Lab Projects

Defining antisemitism has become a topic of significant public debate. This debate often centers on two approaches — the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). Yet there is a long history of proposed definitions, and a large number of cases in which Jews have been the target or victim of an aggression, discrimination, or hostility: these cases offer a rich data source of proposals for drawing out underlying ideas and definitions of what constitutes antisemitism. The Lab is working to build a dataset that will collect such proposals for the definition of antisemitism (beginning with the term’s coinage in the 19th century), along with the articulation of antisemitism in official institutions such as policing, court documents, universities, government documents, legislative debates, and so forth. We intend to collect and code these, and to make this dataset available in an interactive way for researchers interested in antisemitism and in definitions, and their adoption and application over time, location, language, and professional fields.

The Lab is giving special attention to empirical research on the experience of Jewish community safety. This research includes experiences and aspirations for Jewish community safety across cities and countries with significant Jewish populations or sites (including Canada, France, Denmark, the UK, the US, and Australia). We are particularly interested in how policing offers community safety, existing approaches that seek to offer security and reassurance to Jewish communities, and the relationship between concerns over antisemitism and events such as protests or demonstrations. Finally, our attention to community safety includes our interest in Jewish community trust in institutions across cities and over time, the effects of insecurity for Jewish community relationships, and how we might measure the success or shortcomings of policy approaches to ensure Jewish safety. Research on these questions may in turn underwrite potential policy and practices, and the Lab is eager to advance these policy-facing efforts. 

We are planning to build a data hub that will curate data on antisemitism from existing surveys and data collection efforts, over time and across cities. This will allow researchers to access and learn from high-quality data to produce rigorous research on anti-Jewish discrimination and hostility. This will allow the study of antisemitism to be brought to bear on an array of topics, including workplace discrimination, national belonging, perceptions of Jews compared to other minority groups, and identifying patterns in data regarding anti-Jewish hate and animosity to Jewish peoplehood. Having such data available would also allow us to offer policy-focused analyses, and to engage with current events with reliable data on trends and comparative dimensions of contemporary concerns. We intend for the Lab to then draw on and curate insights from data on antisemitism in visual form, for the benefit of a wide range of policy, research, and teaching audiences. 

Significant historical and contemporary research focuses on experiences of antisemitism. Yet we know comparatively little about the approaches and policies that are designed to combat, monitor, deter, attenuate, or offer redress for antisemitism – whether these are formulated by governments, in the private sector, by universities or school boards, or by community organizations. This project is designed to collect approaches by identifying how antisemitism is defined and measures, any indicators for antisemitism that are relied on, and how these anti-antisemitism approaches are then developed. What is the array of responses, what do different forms of anti-antisemitism seek to achieve, what types of antisemitism do they seek to counter, and what metrics of success do they articulate for their own policies? What forms of expertise do these really on, whether pedagogical, legal, the building of institutional cultures, and others? What concerns or hopes have people registered about these responses to antisemitism? And how might we analyze the relative success of some approaches compared with others? 

The Lab is currently collecting available legal claims in Canada and the US that focus on antisemitism, along with available legal materials across fields of law (such as statements of claims, responses, intervenor briefs, and judicial decisions). Our intention is to draw out how antisemitism is thought of in legal domains, and how courts themselves grapple with competing claims, forms of expertise, and competing arguments about the presence of absence of antisemitism (or its degree) in a dispute. Understanding how antisemitism is measured and conceived of in legal documents, and the evidence used in legal cases where antisemitism is in issue, are core to this project. 

We take the view that the return of social scientists and normative theorists to the field of antisemitism will enrich the field. To promote cross-disciplinary engagement, the Lab will be hosting workshops through which “classic” theories of antisemitism (as proposed by, e.g., Arendt, Sartre, Parsons, Horkheimer and Adorno) are considered together with contemporary social scientific data. On what points of data do different classic theories of antisemitism rely, and do the contemporary data confirm or refute the theories? How might these theories be updated with data collection efforts, and more recent theorizing in the social sciences? Might careful re-examinations of earlier theories of antisemitism make available neglected ways of viewing and explaining antisemitism’s different manifestations today? By asking these questions, the Lab intends to build connections across the various areas of expertise that have shaped, and will continue to shape, the field of antisemitism studies.