Online Seminar for Scholars and Researchers: Anti-Jewish Racism and Violence After October 7th and Before

The massacre and hostage taking carried out by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, has provoked different reactions. Some on the left have supported Hamas’s actions and others have refused to criticize them. At the same time, recorded antisemitic incidents have soared in the UK, as they have in other countries. Jews have mobilized in unprecedented numbers in protest.

On Tuesday, December 12th, from 1 PM-2:15 PM (UK time), the University of London’s Birkbeck Center for the Study of Antisemitism will host an online seminar for scholars and researchers, featuring Camila Bassi and Yair Wallach, who will examine responses to anti-Jewish violence.    

Camila Bassi: ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’ in Wake of October 7th

Tuck and Yang’s seminal paper, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” published in 2012, has not only shaped postcolonial/decolonial academic research, but has also become a rallying point for those celebrating the October 7th atrocities by Hamas. In this presentation, Camila Bassi argues that post-October 7th “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” expresses a total war against the harmful “Jewish Other” which foregrounds Israeli and Zionist Jews as the living and leading symbols of the evils and harms of settler colonialism. 

Yair Wallach: How to Understand Anti-Jewish Violence? Rethinking Moments of Zionist/Anti-Zionist Controversy From 1891 to 2023 

Since October 7th, numerous attacks on Jewish institutions have been recorded. For many, this confirms the inherently antisemitic nature of pro-Palestine solidarity. At the same time, left-wing Diaspora Jews have voiced sharpening critiques of Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza as a danger for the Jewish future worldwide. In this talk, Yair Wallach considers the inextricable relationship between Diaspora Jews and Israel/Zionism, the changing historical nature of this relationship, and the manner in which antisemitism is understood by Zionists and anti-Zionists in this regard.  

Camila Bassi is a senior lecturer in Human Geography at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research interests are in the geographies of ‘race’, ethnicity and sexuality, and Marxist geographies. She has published academic critiques of the revolutionary left vanguard of England’s anti-war movement and of the historical U-turns in the Marxist politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Her book, Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination (No Pasaran Media, 2023), was awarded the best book on contemporary antisemitism 2023 by the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

Yair Wallach is a Reader in Israeli Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he is also the head of the SOAS Center for Jewish Studies. He is a social and cultural historian of modern Palestine/Israel, studying Jews and Palestinians in a relational manner. He has written on Israel/Palestine and on antisemitism for The Guardian, Haaretz, and other publications. His current research explores Ashkenazi integration and acculturation in the Arab Levant.

For more information and FREE registration, please visit HERE.