The ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute for Antisemitism Studies is set to kick off at Oxford University on Sunday amid a worldwide rise in antisemitism that led to unlawful encampments and rounds of arrests at universities and colleges this spring.
The event is scheduled from July 28 to Aug. 9 at St Catherine’s College. During the program, faculty members, joining from across the globe, will receive guidance in building antisemitism courses that they will teach students upon returning to their home countries.
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy is an international organization that works on mapping, decoding and combating contemporary antisemitism. ISGAP’s founder and executive director, Charles Asher Small, will give the opening lecture titled “The Importance of Creating Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies.”
“The program helps professors create courses in an area of academia where there is a large void. Our graduates return to their home universities and teach their students, for course credit, on a subject matter that is of great importance and an increasing challenge to social cohesion. Antisemitism is now threatening our very basic democratic principles,” Small told JNS.
He hopes that by collaborating with top professors from around the world, antisemitism studies can morph into an academic field.
“At the end of the initiative, participating faculty members will present an outline of their new courses that we designed together,” said Small.
On Tuesday, Small testified in Washington to the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Oversight, meeting on “Fueling Chaos: Tracing the Flow of Tax-Exempt Dollars to Antisemitism.” He outlined a comprehensive set of 12 policy recommendations to combat antisemitism in higher education and ensure transparency and accountability in university funding.
The New York Times revealed this month that police arrested more than 3,100 protesters during the wave of anti-Israel encampments on U.S. campuses this spring.
However, most of the charges have since been dropped. In one instance, prosecutor Delia Garza in Travis County, Texas, dropped criminal trespassing charges against more than 100 people arrested at the University of Texas at Austin, on the pretext that jurors would have likely ruled that students were exercising the right to free speech.
In February, Small discussed in a conversation with JNS the findings of his research, including tens of millions of dollars in undocumented money coming from Qatar to universities in the United States, Canada and Europe.
“Why would a country that is supporting the dismantling of the State of Israel, the killing of Jews and the destruction of democracy be giving so much money to very important institutions and universities in higher education?” he asked.
“Qatar is using soft power to promote this ideology to distance Israel from the West and uses antisemitism to fragment the United States and other democracies. They are succeeding,” Small said.
