New Studies, Old Hatreds

Is anti-Semitism just another hatred, or is it unique? A new academic study tries, with mixed results, to answer the question.

By Alex Joffe in Mosaic Magazine

Studying anything having to do with Jews is at once conventional and sedate and potentially perilous. In 2010, a project at Yale University gathered experts from a number of different countries and disciplines to examine the peculiarly modern forms taken by the world’s oldest hatred. The resulting conference, titled “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,” included considerations of anti-Semitism in places as disparate as Francoist Spain, Brazil under the Dutch, post-apartheid South Africa, and contemporary settings too numerous to list.

But what drew widespread media attention to the gathering was the treatment of only a single topic, namely, anti-Semitism in the contemporary Islamic world. In fact, the sessions devoted to this phenomenon set off a firestorm of controversy so fierce as to result in the eventual ouster from Yale of the conference organizer, the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). Although the university’s official reason for shuttering YIISA was the program’s alleged failure “to meet high standards for research and instruction,” there was not the slightest doubt that the real reason lay in the vociferous charges of “anti-Arab extremism and hate-mongering” lodged against the conveners by Arab and pro-Palestinian groups and their faculty supporters. By 2011, YIISA was no more.

Now, the conference proceedings have been published in five slender volumes. They appear under the imprint of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), of which YIISA was originally a project. Headed by the sociologist Charles Asher Small, ISGAP is the largest research unit of its kind in North America; its mission is altogether respectable: to study anti-Semitism “in a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework from an array of approaches and perspectives.” Ironically enough, one might say that the very comprehensiveness of ISGAP’s approach—which necessarily mandates the inclusion of Islamic anti-Semitism, today’s single deadliest form of the phenomenon under examination—is what proved YIISA’s undoing. In this respect, publication of the conference volumes affords an opportunity not only to consider the merits of Yale’s conduct but to reflect more generally on the academic study of anti-Semitism today.

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