Events
2024-2025 Zoom series: "Navigating Antisemitism on Campus and Beyond" for higher education leaders and administrators
Higher education leaders and administrators — currently working in departments related to student and academic affairs, DEI and legal affairs, communications, development, president, provost, and deans' offices, etc. — are heartily invited to join us for one or more of the webinars below. Presentations will be followed by a Q&A session for participants.
Free of charge.
Required registration closes 2 hours before webinar start time.
When is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism?
Student and Faculty Misconduct on Campus and Free Speech
Cutting-Edge Research on Antisemitism
Antisemitic Propaganda as a Form of Information Warfare against Democracies
Professors Len Saxe (Brandeis University), Eitan Hersh (Tufts University), and Rachel Fish (Brandeis University) will share their research findings related to college students in the U.S., Jewish and non-Jewish.
Administrators will gain insights on how this research can impact higher education policy, and identify opportunities for meaningful education and skills building for students, faculty, and administrators.
Len Saxe is the Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Social Policy at Brandeis University, directing the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies and the Steinhardt Social Research Institute. An experimental social psychologist, he focuses on religious and ethnic identity, especially within the Jewish community. His research includes studies of antisemitism, American Jewry demographics, and Jewish education's impact on engagement. He leads a study of Birthright Israel and investigates the American Jewish population's characteristics. Professor Saxe has authored nearly 400 publications, served as a Science Fellow for the U.S. Congress, a Fulbright Professor at Haifa University, and received the APA’s prize for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and the Marshall Sklare Award. He also teaches at Brandeis University's Heller School and College of Arts and Sciences.
Eitan Hersh is a professor of political science at Tufts University. His research focuses on US elections and civic participation. Hersh is the author of Politics is for Power (Scribner, 2020), Hacking the Electorate (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as scholarly articles. Hersh earned his PhD from Harvard in 2011 and served as assistant professor of political science at Yale University from 2011-2017. His public writings have appeared in venues such as the New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, POLITICO, and the Boston Globe. Hersh regularly testifies in voting rights court cases and has testified to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary about the role of data analytics in political campaigns.
Rachel Fish serves as special advisor to the Brandeis University President's Initiative on Antisemitism.
Authoritarian states have long deployed antisemitism in their ideological warfare against democracies. During the Cold War, the USSR was the largest purveyor of antisemitic propaganda and disinformation globally as it sought to undermine the US and its ally, Israel. By dressing up tropes from antisemitic conspiracy theory as "anti-Zionism," it managed to sell them to a wide variety of audiences across the globe. Today, state actors such as Russia, China, and Iran target young Americans with the same toxic tropes, presenting them as opposition to Israel.
In this lecture we'll survey "anti-Zionist" antisemitism as a form of information warfare targeting democracies; discuss what specifically makes it antisemitic; and talk about why it is critical that democracies learn to resist it.
Presented by Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism. She is a senior advisor with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center; a fellow with ISGAP and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism; and a contributing writer to Tablet. Her writings have appeared in Fathom, Sapir, Quillette, and Newsweek, among others, as well as in several essay collections, including Jewish Priorities: 65 Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son Press); The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign to the Mainstream (Routledge); and Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays (Routledge).