The second day of “Contemporary Antisemitism 2026” asked a different question than the first. Rather than focusing on language and definitions, speakers examined the spaces where Jewish identity is increasingly contested: on television screens, social media feeds, university campuses, intellectual frameworks and even within minority communities that once promoted solidarity with other groups.
Scholars repeatedly returned to a common theme: Modern antisemitism is increasingly expressed through questions of belonging. The issue goes beyond what people say about Jews online to where Jews are accepted, excluded or expected to justify their presence.
Media and identity
“It is impossible to understand contemporary antisemitism without understanding contemporary media,” said Sharon Shahaf, a media scholar at Gratz College. Her session used Eurovision as an example of how Israel’s decades-long pursuit of European cultural belonging plays out on live television each year before hundreds of millions of viewers.
“For Israelis, Eurovision has long been a symbolic arena for pursuing Zionism’s cosmopolitan aspirations of European cultural belonging,” she told the audience.
Recent years, however, have seen countries threaten to boycott the competition because of Israel’s participation, while Israeli delegates have been heckled backstage, booed inside the arena and subjected to hostile media coverage—experiences she compared to those of “Jewish students on campus in the United States.”
The contrast between hostility inside the arena and support from viewers voting at home reflected a broader struggle over Israel’s legitimacy—not only in politics, but also in questions of cultural acceptance and visibility.
“Eurovision demonstrates the analytical power of live media events, international televised spectacles considering identity and belonging,” she concluded.
Queer antisemitism
Leor Baldus from the University of Marburg delivered a separate lecture on “antisemitism in queer spaces and LGBTQ pride marches,” describing the rejection of Jews from a movement built explicitly on solidarity.
“It has become extremely risky to wear Jewish symbols in LGBTQ contexts,” she said, describing a movement whose public square had turned hostile to the very people history might suggest it should protect.
She pointed to the 2024 Dyke March, where a participant carrying a pro-Israel solidarity sign was singled out, pointed at and later attacked. Baldus also addressed accusations of Israeli “pinkwashing”—the claim that Israel promotes its record on LGBTQ rights to distract from its policies toward the Palestinians.
“The notion of pinkwashing creates a suspicion-based interpretative frame in which any LGBTQ visibility collector is left,” she said. “Because if Israel is said to use queer rights to conceal occupation, apartheid, colonialism and genocide, then Western LGBTQ are addressed directly—as their own struggles are allegedly being instrumentalized for these evil politics as well.”
Her thesis was that anti-Zionism in queer spaces has become not merely a political position but a perceived requirement of queer solidarity, effectively turning Jewish and Israeli LGBT members into outsiders.
‘Spiral of Silence’
The outsider experience was echoed by Karen Fiss, an independent scholar and former professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, who argued that the contemporary art world has shifted from one in which Jews were prominent participants to one where they increasingly find themselves excluded.
Reflecting on decades in the profession, she questioned whether many Jews had forgotten that “our presence was still by permission only” and argued that the normalization of anti-Zionist ideology within cultural institutions had transformed ideological hostility into professional exclusion.
“When the massacre of Oct. 7 took place, the vilification of Israel and the position of the Jew as oppressor within a simplistic power binary was already securely in place in the art world,” she said. “Within days of the attack, anti-Zionism in the art world stopped being an undercurrent and became, in effect, a major ideological and effective tenet of the field’s professional sectors.”
If Shahaf, Baldus and Fiss described the spaces where Jews increasingly struggle to belong, Nir Kaplan of Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA) showed how those dynamics often begin online.
Monitoring platforms from Facebook to TikTok in roughly eight languages, Kaplan argued that unchecked hatred online rarely remains online. Drawing on what he called the “Spiral of Silence,” he said unchallenged extremist views can gradually become mainstream.
“If we will not denounce and will not erase antisemitism from the social platforms, it will become the norm,” he said. “It starts at the social platforms, [and] goes to the street, goes offline.”
His research team found that use of the antisemitic “ZOG” (“Zionist Occupied Government”) conspiracy theory rose by roughly 54% after Oct. 7, with bots and coordinated networks driving roughly half of that increase, illustrating how extremist narratives gain traction online before spreading into broader public discourse.
Moving the marginalized into the real world
The conference then turned to how antisemitism emerging online and in marginalized communities can spread into mainstream society.
A panel on public policy was chaired by Jacob Dallal, managing director of the Comper Center at the University of Haifa, which hosted the conference. He argued that the Rubicon had been crossed for Jewish life in the Diaspora after Oct. 7.
This shift, he said, is driven less by Israel itself than by broader instability within Western societies.
“Antisemitism thrives in a society where there is polarization, where there is social instability, economic instability,” he said. “It thrives in bad times.”
He was joined by Inbal Ratz Gilmore of the Yachad Israel-Breaking Barriers Initiative and Rabbi Aharon Ariel Lavi, managing director of The Jerusalem Interfaith Center, who discussed how partnerships across ideological, governmental and diplomatic divides can strengthen support for Jewish communities.
For Gilmore, the work is both personal and strategic.
“I understood many years ago that in the heart of every struggle the State of Israel is facing, antisemitism is at the root,” she said, describing her Breaking Barriers initiative, which brings Israeli influencers together with liberal American Jewish leaders by deliberately connecting communities that “don’t speak to one another—and certainly don’t work together.”
She described the concept as “Two Camps, One Front,” a model she believes could extend beyond the Jewish world and become “something every nation could adopt and implement in their own eternal struggles.”
Lavi struck a blunter note, arguing that antisemitism is not a communications problem that can be solved through better messaging.
“There’s nothing here to explain,” he said. “You can’t explain it away.”
Instead, he urged Jewish communities to invest in identifying and organizing allies rather than simply rebutting critics.
“There’s a whole universe of potential allies and partners who can stand up with us. Because it’s not only our problem, it’s their problem,” he said, referring to extremist movements across the far left, far right and political Islam that seek to destabilize democratic societies. “The issue requires shifting from focusing on our enemies to focusing on our allies.”
Antisemitism and sexism: A shared ideology
The keynote address was delivered by Prof. Karin Stögner, a sociologist at the University of Passau, who examined the ideological frameworks that foster antisemitism.
She argued that antisemitism cannot be understood in isolation from other authoritarian ideologies and suggested that antisemitism and sexism are structurally intertwined.
Drawing on critical theory, she argued that the sexual violence committed against Israeli women on Oct. 7 was not incidental to the attack but central to it.
“Sexual violence became violence against Jewish sovereignty, female emancipation, and individual freedoms simultaneously,” she said, concluding: “The level of freedom in a society can be measured by how it treats women, Jews, and sexual minorities.”
A place of belonging
Across discussions of television, social media, minority movements and critical theory, a common question emerged: Where can Jews belong without first having to justify their identity?
Rather than portraying antisemitism as a series of isolated incidents, speakers argued that today’s hostility increasingly centers on who is permitted to occupy cultural, academic and ideological spaces.
Dallal said creating a community for researchers is one of the conference’s most important achievements.
“This is like a home for people who, in their individual institutions, feel very isolated,” he told JNS. “You’ve never seen a group of people so happy to talk about antisemitism, and the reason for that is because when they’re not in this kind of warm and friendly environment, they’re in a not warm and very unfriendly environment. So that’s the first thing: to make a home.”
The conference in Haifa brought together more than 220 speakers in person, with additional participants joining virtually, and attracted more than 500 attendees from over 20 countries.
Organizers also announced the launch of the Contemporary Antisemitism Studies Association (CASA), an advisory body bringing together scholars researching contemporary antisemitism across a range of academic disciplines, methodologies and perspectives.
