Reckoning with October 7: Online Antisemitism after October 7
The seventh webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute's yearlong series reckoning with the response within higher education to October 7 is titled “Online Antisemitism after October 7.” The panelists are Matthias J. Becker, who discusses "Antisemitism after October 7: Insights from Social Media Studies," and Günther Jikeli, who addresses "Antisemitic Mobilization across Ideological Borders through Social Media."
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.
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).
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.
Topics: Webinars • Israel Initiative