Antisemitism, Identity Politics, and American Identity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

• Legal, Politics & Economics
• Religion & Spirituality

“Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.”

– Eric Ward, “Skin in The Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism” (Political Research, 2017)

Eric Ward is a long time civil rights strategist and the Executive Director at Western States Center. In 1990, Ward documented his first White Nationalist Rally, and since then has been working to expose and respond to bigoted violence across the country through empowering community organization. Ward emphasizes that in order to understand the threat posed by the rapidly growing white nationalist movement in the United States today, we must first come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to white nationalist ideology.

Joining Eric Ward in conversation is Tony Michels, a professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Christina Greer, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. Together these panelists will pull on the threads that connect past and present, and help us begin the process of unraveling the prevalence antisemitism, and bigotry more broadly, in America.