There’s an element of masochism to spending two days listening to brilliant scholars from around the world lecture on antisemitism. It could be very depressing, and I wasn’t going to attend. But the International Conference on Contemporary Antisemitism, which began on July 7, was being held at Haifa University, and I hadn’t been to Haifa since arriving in Israel a year ago. So, when I saw that a city tour was on the conference agenda, I packed my bag.

I’m glad I went. I not only saw Haifa but, by the end of the second day, realized four crucial questions that scholars haven’t been asking about contemporary antisemitism.

To begin with, the term antisemitism is problematic. It doesn’t properly account for how Jew hatred is tied to contemporary antizionism which, as Adam Lewis-Klein argues, is a distinct form of anti-Jewish bigotry. The term also fails to account for the distinctions between historic antisemitism and the new or “contemporary” forms of antisemitism. By virtue of the conference’s title, Contemporary antisemitism, this last critique seems implicitly accepted.

Older antisemitism, according to Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow and Conference presenter Tomer Persico, portrays Jews as a threat to the world through their liberal values. Holding out the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an example, Perisco shows how this 1903 antisemitic Tsarist forgery claims that Jewish liberal values are a poison which will “weaken humanity, allowing the Jews to take over the world.” Classic antisemitism, by Persico’s account, also includes the blood libel claim that Jews killed the messiah, engaged in ritualistic slaughter of children, greedily exploit the poor, and portray Jews as purveyors of communism. Jews are the emblematic “Other,” the eternal outsiders, the perpetual wanderers, “the pariah on the periphery of culture, the threat to the purity of the people and the wholesomeness of the family.”

This sharply contrasts with contemporary antisemitism, which Persico contends arises from a theological scheme composed of a........

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