Antisemitism, Populism, and Politics Today: Learning from the British Experience with Dr. David Hirsch

Antisemitism, Populism, and Politics Today: Learning from the British ExperienceA community lecture with Dr. David Hirsh, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London
David has been in the sociology department at Goldsmiths since 2003. He wrote his PhD on Crimes Against Humanity and International Law. He was the holder of the Sociological Review Fellowship which enabled him to write ‘Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials.’ This book was awarded the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Prize for the best first book in sociology in 2004. By focusing on two trials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the trial of Andrei Sawoniuk for crimes committed during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case, the book comes to some tentative conclusions about the possibility of the emergence of cosmopolitan law.

David’s newest book is ‘Contemporary Left Antisemitism.’ It begins with a chapter on the Livingstone Formulation, a standard response which accuses Jews of raising the issue of antisemitism in bad faith only in order to silence criticism of Israel or to smear the left. It has two chapters about the rise of antizionist and antisemitic politics in the British Labour movement and two chapters about the campaign to exclude Israelis from the academic, cultural, sporting and economic life of humanity. It has a critique of antizionism and the apartheid analogy; it also looks at specifically Jewish antizionism; it examines case studies of openly antisemitic discourse which have emerged out of antizionism; it discusses struggles over defining antisemitism; and it thinks about specifically sociological approaches to understanding contemporary antisemitism.