What Antisemitism Studies Can Learn From Racism Studies — And Vice Versa ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, February 12, 2026

What Antisemitism Studies Can Learn From Racism Studies — And Vice Versa

Magda Teter, a historian at Fordham University and author of Christian Supremacy and the National Jewish Book Award-winning Blood Libel, was just named the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Her first public lecture, titled "On Jewish Suffering, Empathy, and the Need to Rethink Antisemitism," took place this week.

Based on what we know from the Yale Daily News and Yale's own announcement, Teter wants to move the field beyond the exhausting definitional debates — IHRA vs. Jerusalem Declaration, is criticism of Israel antisemitism, and so on — and toward something more fundamental.

Based on her earlier lectures and her book Christian Supremacy, we can see what she has in mind.

Teter draws a sharp contrast between how antisemitism and racism are studied academically:

Antisemitism studies tends to focus on perpetrators — their texts, ideologies, conspiracy theories, and emotional hatred. It analyzes the haters.

Racism studies tends to focus on the harmed — legal exclusion, economic disparity, incarceration rates, structural consequences. It analyzes systemic impact on victims.

Each field, in other words, is doing only half the job.

If antisemitism studies focuses on perpetrators without examining how hatred restructured Jewish lives, it is studying the disease without examining what it does to the patient.

And if racism studies focuses on structural harm without examining the theological and philosophical architecture that made racial hierarchy morally coherent in the first place, it is studying symptoms without understanding the underlying logic.

A complete analysis of any form of bigotry needs both: the intellectual architecture that made it coherent and the lived impact on the people targeted.

Her work on how theology became law, combined with her observation that antisemitism studies focuses on haters while racism studies focuses on the harmed, points to something neither field has fully modeled: there is a feedback loop that operated for centuries in Christian Europe.

It worked roughly like this:

Theology → Law → Economic Adaptation → Stereotype → Renewed Hostility → Law

Christian theology cast Jews as subordinate — "the elder shall serve the younger." That theological idea was codified into law: Jews were prohibited from holding authority over Christians, from owning land, from joining guilds, from holding public office.

Those legal restrictions forced Jews into specific economic roles — finance, trade, moneylending. Those adaptations then fed back into stereotypes: "Jews control money." "Jews are parasitic." The stereotypes reinforced hostility, which produced new restrictive laws. And the cycle continued.

Antisemitism wasn't just hatred floating in the air. It was an architecture — theology became law, law shaped lives, and shaped lives reinforced the theology.

We can then push this framework into more modern territory.

The historical feedback loop depended heavily on law — formal legal restrictions that structured Jewish (and Black) vulnerability. In modern liberal democracies, those explicit laws are gone. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jewish emancipation in Europe, constitutional equality guarantees — these dismantled the formal legal architecture of bigotry.

So if the feedback loop requires a legal component to be durable, where is it now?

I cannot answer that for racism studies, although I imagine there are still plenty of laws and regulations that are still racist in effect. This is not my field.

Yet for daily, personal antisemitism — harassment, vandalism, campus hostility — the law piece is largely absent. There is no legal structure forcing Jews into particular economic roles or restricting their citizenship. There are university policies and how they are selectively enforced, and while those are important, it is not the same role as state law has been in the past. Daily antisemitism is still real and harmful, but national laws protect Jews at least as much as they are used to attack Jews. Law doesn't have the structural durability that the old loop produced.

For Israel, however, the picture is very different.

The legal arena hasn't disappeared. It has scaled upward — from domestic law to international law and from antisemitism to antizionism.

The structural parallel is compelling. In medieval Europe, church law prohibited Jews from holding authority over Christians. Today, international legal frameworks are used to contest the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself.

The legal categories being deployed — "apartheid," "genocide," "illegal occupation," "colonialism" — are not just political accusations. They are formal legal terms that trigger institutional consequences: UN resolutions, ICC investigations, sanctions campaigns, academic boycotts, corporate divestment.

And just as the old legal restrictions produced a feedback loop, so does the new one:

Legal accusation → Institutional action → Political isolation → Behavioral adaptation → Reinforced accusation

When Israel is framed in international law as an apartheid state or a genocidal regime, that framing doesn't just sit in a legal brief. It shapes UN voting patterns, campus culture, media framing, and diplomatic relations.

Israel adapts to the pressure. It adds layers of policies for how to wage wars it never wanted. Israel's enemies take advantage of those controls to exploit them. Israel tries to come up with creative ways to protect the lives of its people - and this often leads to the next round of accusations or even new international laws and novel interpretations created just for Israel. The loop sustains itself.

This is structurally parallel to what Teter documents historically, but at a different scale. Where Jews were once restricted by municipal and church law, Jewish sovereignty is now contested in global legal forums. The arena has changed. The structural mechanics haven't.

If Teter is right that antisemitism studies needs to examine the impact on Jews — not just the ideology of the haters — then it also needs to examine how international law functions as the contemporary legal architecture of delegitimization under the guise of "anti-Zionism."

That means antisemitism studies can't just treat the Israel question as a definitional debate ("is criticism of Israel antisemitic?"). It needs to ask a structural question: How does the selective application of international legal categories function as a mechanism of legitimacy contestation against Jewish sovereignty?

When legal categories are applied asymmetrically — when "apartheid" is invoked against the one Jewish state but not against states with far worse records — something beyond ordinary legal analysis is operating. But it is using law as a weapon against Jews, in startlingly similar ways to medieval antisemitic laws, and that is a pattern that has been understudied.

Teter has given antisemitism studies a powerful framework. The feedback loop — from ideas to law to lived experience and back again — is the right model. But if we take that model seriously, we have to follow it where it leads.

The law didn't disappear from the antisemitism equation with Western emancipation and enlightenment,

It scaled up.