The Pears Institute is a centre of innovative research and teaching on antisemitism, racialization and religious intolerance. It contributes to knowledge and understanding, policy formation and public debate.
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Established by Pears Foundation in 2010, our founding principle is that the study of antisemitism is vital to understanding other forms of racialization, racism and religious intolerance.
We are an internationally recognized centre for innovative research and teaching.
Our scholarship contributes to public debate on antisemitism, racialization and religious intolerance and we provide expertise and advice to a wide range of institutions in the UK, Europe and the wider world.
The Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism is based at Birkbeck, University of London and is both independent and inclusive.
David Feldman and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum explore the origins and history of racial conceptions of antisemitism, and reflect on their significance today.
Image: Schoolwork produced in Nazi Germany representing the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
For the last four years there has been an intensified debate about the ethics and politics of historical comparison. While current controversies are not limited to questions of racism and antisemitism, those two categories are frequently invoked and are often at stake…
When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they announced the overthrow of a world scarred by exploitation and domination. Yet, in the very moment of revolution, antisemitic pogroms swept the former Pale of Settlement. Brendan McGeever examines the Bolshevik response to this unprecedented wave of antisemitism and the crucial role played by Jewish radicals…
Holocaust education and commemoration are becoming more visitor centric. Yet there is a significant gap in scholarship regarding visitor responses to difficult histories. This edited volume aims to examine diverse aspects of visitor engagement with the Holocaust both inside the museum and outside of it.
The German language holds an ambivalent and controversial place in the modern history of European Jews. Marc Volovici offers a new understanding, turning to German to illuminate the questions and dilemmas that largely defined the experience of European Jews in the age of nationalism.
As some Jews became ‘white’ in the twentieth century, large groups of non-white Jews simply disappeared, or at least disappeared as Jews. Anxieties about the intersections between Jews and race play an important role in sustaining some of the fallacies that mark discussions around Jews of colour.
Laws prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust have been passed in many countries, yet Holocaust denial is still with us. At the same time, denial contributes to the erasure of the history of African enslavement in UK politics and wider culture.
Our work shows how antisemitism has often been intertwined with anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-black and anti-Irish bigotries. Antisemitism and other racisms should not be considered in isolation and still less in competition.
Professor David Feldman, Director
