How is it that the organized hatred of the Jewish people has endured through all the vast political and cultural changes that human civilization has seen through time?

Organized hatred of the Jewish people has accommodated itself to the reigning spirit of the age,

whether that spirit was theological, scientific, or political. The phenomenon known as

anti-Semitism has found a way to exploit every accepted source of cultural authority for its

own purposes. On today's Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas, we explore this history, with the help of Robert

Wistrick's 2013 commentary essay, The Changing Face of Antisemitism.

My name is Jonathan Silver, your host, and I'm pleased to be joined by Charles Asher Small,

the founding director and president of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy is Gap. As a reminder, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, where I hope you leave us a rating and a review. And to learn more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, Tikvafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Charles, welcome to Tickfa podcast. Thank you. I'm really honored to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I thought we'd begin by discussing this essay, The Changing Face of Antisemitism, to see how the intellectual foundations of anti-Semitism have changed over time and how those changes help us understand contemporary anti-Semitism.

But why don't we begin by learning a little about the author? Can you introduce our listeners to Robert Wistrich?

Great. So, first of all, I think the article that Robert Wistrich wrote is really important and sort of serves as an intellectual roadmap to begin to understand anti-Semitism. Robert Wistrich was a well-known

historian. He was a professor at Hebrew University and he ran the Vidal-Sassun Institute that deals

with issues of anti-Semitism. He taught at University, UCLA, University College London, for many

years before making Alia and moving to Jerusalem.

And interestingly, his family were refugees from Europe who ended up in Kazakhstan

and survived the war and the Holocaust in Kazakhstan before emigrating to the United Kingdom.

So he has sort of an international experience, which was really touched profoundly,

if you will, by the Shoah. And he goes off to become an important historian and then starts to

focus his work on the history of anti-Semitism. And I think what marks Robert Wistrich is unique

and very important for our understanding.

He sort of breaks with the history of anti-Semitism and really begins to engage the complexities

of the contemporary context of global anti-Semitism.

And so what was the scholarly historical approach to anti-Semitism like before he did his most

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