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.
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 first monograph to analyse the Bolshevik response to antisemitism. Brendan McGeever also uncovers the explosive overlap between revolutionary politics and antisemitism, and the capacity for class to become racialized in a moment of crisis. Awarded the 2020 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for History.
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.
The Pears Institute explores the pattern of antisemitism both today and in the past. We connect research on antisemitism to the wider study of racialization and intolerance.
