In this post, we publish materials from our March 2025 webinar on antisemitism and the Hostile Environment: the text of Ann Phoenix‘s introductory words and of Ben Gidley‘s presentation. There is also an abstract of and link to the academic paper on which Nira Yuval-Davis‘ presentation was drawn. You can watch the video of the event here.

Ann Phoenix: Introduction

Today’s Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment webinar is on Racism and Antisemitism in the Hostile Environment. I think few people would disagree that this is a crucial issue.

I’d like to give three reasons why this is an important period to engage with these issues:

 1)      Both racism and antisemitism are on the rise around the globe at a time when far-right politics are also in the ascendant producing uncertainties about the future for many people in different countries. The current USA clampdown on policies of Diversity, Equality, Inclusion and Belonging is already having ramifications in different countries as the world order changes. We need to think creatively about how we can effectively advocate for equity in this context.

2)      There is increasing confusion and contestation about what racism is and what antisemitism is. Discussions of both by politicians and in the media frequently individualise and dehistoricise them. For some people there is a lack of clarity about whether, and if so, how, they are related, something that is the focus of this session.  As Liz Fekete said in a 2020 paper “For the fight against racism and the fight against antisemitism to fracture at this particular point in our history is calamitous…”1

3)      The third reason it is important to think racism and antisemitism together relates to the contemporary context of increasing global polycrises where crises are internationally interconnected. It is increasingly important that we understand the relationship between antisemitism and racism to be able simultaneously to campaign against both, something that W.E.B. Du Bois argued for after visiting Germany in 1935 and the Warsaw ghetto in 1949. Hannah Arendt also thought of antisemitism as a form of racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism,

 Abigail Bakan and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (2024) in a paper in Historical Materialism last year argue that “understanding antisemitism in order to challenge it effectively” we need to recognise that antisemitism is anti-Jewish racism and understand four things:

·         antisemitism as anti-Jewish racism is a specific form of racism, and creative analytical tools are needed to explain this effectively;

·         claims that antisemitism is mainly expressed in criticisms of policies and practices of the state of Israel towards Palestinians are dangerous distractions from challenging antisemitism as anti-Jewish racism;

·         antisemitism as anti-Jewish racism varies according to specific contexts in time and place; the current period of rising white nationalism in liberal democratic capitalist states demands specific attention, especially to forms of coded anti-Jewish racism; and

·         antisemitism as anti-Jewish racism needs to be challenged collectively, through solidarity against hegemonic institutions of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism which are sustained largely through divide and conquer strategies.2

Our three speakers this evening are very well placed to help us to think about how we can respond to antisemitism without creating a hierarchy of racism and how we can build solidarity between those in struggle against antisemitism and those in struggle against other forms of racism, avoiding the ways in which some use it in the ‘culture wars’ against the left and against minority ethnic groups in the UK.

Ben Gidley: Facing antisemitism in the age of the Hostile Environment

In this blogpost, based on my presentation to the SSAHE March 2025 webinar, I will start by summarizing a paper that I co-wrote with my colleagues at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, David Feldman and Brendan McGeever, for the Runnymede Trust, and my words draw very heavily on David and Brendan too. The Perspectives paper, entitled Facing Antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity,was launched in January.3 We are very grateful to Runnymede for commissioning it. In my presentation, I’ll start by saying something about the context in which we wrote it, summarise the key points, go into detail first about how we analyse antisemitism today and second about the way forward we propose, and then I will add a personal note to what we wrote in the report, relating it to the Hostile Environment towards migrants. 

So, first, the context that has led to this report and to which the report responds.  We can think of these circumstances in three tiers. First, there are those conditions that impact directly on Jewish people.

  • There is the sharp rise in recorded antisemitic incidents in the UK and globally, since the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the horrific crimes perpetrated on 7 October.
  • There is the growing feeling of insecurity among many Jewish people in the UK.
  • And there is the breakdown in consensus over how to conceive and combat antisemitism which we see, not least, in fierce controversies over whether or when anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel is antisemitic

Another part of the context for our report is national. In Britian in August 2024 there was widespread violence in northern towns directed at Muslims and refugees, and stoked by the far right. These events highlight the emergency character of anti-racism today: that is more urgent than ever for racialised minorities, including Jewish people, to comprehend the insecurity and victimization they share, and to act in solidarity,

Finally, there is the international context: Israel and Palestine. Human rights organisations within Israel and beyond now describe Israel as an apartheid state. Following its catastrophic war on Gaza, jurists, activists and respected scholars charge Israel with war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide. At the same time, the majority of British Jews describe themselves as Zionists, and many of those who do not nonetheless retain an attachment to Israel. How then can Jewish people reconcile their attachments to Israel with an anti-racist politics?

Facing Antisemitism aims to address all of these issues. In the report:

  • We demonstrate that antisemitism is deeply embedded into our common culture; it exists as a reservoir of racist stereotypes and narratives about Jewish people, which are normalised and widespread.
  • We argue that the UK must move beyond framing and discussing antisemitism in ways that pit communities against one another, prohibit solidarity and encourage division;
  • We propose that combating antisemitism must be undertaken as part of wider anti-racist initiatives, including building alliances between Jews and other racialised minorities, and that the work of these coalitions will be to address racism in the UK in the round, including its anti-Jewish forms.

Understanding antisemitism’s manifestations

With that context in mind, what, then, does antisemitism look like in Britain today? In building a picture of antisemitism today, and making a platform from which we can understand and combat it, we make three key arguments.

First, like other forms of racism, antisemitism is complex and multidimensional and cannot be reduced to any single indicator. All too often in public debate, simplification occurs with the result that we are unable to understand the problem we face.

In the report we bring together a wide range of data which are not usually examined in conjunction. This gives us a richer, more rounded picture. What does it tell us?

The data tells us that antisemitism remains a significant problem in the UK today. It also shows that antisemitism manifests not simply as a set of bad ideas and irrational prejudices. It has a material impact on Jewish people and Jewish life in the form of incidents such as physical attack, verbal abuse or desecration. And it can sometimes take institutional and perhaps even structural forms.

And there is evidence that the problem has intensified since October 2023. For instance, according to survey data, 2023 alone saw a sevenfold increase in experiences of vandalism of Jewish targets, and, if we strip out incidents that relate to Israel or Zionism from the record of reported antisemitic incidents, that year also saw 1000 more reported incidents than the year before. This is what feeds the fear and insecurity experienced by many in Jewish communities in recent years, which is also clearly visible in the data.

But, and this is our second point, one of the reasons why this is such a difficult area is because the data we have on antisemitism rest on particular assumptions about what counts as antisemitic. In short: these assumptions depend on different definitions of antisemitism, which are always contested and political.

For example, when antisemitism is conflated with anti-Zionism – or if there is a lack of clarity on when anti-Zionism is also antisemitic – then it can lead to a mismeasurement of the scale of the problem and a misidentification of its most urgent sources.

The incident figures are alarming and it’s not surprising that headlines draw attention to them, but an exclusive focus on incidents creates two problems: it further simplifies the multifaceted problem of antisemitism in British society and it leads us to focus on individual antisemites rather than a societal problem of antisemitism, which I turn to now.

To understand why incidents spike at times such as the current moment, we therefore argue (and this is our third key point) that we need to focus less on the pathology of individual “antisemites” and look instead at the wide diffusion of antisemitism. In the data, it is clear that while the number of fully fledged individual antisemites is fairly low, racialising ideas, narratives and images of Jews are far more broadly dispersed, and constitute a stain on our society. Crucially, these ideas have a long history and are deeply embedded in Britain’s Christian history.

We therefore propose an understanding of antisemitism as drawing on a reservoir of such ideas, narratives and images,  a reservoir that runs very deeply in our culture, that changes over time, that is drawn on by a wide spectrum of political actors when Jews become salient for a range of reasons, and, crucially, is drawn on, often unwittingly, by those who are not ideological “antisemites” and who do not have thoroughly negative attitudes to Jews – including at times by some who consider themselves anti-racist.

We conclude from this that it is politically insufficient to respond to discrete antisemitic incidents and pursue the individual antisemites in our midst, although of course we must continue do that work. Going forward, we also need to also find ways to confront the reservoir of antisemitism that is deeply embedded in our society.

How to do this is the focus of the second half of the report, which I’ll try to summarise now.

Anti-racism and anti-antisemitism

In the UK today, from right to left, there is no shortage of what we might call ‘anti-antisemitism’: by that we mean political activity designed to combat antisemitism. One of the defining features of this political opposition to antisemitism in the UK today is the leading role played by the state and the close cooperation of the Jewish communal mainstream leadership with it. In other words, the dominant approach of the Jewish mainstream leadership has been to seek vertical alliances in the form of state protection against antisemitism.

While this can make many Jewish people feel safe in the short term, there are three flaws to this approach to antisemitism:

First, both the state and the communal mainstream leadership tend to conceive of antisemitism as a form of personal prejudice. Antisemitism, understood in this way, is a problem of bad ideas. This leads to a fixation on individual antisemites not the wider reservoir of antisemitism that is embedded in our society.

Second, this understanding of antisemitism as the product of individual prejudice leaves us unable to comprehend the structural forms of racism in which the state is directly complicit. This includes, for example, the hostile environment created systematically for migrants ,or Islamophobic policies that target British Muslims and contribute to racist outcomes such as unequal access to housing and health, regardless of whether decision-makers are personally prejudiced.

Third, when the state and political parties put significant energy into combating antisemitic ideas but fail to act with similar force against Islamophobia or structural racism, it gives the perception of a hierarchy of racism. This gives life to a competitive victimhood that further pulls apart the horizontal alliances and broad coalitions required to confront all racisms.

Given this, let’s go back to what I said a moment ago, about antisemitism existing as a reservoir. As my colleague Brendan puts it: if the sources of antisemitism lie in society, the response to it needs to be societal. If it exists in our common political culture, we need a response that emanates from there. That is: we need a renewed anti-racism.

But in renewing anti-racism, we also need an anti-racism that is attentive to the specificities of antisemitism wherever it arises, including on the left. When anti-racists fail to adequately address antisemitism, let alone when we defend or embrace antisemitic narratives circulating in our movement, it drives some Jews away, and into the arms of the state.

But the prospect for alliances between Jews and other racialized minorities are also put under pressure by the widespread conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as well as by the tendency of the communal leadership to blur the border between defending Jews from antisemitism and defending Israel’s policies. Again, the state plays a key role here. At worst, prevailing attempts by the state to combat antisemitism have at times served to racialise other minoritised communities, especially British Muslims. We see this in the way Jews are often positioned as a ‘model minority’ or antisemitism is cast as a specifically Muslim problem, not one embedded in British society as a whole. This is damaging not only to Muslims but also to Jews, as it works against crafting a politics that can combat anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim racism together.

The predominant ways of opposing antisemitism lead us further away from a genuinely anti-racist politics. Our report calls for a new approach to combating antisemitism, one that is based on building horizontal alliances between Jewish people and other racialised minorities. This is how we can confront the reservoir of antisemitism. 

But reconnecting opposition to antisemitism with a wider anti-racist politics is not going to be easy. There are significant challenges, not least the contested question of the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism and the war in Gaza.

Resisting antisemitism in the age of the Hostile Environment

Moving beyond the report, how does this relate to the Hostile Environment?

As Aaron Winter and others have argued, the Hostile Environment against migrants has been one element of the mainstreaming of far right ideas in liberal (and increasingly illiberal) democracies, linked, as Ann said in her introduction, to a wider culture war that simultaneously targets the left and minoritised peoples. One of the central narratives animating the rising far right, as you’ll know, is the idea of the “Great Replacement”, the myth that white people face extinction in both Europe and North America and replacement by migrants, in particular Muslim and Middle Eastern migrants – and that this replacement is driven by a conspiracy at the hands of “globalist elites”: a myth that directly echoes some of the familiar narratives from the reservoir of antisemitism, showing the ways in which antisemitism and other forms of racism remain intertwined.

However, in this period sections of the far right and anti-migrant movement have latched themselves on to the fight against antisemitism, either for purely cosmetic reasons (e.g. to launder their reputation and provide an alibi against the accusation of fascism), or because despite their own antisemitism they see Israel as a geopolitical ally in the West’s war on Islam, or because they genuinely hate Muslims more than they hate Jews. Similarly, the narrative of “two-tier policing”, another vehicle for the mainstreaming of far right ideas in the UK, has deployed the image of Palestine solidarity protestors, usually from minoritised communities, to drive the criminalization of protest, cynically exploiting Jewish insecurity in doing so.

Some Jews, animated by insecurity and linking the problem of antisemitism in the diaspora to a sense of an existential threat to Israel, have entered the embrace of far right actors. In one recent striking example, Israel is about to host a conference on antisemitism whose line-up looks like nothing more than a fascist rally, replete with MEPs from the most hardcore anti-migrant parties across Europe, including, most strikingly, many who have themselves articulated antisemitic positions, leading the German and British antisemitism commissioners to pull out of the event – followed, thankfully, after a few days, by Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. The criticism of the conference from many in the diaspora’s mainstream leadership indicates that the potential for a rapprochement with anti-racist principles is not completely evaporated.

At the same time, other elements of the far right, often with a more explicitly Nazi rather than anti-migrant heritage, have latched themselves on to the Palestine solidarity movement, in particular in online spaces, using anti-Zionist language to promote other antisemitic myths; antisemitic slogans and images have at times been tolerated on Palestine solidarity demonstrations, further alienating mainstream Jews from anti-racist politics. The boycott movement’s opposition to Jewish-Palestinian dialogue, as a form of “normalisation”, alienates anti-racist Jews too.

In short, a broad coalition against racism, including antisemitism, is more necessary than ever, but competition and division undermines this. A politics of solidarity, including a deeper understanding of antisemitism as a form of racism, is the only path forward from the politics of division. Overcoming the legacy of apprehension many Jewish people feel about the left, as well as finding a consistent anti-racism which also reckons with emotional attachments to Jewish life in Israel, will not be easy. Holding these conversations and building these bridges will take work and persistence, but is the only hope in building a broad coalition against all forms of racism.

Nira Yuval-Davis: Antisemitism – three contentions

My paper published in the journal Sociology at the end of 2023 dis4cusses relationships between racism and antisemitism. It focuses on three major contestations which have taken place during the post WW2 era(s) regarding the ways racism, antisemitism and the relationships between them should be analysed. The first examines the different academic disciplinary approaches from which racism and antisemitism need to be studied. The second concerns the relationship between antisemitism, racism and modernity, introducing the notion of ‘new antisemitism’ which has become entangled in this contestation. The third examines how understanding racism and antisemitism relates to the theory and politics of intersectionality. The article argues against exclusionary constructions of racism resulting from different forms of identity politics. It calls for an inclusive definition of racism in which vernacular and specific forms of racism can be contextualised and analysed within an encompassing de-centered non-Eurocentric definition of racism. Within such an analytical framework, antisemitism should be seen as a form of racism.

References

  1. Fekete, L. (2020). Fault lines in the fight against racism and antisemitism. Institute for Race Relations https://irr.org.uk/article/fault-lines-in-the-fight-against-racism-and-antisemitism/. ↩︎
  2. Bakan, A. B., & Abu-Laban, Y. (2024). Anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism, and solidarity: considerations towards an analytic of praxis. Studies in Political Economy / Recherches En Économie Politique, 105(1), 107–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/07078552.2024.2325300 ↩︎
  3. Feldman, D., Gidley, B., & McGeever, B. (2025). Facing antisemitism: The struggle for safety and solidarity. Runnymede Trust. https://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/facing-antisemitism-the-struggle-for-safety-and-solidarity ↩︎
  4. Yuval-Davis, N. (2023). Antisemitism is a Form of Racism – or is it? Sociology, 58(4), 779-795. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231208691  ↩︎

Authors

Ben Gidley is a Reader in Sociology and Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University of London, a member of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, and previously a Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society at Oxford University. He is also a member of the International Centre on Racism at Edge Hill and a board member of the European Sociological Association’s Research Network on Racism and Antisemitism and the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies. He researches antisemitism, Islamophobia, the far right and conspiracy theories.

Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at University College London’s Institute of Education and Social Research Institute. Her recent research and publications have been topics including: boys and masculinities, young people and consumption, serial migration, visibly ethnically mixed households, and language brokering in transnational families.

Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor Emeritus, Honorary Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London. She has written widely on intersected gendered nationalisms, racisms, fundamentalisms, citizenships, identities, belonging/and everyday bordering as well as on situated intersectionality and dialogical epistemology. Among her books are Woman-Nation-State (1989), Racialized Boundaries (1992), Unsettling Settler Societies (1995), Gender and Nation (1997), The Warning Signs of Fundamentalism (2004), The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (2011), Women Against Fundamentalism (2014) and Bordering (2019).