AI will kill the Jews.

That sentence sounds like science fiction, but the real danger is more ordinary, and therefore more plausible. Artificial intelligence does not need consciousness, hatred, or a plan of its own. Algorithms are not evil — at least for now. Rather, AI needs people, bad people, antisemites, willing to use it; companies willing to release it without adequate safeguards; platforms willing to reward outrage; and millions of users willing to mistake fluent machine output for truth.

Every age has given antisemitism the authority of its dominant institutions. Medieval blood libels borrowed the authority of religion. Nineteenth-century racial antisemitism dressed itself as science. Nazism joined those myths to bureaucracy, radio, film, census records, railways, and industrial management. The Soviet antizionist campaign, alongside Palestinian terrorism, repackaged antisemitism into postcolonial antizionism. Now AI is the authority system. It can give ancient lies the appearance of computation: calm, personalised, data-driven, and supposedly free of human prejudice.

The danger is not simply that AI can generate more hateful content. It can transform propaganda in a few decisive ways. First, it can manufacture evidence. A modern antisemite can create a realistic ‘archival’ photograph, a fabricated quotation, a cloned voice, a fake identity, an invented survivor, or a polished report complete with footnotes that do not exist. A new digital blood libel no longer requires a priest, a printing press, or a state propaganda ministry. It requires a prompt. By the time historians authenticate one image, propagandists can produce a hundred variations. One can only think about the impact of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to understand the potential danger of spreading fakes at scale.

Second, AI can manufacture a crowd. Generative and agentic systems allow bots to speak persuasively, adopt local slang, imitate emotion, and maintain convincing personas. Thousands of synthetic accounts can repeat the same accusation, harass the same Jewish target, or push the same hashtag until it appears to represent public opinion. Unfortunately, platforms now prioritise engagement, of any kind, and recommend the content. Human users see apparent consensus and assume legitimacy. A small extremist network can therefore masquerade as a social movement.

Third, AI can personalise radicalisation. The same antisemitic conspiracy can be rewritten for almost any audience. A far-right user may be told that Jews are engineering immigration. A radical-left user may be told that ‘Zionists’ control capitalism and foreign policy. An Islamist user may receive a religiously framed narrative of betrayal and cosmic war. The language changes; the imagined Jewish enemy remains.

Fourth, recommender systems deepen the process. They do not need to understand antisemitism or endorse it. They need only learn that fear, grievance, and conspiracy keep people watching. A user who pauses over content about ‘global elites’ can be guided toward Jewish-control narratives, Holocaust denial, extremist communities, and eventually material that treats violence as resistance. This is not a single leap into fanaticism. It is a sequence of small, personalised nudges.

In addition, uncensored local models make the threat still clearer. A user can instruct a model to imitate Hitler, Haj Amin al-Husayni, or another ideological authority and ask it to reinterpret contemporary crises through their worldview. The model can move rapidly from identifying an alleged Jewish conspiracy to proposing how that conspiracy should be confronted or repackaged to be more palatable. The historical propagandist becomes an interactive tutor who is always available, endlessly patient, and capable of tailoring hatred to the psychological needs of the person asking. With automation and agentic capabilities, these can orchestrate a whole campaign at scale, and fairly cheaply as well.

True, a person must instruct it now, but at that point, AI is no longer merely producing speech. It is becoming an infrastructure for ideology. It can generate the accusation, create the ‘proof’, invent the witnesses, deploy the bots, identify receptive audiences, test which message performs best, and keep repeating it until synthetic popularity becomes real political pressure.

Furthermore, what happens when biased systems run humanoids, border patrols, policing units, and so on? Biased systems, abused by antisemites, can nudge real discriminatory or even physical harms.

But the most dangerous product of this infrastructure is synthetic authority. People know that human beings lie, rage, exaggerate, and manipulate while machines appear dispassionate. Their sentences arrive without a red face, a raised fist, or a swastika. That emotional distance can make prejudice sound like analysis and conspiracy sound like knowledge. Just like during the Cold War or the recent campus encampments, we are all in danger of becoming just another set of ‘useful idiots’.

My latest book, Synthetic Hate, is a warning, not a prophecy. AI will kill the Jews only with enough human stupidity and enough credulity to trust synthetic evidence, enough greed to monetise outrage, enough cowardice to avoid regulation, and enough hatred to turn a tool into a weapon. For now, machines do not hate Jews. They industrialise what humans teach, request, reward, and permit.

For now, the intelligence may be artificial, but the stupidity will be entirely our own.

Dr Lev Topor will be discussing his book on 14th September at 17.30 at JW3 .

Tickets

Dr. Lev Topor is a policy-oriented researcher and a private consultant in the fields of antisemitism and cybersecurity. He is the Head of the Cybersecurity Program at the School of Information Systems at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reports on cyber policies, anonymous communications, racism, antisemitism, and antizionism. A recognised international expert, Synthetic Hate is his fourth book.

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Kolkata is home to a tiny, three-century-old Baghdadi Jewish community. Though reduced to fewer than 18 individuals, they remarkably maintain three synagogues, two schools, and a cemetery. Crucially, they have never faced direct persecution in India, not historically nor in the volatile aftermath of October 7.

Local Jews have echoed this feeling of safety, with Jael Silliman famously noting “India is probably the only country in the world where Jews have always been welcome.”

Yet a deep contradiction sits beneath the surface.

The antisemitism observed here is primarily a radical form of antizionism that targets Israel, leaving it largely invisible to outside scholars and the mainstream press.

Today, for a vast majority of student activists in the city, the ‘Zionist’ has been completely decoupled from reality and turned into a convenient political symbol.

The Architecture of Campus Anti-Imperialism

To understand Kolkata’s campus reactions post-October 7, we must look at the ideological legacy of decades of communist rule. The CPI(M)-led Left Front government (1977–2011) directly shaped how generations of students view the world. Leftist organisations like the SFI, AISF, and AISA filter the Arab-Israeli conflict through a heavily biased, pre-packaged anti-imperialist lens.

Stemming from Cold War-era postures—such as performatively renaming the road outside the US Consulate to Ho Chi Minh Sarani—the Palestinian cause was seamlessly folded into a broader anti-Western framework. In protests organised since October 7, these groups have openly crossed the line, calling for the total destruction of Israel and accusing it of genocide while sweeping Hamas’s atrocities under the rug.

The Information Vacuum

This bias is worsened by a massive gap in local education. West Bengal’s state school board—where most students study—completely lacks references to Jewish history or the Holocaust. In fact, Presidency University—my own institution—is the only university in the state offering dedicated courses on the subject.

Without this basic historical grounding, most people perceive Judaism merely as a branch of its sister Abrahamic religions, colloquially calling the city’s historic synagogues girjas (churches) or masjids (mosques). Relying primarily on social media and politically coloured literature, students fall hook, line, and sinker for what Natan Sharansky has termed the 3Ds regarding Israel: delegitimisation, demonisation, and double standards.

The 3Ds in Action

These 3Ds are highly visible in student rallies and boycotts. Even in a 2014 pro-Palestinian rally, the SFI blamed Israel for war crimes while completely erasing Hamas’s cross-border rocket fire—a clear double standard. Post-October 7, this escalated into outright delegitimisation, with protest posters routinely printing unified maps of Palestine that erase Israel’s existence.

During boycott movements, organisers aggressively urged the public to replace American and Swiss brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Nestlé with local ones, claiming these companies have “Palestinian blood on their hands.” Similarly, the slogan “From the river to the sea...” is shouted freely, even though field interviews reveal many students have no idea what river or sea they are referencing; they parrot the phrase simply to perform their activist identity.

Performative Protests and Digital Realities

Over time, the campus response became highly performative. Between late 2023 and early 2026, student unions channeled this framework through a series of events—ranging from film screenings and a massive Maha Michil (Grand March) to a ‘Concert for Palestine’ and solidarity festivals. Speakers drifted straight into antisemitic tropes, labelling Israel a “racist apartheid state” and comparing Palestinians to Indian freedom fighters battling British colonialism.

While student leaders try to maintain a superficial veneer of diplomacy during live street speeches, that restraint vanishes on social media. For instance, a prominent SFI leader openly posted a call for the total annihilation of the state under the guise of justice:

“ইজরায়েল রাষ্ট্র ধ্বংস হোক। এই রাষ্ট্রটা বিশ্বের ম্যাপ থেকে মুছলে বিশ্বে শান্তি ফিরবে।” (“The State of Israel should be destroyed. Only then will global peace return.”)

The Path Forward

Having never met a Jewish person, most of these students derive their entire understanding from secondary literature and social media algorithms that view Israel strictly as a ‘neo-colonial’ entity and Western proxy.

The only real way to counter this rise in antisemitic prejudice in West Bengal—and India as a whole—is curricular reform. While central education boards like the CBSE and ICSE have successfully introduced dedicated chapters on the Holocaust, our state boards still completely lack them. Introducing rigorous, objective history courses on Jewish heritage and the Holocaust is no longer optional; it is a critical necessity to stop students from blindly recycling centuries-old hatreds under the banner of progressive activism.

Sayan Lodh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. His doctoral thesis explores Judaizing movements in India, specifically focusing on the emergence of Jewish-identifying communities among Christian, socio-economically marginalised populations.

His primary research interests include Indo-Judaic Studies (encompassing broader Jewish Studies), antisemitism, and mass violence, with a particular focus on South Asia.

To Teach Soviet Antizionism, Start with a Story

Why did a Soviet Jew listen to Israeli radio in secret? Why was a family afraid

to discuss its Jewish identity? Why were Jews were excluded from

prestigious Soviet universities? And what does this mean for Jews today?

Izabella Tabarovsky uses personal stories to shed light on the little-known

history of Soviet antizionism: how central it was to Soviet ideology, how

widespread its influence, and how fundamental it is to understanding — and

fighting — contemporary antisemitism.

Without any unnecessary formalities, the first episode plunges us right into the heart of the matter: Does antisemitism always stem from hatred?

I think you don’t have to hate to act antisemitic and to reproduce antisemitism. I also think you can hate and still be right.

Before you disagree, listen to the podcast. You’ll find out why I believe that “hate” isn’t the right diagnosis for the causes of contemporary antisemitism.

My name is Anna Zawadzka. I’m a sociologist, cultural studies scholar, gardener, and a professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Do not be afraid to let this Eastern-European accent into your homes.

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Every visitor to the Nova Exhibition will have had a different moment when it got too much. When they were finally overwhelmed. For some, it will have been walking into the first exhibition hall and being confronted by the tents, mobile phones and other items belonging to the young people who were at the festival.

For others, the room just off that, outlining the horrifying sexual violence endured by Hamas’s female victims, will have been the final straw. (We now know men were subjected to this abuse, too.)

Others still will have found that the collection of shoes recovered from the site, reminiscent of a display at Yad Vashem, the thing that took them over the edge.

I, though, was caught as I walked into the penultimate section. It is designed like Nova’s main dance floor. Playing was Bicep’s “Glue”, a piece of electronic music I love. Despite the surroundings, I briefly got lost in the beat, caught myself gently dancing to it.

Then the tears came.

The exhibition overall is a compelling piece of work. Organisers have brought together gut-wrenching testimony and physical evidence from that day. The fact that it is actual items collected from what remained of the site near Kibbutz Re’im makes it all the more impactful. Once you’ve seen the displays, they are impossible to get out of your head.

The exhibition left London last month, but will arrive in other cities, soon to be announced.

The music hit me

After a brief opening video, you walk into the first room, described above. There is so much, too much, on show in a relatively small space. Audio and video recordings are playing from every direction. It is deliberately overwhelming, providing some sense of just how chaotic and scary it would have been as the terrorists descended on the party.

Eventually, unable to absorb any more, I walked into the next room and…the music hit me. I will never again be able to listen to that track without picturing that dance floor, without remembering the victims of Hamas’s rampage.

I’ve had the profound honour of hearing hostage families speak. I’ve read and watched more about October 7 than is probably good for me. However, the Nova Festival exhibition takes your understanding of the atrocities to another level, because it is suddenly all there in front of you, tangibly so. For instance, you can pick up the phones of victims and read the messages they sent loved ones as the attack unfolded.

Furthermore, on one side of one room are toilet cubicles from the festival, riddled with bullet holes. These caught my attention because in one film documenting the attack that I’ve watched, two young women, girls, really, explained how they survived by spending hours crouched down in one such cubicle, before the army eventually came to rescue them.

Go we must: why the exhibition matters

Senior politicians, including reinstated Cabinet Ministers Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, and, eventually, Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Kahn, visited the exhibition during its London leg. Videos posted on social media afterwards reveal them to be visibly shaken by what they have just seen.

As many people as possible, be they politicians or otherwise, should visit the Nova Festival Exhibition if it arrives nearby. There is no doubt about that. One can’t help but fear, though, that the people who really need to walk around the exhibition have not and will not.

The antisemitic antizionist mob will ignore it. The videos demonstrating the level of wild violence carried out by Hamas will go unseen. Instead, such people continue uninformed, hating Israel and imperilling the lives of Jews.

Then there are those who are perhaps ambivalent about or even unaware of the details of October 7. Sadly, they have likely let the exhibition pass them by.

Meanwhile, Jews and our allies reinforce our suffering by going.

But go we must.

We must go in order to have the facts. To know the painful details. To honour the victims. Because, for every detail of the terror you’ve read, for every piece of testimony you have heard, nothing prepares you for the moment you step into that first room and the real thing is there in front of you.

As a friend and I exited the exhibition, returning to the summer, we were greeted by young girls from Chabad giving out Shabbat candles. Truly, whatever horrors we face, Jewish life endures.

Charlotte Henry is a journalist covering the crossover of culture, media and sport. She is a board member and fellow of LCSCA. She runs the award-winning independent outlet, The Addition.

October 7 marked a civilisational rupture. The attacks constituted the deadliest outbreak of violence against Jews since the Shoah. They were also an expression of an extreme misogyny, manifested in the coordinated and mass sexual violence against women.Karin Stögner examines the current - and shameful - Critical Theory response to October 7 and argues for a truly intersectional reclamation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, driven by an understanding of antisemitism and sexism as mutually interrelated theories and mutually reinforcing mechanisms.

This post is public so feel free to share it.

Fathom Journal

Critical Theory, October 7, and the Critique of Antisemitism and Sexism

Guided by Critical Theory in the tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno, Karin Stögner elaborates on the interrelation of antisemitism and sexism and applies this approach to the Hamas atrocities on October 7. These ideas were originally presented as academic keynote at the Contemporary Antisemitism conference at the University of Haifa in early July, 2026…

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a month ago · 4 likes · Fathom Editor

The two “Jedwabne massacres” teach us that neither the scarcity nor the abundance of evidence guarantees remembrance. In the case of Jedwabne, truth can remain buried for almost sixty years beneath a false monument and covered with false national narratives.

In the case of October 7, truth can also be filmed, uploaded, circulated around the world—and buried within hours beneath anti-Jewish hatred, ideological slogans, manipulated images, algorithms, and moral indifference. The victims of Jedwabne could not record their final moments. Some of the victims of October 7 did. But possessing their voices does not ensure that the world will listen.

This is why historians, archivists, documentary filmmakers, educators, legal scholars, and survivors must continue their work even when the world turns away. We must preserve the evidence, record testimonies, reconstruct individual lives, expose misinformation, and teach future generations how to distinguish historical investigation and truth from propaganda.

Joanna B. Michlic

Buried, Filmed, Denied:

Buried, Filmed, Denied: Jedwabne, October 7, and the Assault on Historical Truth…

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a month ago · 5 likes · Joanna B. Michlic

Read the full piece here.

Dr Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian, and founder and first Director of HBI (Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children, and the Holocaust at Brandeis University.

The mission of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism is to challenge the intellectual underpinnings of antisemitism in public life and to confront the hostile environment for Jews in universities.

We do this by:

• Pursing our mission through academic leadership.

• Building and supporting international communities of scholars who study antisemitism, and of scholars working in disciplines and fields in which antisemitic intellectual frameworks have become established.

• Building the scholarly infrastructure that these communities need: books, journals, seminars, conferences, networks and, in time, research funding.

It is to this end that we are creating, with partners and collaborators, CASA, the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association.

Universities matter because they shape society. It is in universities that young people develop political identities, and it is within academic disciplines that ways of thinking are developed, refined and then taught. The ideas that emerge from universities do not stay there. They shape journalism, education, public policy, social media and political debate.

The knowledge that scholars gain about contemporary antisemitism should not remain inside the academy. It should inform the wider public conversation. It should help people to understand antisemitism more clearly, to recognise its changing forms, and to challenge it more effectively.

LCSCA Fellows are doing important work to understand contemporary antisemitism and to undermine it. Through this Substack and our podcast, we hope to make that work accessible to wider audiences: to academics and students, to journalists and policymakers, to communal organisations and to anybody with an interest in understanding one of the defining political and intellectual questions of our time.

This will be a place for essays, interviews, conversations, podcasts and reports. It will showcase new research, engage with current debates, and provide a platform for scholars whose work deserves to reach beyond the academy.

We hope this Substack will become a forum for serious thinking, informed debate and new ideas.

David Hirsh, LCSCA Academic Director and CEO. Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

David Hirsh has pioneered a sociological account of contemporary antizionism and its relationship to antisemitism. He has worked on crimes against humanity, totalitarianism, democracy and populism. He teaches core Sociology, Criminology, Crimes against Humanity and Human Rights courses at UG and MA level.

Welcome to the LCSCA Substack.

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Last Sunday at the Montreal airport, a stranger asked where I was headed, and I said Vienna. It was true the way the easier thing is true: I was changing planes in Vienna and flying straight on to Tel Aviv. The word Israel stayed in my mouth. Saying the easier thing took so little effort that I barely registered the choice.

I was traveling to Haifa, to a conference where, for four days, every aspect of contemporary antisemitism from every corner of the world was tackled — and where we launched the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association (CASA), spearheaded by sociologist David Hirsh, who has been drawing this map since almost nobody wanted to admit the territory existed. The association is a partnership spanning Gratz College in the United States, the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and the Comper Center at the University of Haifa. This is my field. I came to it through curiosity and study. And then, for some of us, October 7 clarified that this was now an active condition, and we had a real research problem on our hands.

There were dinners and wine with colleagues from Austria, Germany, Britain, France, and beyond. The most honest thing I can report from all of it: none of us pretended to have the answers. What we have is humility, a commitment to rigor, and a willingness to work together, which turns out to be a research method.

Four days later, at Ben Gurion Airport, I chatted with an older couple on the first leg of the trip home, Tel Aviv to Vienna, and then on to Chicago. Somewhere over Turkey, the woman told me about her last trip to Chicago to see her daughter. In a café in Chicago, a young man had asked where she was from, and she said Germany. She is Israeli. She told me she still felt ashamed of the answer, and I told her the most important thing is that she protects herself. She is my mother’s age. I knew the shame she meant because I had felt a smaller version of it in Montreal and filed it under convenience.

For the rest of the flight I sorted the four days.

The night before I left, Bernard-Henri Lévy had closed the conference under the stage lights, looking tired. I had seen him speak a year or so ago when he came to Ohio State, and I remembered the force of him; the tiredness seemed new.

Fifty years ago, Lévy told us, he wrote that antisemitism moves like a virus, mutating its wording with each generation, and that its next wording would be Israel. Everyone asks whether antizionism is antisemitism, he said, and the question runs the wrong direction. The old fuels are spent: nobody assembles a mob anymore over deicide, or over Voltaire’s contempt for the people who produced Christianity, or over the racial pseudoscience of the nineteenth century. Ask instead whether antisemitism today can be anything other than antizionism. Convince the world that the Jewish state commits apartheid and genocide, that Jews everywhere are complicit, and millions can hate in good conscience.

He had toured the American campuses to see it up close — protesters chanting the slogans, Jewish students keeping Shabbat with fear in their bellies. The protesters, he said, were no worse than he had been at their age. They believed they were defending the weakest people on earth. Their hatred spoke the vocabulary of love, and he said the encounter chilled him in a way fifty years of writing about the subject had spared him. That morning a journalist had asked him whether French Jews should emigrate as their grandparents should have in the thirties. To go where, he answered. In the thirties there was America; there was the Yishuv, the Jewish community building a homeland in British Mandate Palestine before statehood in ‘48. Today the wave is worldwide.

And when the sexual atrocities of October 7 came up on stage, he named their reception: “the will not to know.” Real academics, great teachers, had looked him in the eye after the evidence was public and said they did not believe, or that it was not without context. In France, in America, in the UN. Beside him on stage sat Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, who had spent those same two years assembling the most comprehensive documentation of those crimes.

And still — after all of it — Lévy expressed hope and optimism. I didn’t hear it as his though; I heard it as an act of transfer. He was passing a torch to the rows in front of him, trusting that my colleagues and I would carry the ideas that matter, would serve as a weight when the world spins with algorithms too fast for anyone to steer.

The ideas he was trusting us with were the ones I discovered as a girl in Ohio. I was fifteen when I first saw the black-and-white photograph of Hannah Arendt leaning over a desk — a woman thinking for a living, the thought visible on her face. I understood something I could hardly have phrased then: ideas were a place a person could live. They could matter more than the room you stood in, the town, the decade. A girl in Ohio could belong to them, and they would have her.

Days earlier, in a lecture hall in Haifa, sociologist Karin Stögner had given the talk that returned me to that moment when I learned the name of these ideas. Critical theory began in Frankfurt in the 1920s and ‘30s as a refusal to take society at its own word — a way of asking how domination survives inside categories that feel natural, and of keeping thought supple enough to catch it. By 1940, Adorno and Horkheimer had placed antisemitism at the center of the inquiry: the hatred that makes a complicated world feel simple, that bridges the contradictions of modern life by giving them a face.

Early in her talk, Stögner addressed Nancy Fraser’s essay, “Gaza as World Event,” which argues that the Holocaust-centered moral order governing the West for half a century is in crisis — that Gaza now “bids to replace” Auschwitz as the era’s symbol of atrocity. It is a sweeping essay, a travelogue through Germany, America, world Jewry, Japan. And in every location it makes the same discovery. Jews who testify to antisemitism are exercising power: their testimony arrives pre-labeled as a weapon, a pretext, an instrument of repression. Jews who renounce Israel carry a purer Judaism and inherit the great universalist line — Spinoza, Heine, Freud, Arendt. Across the essay’s pages, antisemitism itself appears almost entirely inside quotation marks, released once, in parentheses, to concede its existence on the far right. October 7 appears nowhere. Hamas appears once, in scare quotes, as an example of unfair conflation. The women of that morning — the ones whose violation Cochav spent two years documenting — are absent. A world event, narrated at length, with its first morning missing.

The older woman from Ben Gurion Airport, the one who had said “Germany,” changed her answer because she anticipated its reception. Fraser’s essay is the reception — it announces in advance what Jewish testimony will mean. A frame arranged that way has assigned every Jewish voice its meaning before it speaks: confirmation counts as witness; challenge counts as weaponization. It can absorb anything — a massacre, an investigation, a survivor — and convert each into further evidence for itself. The will not to know, given a bibliography.

Karin Stögner’s verdict on the essay was that it was apologetic, and she meant the word in its strict sense. Fraser observes, accurately, that for many “Gaza” now displaces “Auschwitz,” and then proceeds to defend the displacement. The critical move would have been to name the untruth within the fact: substitutions of this kind happen, and they can still be false. Fraser supplies their justification instead. And so, Stögner concluded, she can no longer count as a critical theorist.

I would go further. Ideas held open remain theory. Ideas captured become ideology. Ideology begins when the world loses the ability to answer back.

Arendt on Fraser’s list stopped me. She is the same Arendt from my photograph — the one who practiced what she called thinking “without a banister,” who distrusted every framework that knew the answer before the question. A framework that assigns Jewish testimony its meaning in advance is banister from wall to wall. That lineage belongs to whoever keeps the questions open.

Stögner kept them open, and watching her do it was watching critical theory practiced in the spirit it was written. She began where Adorno and Else Frenkel-Brunswik began in the 1940s: ideologies rarely travel alone — antisemitism, sexism, racism, and nationalism arrive as a syndrome, each reinforcing the others. From that finding she has built an intersectionality of ideologies, the concept restored to the meaning Kimberlé Crenshaw gave it: a lens for what single categories erase. Antisemitism confounds every framework built on stable categories because it fixes Jews nowhere. The antisemite’s Jew is capitalist and communist, effeminate and domineering, rootless and secretly sovereign — a figure assembled to embody the dissolution of boundaries, the threat to unity as such. A framework that sorts the world into privileged and oppressed meets that figure, files Jews under privilege, and hands the oldest stereotype an anti-racist certificate.

That was the difference between the essay and the talk, and it is the whole difference. Fraser deploys the categories; Stögner asks what fear the categories serve. And her answer reached October 7 itself: antisemitism braided with misogyny, both fueled by intolerance of ambiguity, both enraged by bodies that cross assigned lines — the Jew imagined as dissolver of boundaries, the female Israeli soldier as a scandal against womanhood itself. Read that way, the sexual violence of that morning enacted the ideology’s deepest demand: Jews and women forced back into their assigned places through absolute domination of the body. Cochav’s report and Stögner’s theory describe the same event from two directions, evidence and explanation meeting in the middle.

The meeting happened in person, too. After Karin’s talk I found Cochav in the crowd, and we hugged for the first time. For over two years I had cheered her on from Ohio — watching her assemble the record, posting about what she was building, understanding that one of the most important documentations of our time was taking shape in her hands.

She knew who I was; she had felt the support and understood I was tracking every step. I told Karin her talk gave me goosebumps. “Same here,” Cochav said. We had tears in our eyes, but our tears carried the opposite of grief. That is what a theory that holds can do: it gives the thing that happened to you a shape, and a name, and company. We walked out of that room empowered, both of us, and said so.

I told another colleague in Haifa that I had felt betrayed by the feminist thinkers whose books taught me how to think. The feeling came early and it came hot. What I understand now is that the only people they betrayed were themselves. The ideas belong to everyone; that was always the point. The tradition lives in whoever keeps applying it honestly — including against the institutions that claim to own it. And if anything, their disbelief should stand as the object of adjudication. Because a framework’s claim to analytical power depends on its willingness to apply that power reflexively. The testimony has been delivered — Cochav saw to that. What the framework does with it is the test.

Which is what made the company in Haifa extraordinary — the Germans and Austrians most of all. For them the “genocide” label arrives with a gift attached. Accept it, and the ledger balances: if the descendants of the victims commit the crime of the century, the descendants of the perpetrators are released from theirs. The offer stands in every faculty meeting and every feuilleton, and it costs one word. They refuse it. They come to Haifa instead and say: everyone around me is saying this, and it is wrong. They have no guarantee of jobs afterward. There may be no place for any of us inside what currently calls itself the academy. It would be so easy for them to say the easier thing and go home absolved.

An older vocabulary had a name for that courage: righteous among the nations. The term is too large for a conference room, but the shape of the courage is the same — knowing in your gut what is true and acting on it. Watching them pour each other wine, I kept thinking, “They have no idea how extraordinary they are.”

Before she slept, the woman beside me asked what I want to do when the PhD is finished. I told her the truth, which is that I have never known less. I have also never been more certain that what I am doing is exactly what I should be doing.

For years I worried about the past and holding on to the old world, the memories, my heritage. I see now that tomorrow needs the worry more. But the two feed each other — Walter Benjamin’s insight, that the past survives through a present willing to turn toward it, and the present knows itself only through what it inherits. If the past two and a half years gave one gift, it is clarity: knowing who is who, where they stand, where you belong — and staying open as the walls shift, flexible enough to evolve with them. That is the dialectic. That is critical theory, lived. Nobody can take it from us.

The torch has left the older hands. The plane began its descent toward Vienna. Beside me sat a woman my mother’s age who had learned to say Germany. Somewhere in Ohio, a girl was looking at a photograph. I sat between them, carrying the name and the ideas together.

Hours later, in Chicago, changing terminals for the last leg home, I shared a shuttle bus with a young Black couple headed to New York for the Jay-Z concert at Yankee Stadium. She was worried they’d get in too late to buy Yankees merch before the show, and I assured her she could grab a tee at LaGuardia, and she was happy. She told me she teaches fifth-grade math. I told her my son is going into fifth grade and I couldn’t do his homework if my life depended on it.

We had been talking like that a while when they asked what kind of conference I was flying home from. “Antisemitism,” I said — the whole word, out loud, in the city where the woman on the plane had once said “Germany.” They asked what I had learned. “We’re fucked,” I joked, and they laughed. Then I answered honestly. “That we all need to slow down. Pause before we leap to our interpretations.” They nodded and said how much they liked that. The bus rolled on between terminals.

Joanne Strasser is a PhD candidate in Antisemitism Studies at Gratz College. Her scholarship develops a dual-structure model of antisemitism as a durable interpretive system, examining how meanings formed before encounter shape institutions, scholarly discourse, and Jewish experience. She writes on Substack at @elysiumsdaughter.

On 6 November 2025, something unusual happened in English football.

Supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv were banned from attending a UEFA Europa League fixture against Aston Villa. Not partially restricted, not subject to targeted controls - but excluded entirely.

In the context of European football, this matters. Blanket bans on away supporters are exceptionally rare in the UK. Even high-risk fixtures - involving entrenched rivalries, histories of disorder, or political sensitivities - are typically managed through intelligence-led policing, segregation, and targeted interventions. The infrastructure exists precisely to avoid collective punishment.

So why did this case depart from that model?

A new report by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism examines the decision in detail, and its conclusions are stark: the process was flawed, the evidence was limited, and the outcome was disproportionate.

At the heart of the issue is a familiar problem in public order decision-making: the slippage between risk and evidence.

The decision to exclude Maccabi supporters was justified on the basis of anticipated disorder. Much of this concern drew on events in Amsterdam in 2024, where violence followed a fixture involving the same club. But the evidential picture from Amsterdam is complex. Whist there were incidents involving a minority of Maccabi supporters, the majority of those arrested were not connected to them. Some of the violence was explicitly antisemitic; some was opportunistic; some emerged from the broader political climate.

What matters here is not whether Amsterdam was serious - it clearly was. It is whether those events could be meaningfully transferred to Birmingham.

The report finds that they could not.

There was no publicly available evidence of organised travel by high-risk groups to the UK fixture. No identification of specific individuals posing a threat. No credible, match-specific intelligence indicating that disorder could not be managed through existing policing strategies.

Instead, the risk assessment appears to have been constructed from generalised conditions: geopolitical tension, protest activity, and the symbolic visibility of an Israeli club. These are not irrelevant factors. However, they are not, on their own, sufficient to justify exceptional measures.

This is where the decision becomes more troubling.

When risk is defined broadly, without clear evidential thresholds, it becomes easier for group identity to function as a proxy. In this case, the prohibition applied not to individuals or identified risk groups, but to all Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters - a population that is overwhelmingly Jewish and Israeli.

That raises difficult questions. Public order policing in the UK is grounded in principles of necessity and proportionality. Restrictions should be the minimum required to achieve a legitimate aim. They should be targeted, evidence-led, and capable of justification beyond precaution alone.

The Aston Villa decision struggles on each of these counts. Less restrictive measures were available. Enhanced policing, controlled travel, ticketing restrictions, and coordination with UEFA are standard tools for precisely these kinds of fixtures. The report finds no compelling evidence that these would have been insufficient.

And the outcome matters.

The match proceeded without significant disorder. The risks anticipated did not materialise. That does not, in itself, prove the decision was wrong. But it does sharpen the question of necessity. If the worst-case scenario does not occur, we are left asking whether the restriction exceeded what was required in the first place.

Beyond the specifics of this fixture, the implications are broader. Decisions like this do not occur in a vacuum. They sit within a longer history in which Israeli participation in international sport has been contested, and in which Jewish communities have experienced exclusion justified in the language of safety or expediency.

This does not mean that every restriction involving Israeli teams is discriminatory, but such decisions carry additional weight, and require greater evidential care.

There is also a precedent problem. If a blanket ban can be justified on the basis of generalised risk, rather than specific intelligence, then the threshold for exclusion lowers. Other fixtures, other groups, other politically sensitive contexts may follow. What begins as an exception risks becoming a model. That is not a stable position for public order policing.

The report does not argue that the police should ignore risk, or that difficult decisions should not be made. On the contrary, it recognises the complexity of managing large-scale events in periods of heightened tension.

But it does argue for clarity.

Risk assessments must distinguish between context and evidence. Exceptional measures must be demonstrably necessary, not simply precautionary. And where decisions affect entire groups - particularly those defined by protected characteristics - the burden of justification must be high.

The Aston Villa case suggests that these standards were not met. And that should concern anyone interested in how public authority is exercised under pressure: not just in football, but across public life more broadly.

Adam Dickson is a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Durham University and a Postgraduate Fellow of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. His research explores antisemitism in English football, with a particular focus on how collective memory and moral injury shape the experiences of Jewish supporters.

A popular meme claims that every accusation is an admission. Almost immediately after 1,200 Israelis were massacred by Hamas’s death squads on 7 October 2023, Israel was accused of genocide in Gaza.

This is a classic case of reverse accusations. Hamas’s slaughter meets the definition of genocide as codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and in international case law. Properly naming the October 7 massacre a genocide is not merely a semantic game but has profound implications under international law for the duty to punish the perpetrators of the genocide and to prevent the repetition of such atrocities. Hitler supposedly dismissed international opposition to the mass murder of Jews, reportedly telling his generals: “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians [during the First World War]?” At a time when Jews in Israel and the Diaspora face acute threats, recognition of genocide becomes all the more urgent.

The crime of genocide consists of two parts: an act of genocide accompanied by genocidal intent. The Genocide Convention defines genocide as the following (Article II):

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Genocide requires a dolus specialis (a specific or a special intent), meaning that the crime be committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. As international courts have repeatedly stated, genocidal intent must be the “only reasonable inference” which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.

On 7 October 2023 thousands of armed Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, accompanied by a massive rocket barrage against Israeli cities. The terrorists split up, conquering and taking control of more than 20 Israeli towns. Terrorists also attacked the Nova Music Festival near the town of Re’im. Their goal was to murder as many Jews as possible. That day, over 1,200 Israelis were tortured, mutilated, and massacred, including women, children, and the elderly, and over 200 were abducted to Gaza. Independent researchers have confirmed that on October 7 Hamas systematically and deliberately inflicted sexual violence against Israeli women, including rape, torture, and the mutilation of sexual organs. This was part of a plan to humiliate and degrade Jews and to traumatise Israeli society. These actions easily meet the physical elements of genocide.

Hamas’s actions were motivated by an intent to destroy Israeli Jews as a distinct ethnic, racial, and national group. Hamas is a Sunni Islamist group, ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state across all of historical Palestine. Hamas emphasises jihad and violent struggle as the sole means of achieving its goal. Its worldview is virulently antisemitic, portraying Muslims as locked in an existential war against the corrupt and conniving Jews. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader and the mastermind of October 7, viewed the attack as the opening salvo that would launch a regional war in which Hizbullah, Palestinian groups in Judea and Samaria, Israeli Arabs, and Iran would join the direct conflict and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

The sheer brutality of the October 7 massacre testifies to the extent to which Hamas’s terrorists dehumanised Israeli Jews. According to Dr Chen Kugel, head of Israel’s forensics centre, scans revealed signs of torture and execution: people burned alive and bodies found with their hands bound before being executed. In their joint submission before the International Court of Justice’s case on genocide in The Gambia v. Myanmar, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK argued that sexual violence is an important indication of genocidal intent as it has no military value besides harm to the group. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in the Akayesu judgment, recognised that rape may be a tool of genocide. The Court held that rape was used as a means of destruction:

… solely against Tutsi women, many of whom were subjected to the worst public humiliation, mutilated, and raped several times, often in public, in the Bureau Communal premises or other public places, and often by more than one assailant. These rapes resulted in the physical and psychological destruction of Tutsi women, their families and their communities.

In conclusion, the recognition of the October 7 massacres as genocide triggers profound and binding legal obligations under customary international law. As Israel prepares to prosecute the massacre’s perpetrators, it must do so under its domestic Genocide Law, modelled on the international Genocide Convention. Third-party states must use universal jurisdiction to try perpetrators while patron states like Qatar and Iran must cease providing funding, training, and safe havens, requiring them to either prosecute or extradite Hamas leaders. Under the ICJ’s case-law, any state signatory to the Genocide Convention may file a complaint against Iran for its involvement in Hamas’s genocide. Finally, the October 7 genocide may provide renewed impetus for serious analysis of and measures against Islamist eliminationist and antisemitic ideology.

Adv. Avraham Russell Shalev is the director of the International Law Department at the Kohelet Policy Forum in Jerusalem, Israel. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University in Canada, and a Bachelor of Law, and Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Bar-Ilan University. He writes on Substack at The Jerusalem Jurist.