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.
Latest Update: Early Career Fellowship - The Pears Institute seeks an outstanding postdoctoral researcher with a specialism in the study of antisemitism in the past or the present day.
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.
This panel discussion explores how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, religion, race and gender functioned and interacted differently in European Jewish heartlands, in the Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman empire, and in the North American Atlantic world.
What is antisemitism? How can we recognise and define it?
This short course, which is open to everyone, explores the sources, development and contemporary forms of antisemitism drawing on information and concepts from the social sciences and history.
This book charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century.
How can we defend academic freedom, repudiate antisemitism on campus and protect Jewish students? David Feldman argues that the universalist principles that underpin equality law provide the best means to combat Miller and others. They are also the basis on which Jews and other minorities can act in solidarity.
The IHRA definition is confusing and divisive. Forcing its adoption will not help protect Jewish students and staff. David Feldman argues there is a need to tackle antisemitism but also racism in universities more broadly.
For the last four years there has been an intensified debate—at least in Europe and North America—about the ethics and politics of historical comparison. Michael Rothberg offers preliminary reflections on this spate of recent controversies while also situating them in relation to selected earlier disputes.
Intersectionality is a methodological approach in the social sciences that investigates the multidimensionality of power relations. Why does this framework routinely exclude antisemitism?
The Pears Institute is a respected source of independent advice and comment on antisemitism, contributing to policy formation and public debate.
