The Official ISCA Podcast

Sunday, March 09, 2025. In this episode, Yaron Gamburg discusses, "Back to the Origins of Antisemitism: Attitudes Towards Jews and Israel in Contemporary Russia."Yaron Gamburg is a Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies of Tel Aviv University and a PhD student at the Institute of Geopolitics at Paris 8 University. His academic research focuses on antisemitism and the discourse of the Holocaust in post-Soviet Russia. During his diplomatic service, he served at the embassies of Israel in Moscow, Paris, Washington D.C., and as Deputy Chief of Mission to the OECD, Council of Europe, and UNESCO. Born and raised in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, he immigrated to Israel in 1990. He completed his BA in Economics and MA in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Yaron has also published a piece for the ISCA Beinner Family Research Series on Antisemitism, "The Antisemitic Discourse of a 'Friend of the Jewish People': Why Putin's Russia Slides Again into the Trap of Antisemitism."Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sunday, February 16, 2025. In this episode, Norman JW Goda discusses "The Genocide Libel: How the World Has Charged Israel With the Crime of Crimes, 1982-2024."Norman J.W. Goda specializes in the history of the Holocaust, war crimes trials, and twentieth century diplomacy. He teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany from historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. His single authored books include Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (2007) and The Holocaust: Europe, the World, and the Jews (2nd ed 2022). He has also co-authored, with Richard Breitman, US Intelligence and the Nazis (2005) and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (2010). He has edited two volumes of international essays titled Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Perspectives (2014) and Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays Across Disciplines (2018). He served a lead editor on To the Gates of Jerusalem: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1945-1947 (2014), which concerns Holocaust refugees and the question of Palestine in those years, and Envoy to the Promised Land: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1948-1951 (2017) which concerns McDonald’s work as the first US ambassador to Israel and the initial years of the new state. Goda has published articles in various journals including the Journal of Modern History, The International History Review, The Journal of Contemporary History, and Antisemitism Studies, and his work has been the subject of stories by the The New York Times, the Associated Press, US News and World Report, and other major news outlets. Goda has served as a consultant to the US and German governments, as well as for various radio, television, and film documentaries in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel. He is currently working on a monograph concerning the 1987 Trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon for crimes against humanity, and, with Ed Kissi of the University of South Florida, an edited volume on the universalization of the Holocaust.Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

December 8, 2024. In this episode, Yfat Barak-Cheney, Dr. Matthias Becker, and Tal-Or Cohen, discuss "Trends, Research Gaps, and Future Directions in the Study of Online Antisemitism." Yfat Barak Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association.  Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Adv., is the founder and Executive Director of CyberWell – the first ever open database dedicated to fighting online antisemitism. Tal-Or is an expert in digital social platforms, hate speech and extremism. She focuses on online antisemitism and social media hate speech policies, alongside hate crime reporting and legislation. Mrs. Cohen Montemayor has led a variety of open-source intelligence research projects, providing analysis and consulting services to the Institute of National Security Studies, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Jewish Agency. A Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) magna cum laude graduate of Government and Law and a member of the Israel Bar Association, prior to launching CyberWell, Tal-Or worked in the business and web intelligence space at a boutique consulting firm in Tel Aviv. Dr. Matthias J. Becker is an expert in cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and social media studies, with a particular focus on the study of hate speech within the political mainstream. His doctoral dissertation, Antisemitism in Reader Comments, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021, analyzes antisemitic stereotypes and historical analogies in British and German online discourse related to the Middle East conflict. Since 2020, he has been leading the international, transdisciplinary research project Decoding Antisemitism. In this context, he serves as co-editor of a comprehensive 40-chapter Lexicon that offers systematic guidance for deconstructing both explicit and implicit antisemitism on social media. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, November 24, 2024. In this episode, Matthias Küntzel discusses "October 7th and the Shoah." Matthias Küntzel is a political scientist and historian based in Hamburg, Germany. Between 2004 and 2015, he was an external research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Küntzel is the author of several books, including Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos 2007), Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold (Telos 2014) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism, and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II (Routledge 2024). Küntzel’s essays on Islamism, antisemitism and Iran have been published inter alia in The Wall Street Journal, The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Fathom and Die ZEIT and they have been translated into fourteen languages. See for additional information www.matthiaskuentzel.net. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, November 17, 2024. In this episode, Dr. Aaron Hagler discusses "Who is 'The Jew' in Early and Later Islamic Texts?" Dr. Aaron (Ari) Hagler has a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania (2011) and an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005). He is the author of two books: Owning Disaster (Routledge, 2024) and The Echoes of Fitna (Brill, 2022). Previously, he has served as Associate Professor of History at Troy University. Currently, he is a history educator at Geffen Academy at UCLA. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Wednesday, October 30, 2024. In this episode, Adam Kirsch discusses "The Ideology of Settler Colonialism and the Response to Oct. 7." Adam Kirsch is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. His latest, just recently published, is On Settler Colonialsm: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim award, he is an editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Review section and frequently writes for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Tablet, and other publications. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, October 27, 2024. In this episode, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove discusses "For Such a Time as This: Being Jewish After October 7." Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, PhD, a leading voice of American Jewry, has been the rabbi of New York’s Park Avenue Synagogue since 2008. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999 and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The author of the recently published book, For Such a Time as This: On Being Jewish Today, Rabbi Cosgrove is the editor of Jewish Theology in Our Time: A New Generation Explores the Foundations and Future of Jewish Belief. His essays and op-eds appear frequently in a variety of national Jewish journals and periodicals. Among his many professional activities, Rabbi Cosgrove sits on the Chancellor's Cabinet of JTS, where he is adjunct faculty, and is on the Editorial Board of Conservative Judaism. A member of the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, he is also an officer of the New York Board of Rabbis and a member of the Board of UJA-Federation of New York. He serves as Rabbinical Advisor on Interfaith Affairs for the ADL and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Rabbi Cosgrove was honored to represent the Jewish community at the National September 11 Memorial Museum during the visit of Pope Francis to New York in September 2015. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Monday, October 21, 2024. In this episode, Pavel Brunssen and Andrei Markovits discuss "From Chants to Change: German Soccer's Unique Response to Antisemitism Post-October 7." Pavel Brunssen is a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. Brunssen’s research interests include antisemitism, antigypsyism, memory cultures, European soccer, and fan cultures. He has published widely on these topics, including an edited volume entitled "Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond." Brunssen holds a PhD in German Studies from the University of Michigan. His award-winning dissertation forms the basis of his forthcoming book, The Making of "Jew Clubs": Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Indiana University Press). Andrei S. Markovits is the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies Emeritus and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He just concluded a fifty-year university teaching career at leading institutions in the United States, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Israel. His work on social democracy, trade unions, new social movements, antisemitism and anti-Americanism in Europe; as well as on comparative sports cultures and human-animal relations appeared in 18 languages in many books, articles and reviews. His latest work is a memoir entitled The Passport as Home: Comfort in Rootlessness (Central European University Press, 2021). Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, October 13, 2024. In this episode, Günther Jikeli and Katharina Soemer discuss "Manual Annotation: Why and How?" What is machine learning? How is machine learning helpful when observing and combatting antisemitism online? What challenges exist when using machine learning for this purpose? Why is manual annotation a necessary step for automated content detection? How do you manually annotate tweets? 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 has published widely on antisemitism online and offline. Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Bremen, Germany. She currently manages ISCA’s Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University. Her published work focuses on online antisemitism and methods of research in that field. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Sunday, October 6, 2024. In this episode, Günther Jikeli and Katharina Soemer discuss "Online Antisemitism Before and After October 7” as part of our 2024 Datathon & Machine Learning Competition. 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 has published widely on antisemitism online and offline. Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Bremen, Germany. She currently manages ISCA’s Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University. Her published work focuses on online antisemitism and methods of research in that field. Music: "Pleasant Porridge" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/