving, again, that this is not just a problem of scale or capability.

What these investigations ultimately revealed is that tech companies’ hands aren’t tied. Companies have a choice in what to prioritize, including when it comes to tuning algorithms and refining design features to either exacerbate or help curb antisemitism and extremism.

As debates rage between legislators, regulators, and judges on AI, platform transparency, and intermediary liability, these investigations underscore the urgency for both platforms and governments to do more. Based on our findings, here are three recommendations for industry and government:

Tech companies need to fix the product features that currently escalate antisemitism and auto-generate hate and extremism. Tech companies should tune their algorithms and recommendation engines to ensure they are not leading users down paths riddled with hate and antisemitism. They should also improve predictive autocomplete features and stop auto-generation of hate and antisemitism altogether.

Congress must update Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to fit the reality of today’s internet. Section 230 was enacted before social media and search platforms as we know them existed, yet it continues to be interpreted to provide those platforms with near-blanket legal immunity for online content, even when their own tools are exacerbating hate, harassment and extremism. We believe that by updating Section 230 to better define what type of online activity should remain covered and what type of platform behavior should not, we can help ensure that social media platforms more proactively address how recommendation engines and surveillance advertising practices are exacerbating hate and extremism, which leads to online harms and potential offline violence. With the advent of social media, the use of algorithms, and the surge of artificial intelligence, tech companies are more than merely static hosting services. When there is a legitimate claim that a tech company played a role in enabling hate crimes, civil rights violations, or acts of terror, victims deserve their day in court.

We need more transparency. Users deserve to know how platform recommendation engines work. This does not need to be a trade secret-revealing exercise, but tech companies should be transparent with users about what they are seeing and why. The government also has a role to play. We’ve seen some success on this front in California, where transparency legislation was passed in 2022. Still, there’s more to do. Congress must pass federal transparency legislation so that stakeholders (the public, researchers, and civil society) have access to the information necessary to truly evaluate how tech companies’ own tools, design practices, and business decisions impact society.

Hate is on the rise. Antisemitism both online and offline is becoming normalized. A politically charged U.S. presidential election is already under way. This is a pressure cooker we cannot afford to ignore, and tech companies need to take accountability for their role in the ecosystem.

Whether you work in government or industry, are a concerned digital citizen, or a tech advocate, we hope you find this pair of reports to be informative. There is no single fix to the scourge of online hate and antisemitism, but we can and must do more to create a safer and less hate-filled internet.

New York: ADL, 2023. 18p.

By Julien Bellaiche

On 2 August 2023, a federal jury sentenced Robert Gregory Bowers to death for committing the deadliest antisemitic attack in the history of the United States. Five years earlier, on 27 October 2018, he entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire on worshippers who had gathered to celebrate Shabbat, one of the most important ritual observances in Judaism. Eleven people were killed and seven more injured.

While in custody, Bowers reportedly expressed demographic conspiracy beliefs to explain his act. These narratives claim that ethnic, religious or national groups are under threat of eradication by outsiders due to demographic changes resulting from plots instigated by diverse sets of actors.

This report examines the ideological underpinnings of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack and its long-term impact on the extreme right five years later. It does so by delving into the key narratives that motivated Bowers’ act and assessing their influence on subsequent attacks and plots. It then investigates the ways in which the attack and the attacker continue to be referenced and glorified in extreme-right communities online.

Key Findings

This report traces the history of demographic conspiracy theories in the far right in the West back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when French discourses of “replacement” resonated with fears of miscegenation in the United States. These discourses shaped alternately the figures of Jews, Muslims, immigrants and progressive forces as racialised collectives plotting the eradication of White people and/or Western cultures. Over a number of years, these discursive trends interlaced and merged to produce labelled demographic conspiracy theories, which are known today under various names such as the “White Genocide” and the “Great Replacement” theories.

An analysis of Bowers’ activity on the social media platform Gab highlights the role demographic conspiracy theories played in Bowers’ interpretations and representations of social realities. These narratives helped shape the image of Jews as enablers of an alleged invasion of migrants endangering the future of White people.

In the context of White supremacist attacks, Bowers’ influence is linked to broader conspiracy beliefs that view the alleged struggle for the survival of the “White race” against concerted annihilation attempts as central. Other attackers who cited Bowers as a role model displayed various demographic conspiracy beliefs, picked different targets, but praised one another as committed “ethno-soldiers” sacrificing themselves for the cause of preserving the “White race”.

Despite his relatively modest popularity, Bowers remains regularly commemorated and glorified within extreme-right communities online five years later. “Screw your optics, I’m going in”, his last words on Gab, turned into a popular slogan used as a catchphrase to incite violence. Bowers was also introduced into militant accelerationists’ pantheon of “saints” and was regularly promoted as a holy figure within these online communities.

London: King’s College London , Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism,. 2023. 48p.

By The Anti-Defamation League, Center for Technology and Society

The question of who is accountable for the proliferation of antisemitism, hate, and extremism online has been hotly debated for years. Are our digital feeds really a reflection of society, or do social media platforms and tech companies actually exacerbate virulent content themselves? The companies argue that users are primarily responsible for the corrosive content soaring to the top of news feeds and reverberating between platforms. This argument serves to absolve these multi-billion-dollar companies from responsibility for any role their own products play in exacerbating hate. A new pair of studies from ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) and TTP (Tech Transparency Project) show how some of the biggest social media platforms and search engines at times directly contribute to the proliferation of online antisemitism, hate, and extremism through their own tools and, in some cases, by creating content themselves. While there are many variables contributing to online hate, including individual users’ own behavior, our research demonstrates how these companies are taking things from bad to worse. For these studies, we created male, female, and teen personas (without a specified gender) who searched for a basket of terms related to conspiracy theories as well as popular internet personalities, commentators, and video games across four of the biggest social media platforms, to test how these companies’ algorithms would work. In the first study, three of four platforms recommended even more extreme, contemptuously antisemitic, and hateful content. One platform, YouTube, did not take the bait. It was responsive to the persona but resisted recommending antisemitic and extremist content, proving that it is not just a problem of scale or capability. In our second study, we tested search functions at three companies, all of which made finding hateful content and groups a frictionless experience, by autocompleting terms and, in some cases, even auto-generating content to fill in hate data voids. Notably, the companies didn’t autocomplete terms or auto-generate content for other forms of offensive content, such as pornography, proving, again, that this is not just a problem of scale or capability. What these investigations ultimately revealed is that tech companies’ hands aren’t tied. Companies have a choice in what to prioritize, including when it comes to tuning algorithms and refining design features to either exacerbate or help curb antisemitism and extremism. As debates rage between legislators, regulators, and judges on AI, platform transparency, and intermediary liability, these investigations underscore the urgency for both platforms and governments to do more.

New York: The Anti-Defamation League, Center for Technology and Society, 2023. 36p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

Edited by Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner

FROM THE PREFACE: “This work sterns from many decades of effort and affection which we, as social anthropologists, have invested in research on Jews from Muslim lands for over thirty years. We have been engaged in uncovering the present-day life of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel, the United States, in other countries in Europe and the Americas, as well as North Africa. Together with our interest in the present, we both have a lively interest in the social history of these people. In 1982, we published a volume of selections which tried to reconstruct the lives in Jews in traditional Middle Easter societies, as well as syntheses by anthropologists and historians. Jewish Societies in the Middle East: Community, Culture and Authority was well received at the time. But, since 1982, much has been published on the Jews of North Africa and Southwest Asia, both by professional historians and anthropologists. Anthropological thinking has become more critical of earlier theoretical approaches. The perspectives of scholars have been affected by political changes in the relationship of Israel and her Arab neighbors. We decided to respond to these developments by editing a new volume.”

NY. New York University Press. 1996. 297p.

By  Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz

Antisemitism is on the rise in Europe, sometimes manifest in violent acts against Jews, but more commonly noticeable in everyday discourse. This innovative empirical study examines written examples of antisemitism in contemporary Germany. Drawing on 14,000 letters and e-mails sent between 2002 and 2012 to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin, as well communications sent between 2010 and 2011 to Israeli embassies across Europe, the authors show how language plays acrucial role in activating antisemitism across a broad spectrum of social classes, investigate the role of emotions in antisemitic argumentation patterns, and analyze “anti-Israelism” as the dominant form of contemporary hatred of Jews.

Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. 468p.

Edited by Charles Asher Small

This volume contains a selection of essays based on papers presented at a conference organized at Yale University and hosted by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) and the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA), entitled “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.” The essays are written by scholars from a wide array of disciplines, intellectual backgrounds, and perspectives, and address the conference’s two inter-related areas of focus: global antisemitism and the crisis of modernity currently affecting the core elements of Western society and civilization.

Leiden; Boston: Brill | Nijhoff, 2013. 364p.

By Joseph Litvak

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names”.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 306p.

Biden, Joseph R., Jr.

From the document: "Hate and the violence it fuels are on the rise in America. Hate crimes, targeted violence, and acts of harassment--including online abuse--have increased in recent years, eroding our democracy, decreasing public trust, and putting so many American communities at risk. We have seen this unfold from bomb threats at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to rising hate crimes against Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, to escalating threats against women and LGBTQI+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other] Americans, to persistent bias and violence against Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities, to harassment of Jews and attacks on Jewish communities. Antisemitism is often called 'the oldest hatred,' yet it remains all too present today--including in America. [...] While antisemitism most directly and intensely affects the American Jewish community, antisemitism also threatens the democracy, values, safety, and rights of all Americans. [...] This strategy represents the most comprehensive and ambitious U.S. government effort to counter antisemitism in American history. To implement this strategy, executive agencies will take a broad array of actions to address antisemitism. But the federal government cannot address antisemitism alone. This strategy also calls on Congress to act and play its part in countering antisemitism. It urges action from all of society--state and local authorities, civil society, community and faith leaders, the private sector, individual citizens."

United States. White House Office. 2023. 60p.

By Anti-Defamation League

From the document: "The Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2022 informs of both increases and decreases, some more meaningful than others, in the number of antisemitic incidents in different countries. The United States, where the largest Jewish minority in the world lives, saw a particularly alarming rise in anti-Jewish violence and slander. These data are not encouraging. The record-levels of 2021 were attributed in part to the exceptional social tensions created by the Covid-19 epidemic and the political tensions created by the Guardian of the Walls operation in Gaza. The data for 2022 suggest that the motivations for present-day antisemitism are not transient as some may have hoped. Despite the investment of substantial legal, educational, and political efforts, thousands of antisemitic incidents took place across the globe in 2022, including hundreds of physical assaults. Everyone who cares about human dignity and justice must recognize the need to prevent this reality from becoming normalized."

Tel-Aviv. University. Kantor Center For The Study Of Contemporary European Jewry; 2023. 86p.

By The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry.at Tel Aviv University,

The Antisemitism Worldwide Report for 2022 informs of both increases and decreases, some more meaningful than others, in the number of antisemitic incidents in different countries. The United States, where the largest Jewish minority in the world lives, saw a particularly alarming rise in anti-Jewish violence and slander. These data are not encouraging. The record-levels of 2021 were attributed in part to the exceptional social tensions created by the Covid-19 epidemic and the political tensions created by the Guardian of the Walls operation in Gaza. The data for 2022 suggest that the motivations for present-day antisemitism are not transient as some may have hoped. Despite the investment of substantial legal, educational, and political efforts, thousands of antisemitic incidents took place across the globe in 2022, including hundreds of physical assaults. Everyone who cares about human dignity and justice must recognize the need to prevent this reality from becoming normalized. Antisemitic incidents are not an abstract phenomenon. Whether physical or virtual, they affect real people in the real world. As with other hate crimes, fighting them requires a combination of broadly applied agendas along with tailor-made, targeted initiatives. It requires establishing who is attacked, who are the attackers, where the attacks occur, and what motivates the offenders. These questions must be treated with great caution and sensitivity. But they cannot be ignored if we are to achieve results. This year’s Report examines the location and affiliations of victims of antisemitic physical assaults in several cities that were major theatres for such incidents (p. 23). Our comparative study suggests physical attacks tend to occur in specific areas in major urban centers on streets and public transportation (rather than in or outside synagogues); usually do not appear to be premeditated; and target in the vast majority of cases visibly-identifiable Jews, particularly ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews. Whether attackers are motivated by strong antisemitic sentiments, by hatred of Israel (which, ironically, in some cases preys on anti-Zionist Jews), or by a bullying impulse that targets those who appear most different and vulnerable, their offenses fall under the category of antisemitic hate crimes.

New York: Anti-Defamation League; The Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry.at Tel Aviv University, 2023. 86p.

By Irina Astashkevich

This is a groundbreaking study of an important and neglected topic—the systematic use of rape as a strategic weapon of the genocidal anti-Jewish violence, known collectively as pogroms, that erupted in Ukraine in the period between 1917 and 1921, and in which at least 100,000 Jews died and undocumented numbers of Jewish women were raped. The book is based on the in-depth study of the scores of narratives of Jewish men and women who survived the pogrom violence, but were then all but forgotten for almost a century. This book deconstructs the motives of perpetrators, the experience and expression of trauma by the victimized community, and how the genocidal objectives of the pogrom perpetrators were achieved and maximized through the macabre carnival of violence.

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018. 170p.

By Anti-Defamation League and the Community Security Initiative

This report examines extremist and antisemitic trends and incidents across New York state during the twoyear time period from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021, and provides recommendations for combatting these threats. The ADL Center on Extremism (COE) and the Community Security Initiative (CSI), a project of UJA-Federation of NY and JCRC-NY, jointly researched and authored the report. The last two years have seen a significant proliferation of hate incidents both nationwide and in New York State. These incidents have been rooted, in part, in widespread campaigns of disinformation and conspiracy theories, some of which have animated extremists and fueled antisemitism, resulting in unrest and violence, from the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C. to white supremacist activism to a spike in hate crimes and rising antisemitism.

New York: ADL, 2022. 30p.

By Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz.

Antisemitism is on the rise in Europe, sometimes manifest in violent acts against Jews, but more commonly noticeable in everyday discourse. This innovative empirical study examines written examples of antisemitism in contemporary Germany. Drawing on 14,000 letters and e-mails sent between 2002 and 2012 to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin, as well communications sent between 2010 and 2011 to Israeli embassies across Europe, the authors show how language plays a crucial role in activating antisemitism across a broad spectrum of social classes, investigate the role of emotions in antisemitic argumentation patterns, and analyze “anti-Israelism” as the dominant form of contemporary hatred of Jews.

Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. 458p.