Online Antisemitism after October 7

The seventh webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s series reckoning with the response within higher education to October 7 will take place on Sunday, July 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.

Click here to register for the webinar!

All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.

Our seventh webinar will focus on “Online Antisemitism after October 7.” The panelists are Matthias J. Becker, who will discuss “Antisemitism after October 7: Insights from Social Media Studies,” and Günther Jikeli, who will talk about “Antisemitic Mobilization across Ideological Borders through Social Media.”

How to Register

Registration for each panel via Eventbrite is required. Register for the upcoming panel here. All future Telos-Paul Piccone webinars will be managed through the Eventbrite portal.

After registering, you will be given an option to retrieve your tickets to the event. You will also receive a reminder via email both two days and thirty minutes before the webinar.

This event is free for participants, but as an independent, non-profit organization, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute relies on your generosity. To donate to our efforts, click here. Donations are tax deductible in the United States.

For more information about the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative, click here.

Participant Biographies

Panelists

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is the founder and lead of the international research project Decoding Antisemitism at the Technische Universität Berlin. The project comprehensively and deeply analyzes online antisemitism using an interdisciplinary framework that combines the humanities, social sciences, and AI research. The research team qualitatively analyzed a dataset of over 130,000 comments from German, British, and French social media contexts and used this data as training material for AI models. Becker’s presentation will introduce the project and its research design and will discuss the latest findings from his case studies on October 7.

According to Becker: “October 7 marked a pivotal moment in which antisemitism, both online and offline, escalated significantly to levels not seen in decades. Previously, periods of escalation in the Middle East typically led to an increase in antisemitic stereotypes and demonizing analogies. What changed on October 7, however, was not just an unprecedented spike in these terms but a trend toward something the research team had not seen in previous case studies. This represents a turning point that has fundamentally changed the online reproduction of antisemitic ideas. The Decoding Antisemitism project examines antisemitic expression at all levels, analyzing not only the sheer quantity of Jew-hatred but also identifying the stereotypes and the communicative strategies used to convey them. This approach is particularly necessary in light of recent events, as coded language is a phenomenon present in mainstream online discourse as well as in fringe communities. Fully understanding this range and using this knowledge to train GenAI is the stated goal of the DA research project.”

Günther Jikeli holds the Erna B. Rosenfeld Professorship at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. He is an associate professor of Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies and heads the Social Media & Hate research lab. The lab focuses on examining and quantifying antisemitism in social media. Jikeli has published widely on antisemitism on social media in France and Germany, perceptions of the Holocaust, and the return of religious antisemitism, including Muslim antisemitism. His focus shifted after October 7, with “Holocaust Distortions on Social Media after 10/7: The Antisemitic Mobilization” (pre-published in H-Commons) and “The Universal and The Particular: 10/7 and Its Aftermath Challenges the Very Concept of Humanity” (in Antisemitism Studies).

In his presentation, Jikeli will discuss how, since October 7, “antisemitism on social media has escalated to unprecedented levels, moving from the mere circulation of antisemitic tropes to active antisemitic mobilization. The accusation of genocide now functions as the new blood libel used to justify terror against Jews.”

Moderator and Host

Our panel’s moderator is Dr. Gabriel Noah Brahm (aka Gabi Abramovich). Brahm is Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel Initiative, Professor of English and World Literature at Northern Michigan University, and a Visiting Scholar with the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. A frequent contributor to such leading journals of thought and opinion as the American Mind, Fathom, Perspectives on Political Science, Society, and Telos, he is co-editor, with Cary Nelson, of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2014). He received his B.A. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. As a dual American-Israeli citizen, he has double, not dual loyalties. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @Brahmski.

Contact Information
Telos-Paul Piccone Institute
431 East 12th St.
New York, NY 10009

Tel: (212) 228-6479
Email: info@telosinstitute.net
www.telosinstitute.net