Article published in Contemporary Jewry: What drives antisemitic hostility in the 21st century?

Although the CHACE project has been formally finalized, some pieces of research have remained in the pipeline. One of them was published today in Contemporary Jewry. In this paper I pose a big question: What drives antisemitic hostility in the 21st century? The article certainly does not settle this complex issue, but begins to address it more systematically than before by way of a comparative and longitudinal case study approach focusing on Germany, Sweden, and Russia in the period 1990 to 2020.

The very brief summary is that patterns of antisemitic hostility do not align with what we would expect if 21st-century antisemitism were primarily driven by a general “syndrome” of outgroup hostility. Instead, the findings support theorizing that posits hostile sentiment toward Israel and Zionism as an important driving or catalyzing force behind the intensification of antisemitic hostility in the 21st century. More comparative research with a broader range of cases is needed to probe this relationship further.

The article—What Drives Antisemitic Hostility in the Twenty-First Century? A Comparative Case Study of Germany, Sweden, and Russia (1990–2020)—is published open access and freely available.