Abstract: Pearn Kandola’s Antisemitism and Islamophobia at Work report (2024) is a comprehensive study in which over 1000 Muslim and Jewish employees participated, either through in-depth focus groups or our survey, to shine a light on their experiences of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the workplace since October 7th 2023.
Late last year, we published our groundbreaking Religion At Work (2023) report, the largest of its kind. It explored the experiences of people of faith in the workplace, highlighting the difficulty for employees of any religion to express their faith at work.
Released in November 2023, a question we were increasingly faced with as time went on was the impact on Muslim and Jewish employees, in particular, since October 7th. However, the data for this momentous report was gathered and analysed before the current Israel-Gaza conflict, which could tell us little to answer this question.
As a result, we carried out a new piece of research, designed to look at the:
Extent to which Jewish employees experience antisemitism in the workplace;
Extent to which Muslim employees experience Islamophobia in the workplace;
Impact of the Israel-Gaza conflict on them
Actions that organisations can take to ensure people feel safe and included in workplaces
The research was in two parts:
Firstly, a survey was carried out in June 2024 in which 500 Jewish and 500 Muslim employees participated, followed by in-depth interviews with 20 people, 10 of each faith.
The report closes with key recommendations for employers to better support Muslim and Jewish employees by research author Professor Binna Kandola OBE.
Abstract: Evaluative research in Jewish education often adopts a “silver bullet” approach, attributing identity outcomes to single programs or interventions. This article advances an ecosystem framework that situates Jewish schooling, family upbringing, and peer networks within their wider communal and societal contexts. Drawing on hierarchical regression analyses of large-scale survey data (n = 21,260) from four Jewish diaspora communities, we find that the impact of Jewish education depends on its interaction with family background, social capital, and national setting. Jewish identity thus emerges as a cumulative and relational process rather than the product of discrete experiences. These findings underscore the limitations of single-country studies, which often generalize about Jewish identity formation without considering the structural and contextual differences that shape communal life in different national settings. The findings also extend sociological theories of social capital, cultural capital, and the life course, offering new insight into how educational, familial, and communal forces together sustain Jewish identity in diaspora.
Abstract: The British Jewish community has faced an unprecedented number of attacks in recent weeks, including multiple arson incidents and a terrorist attack. As the UK government grapples with how to respond, this ISD policy brief offers a strategic framework for confronting a range of antisemitic threats. These threats encompass mainstream and extreme actors, state- and non-state-linked activity, online and offline environments, and both violence and latent cultural antisemitism. It urges a cross-government strategy, led by the UK Prime Minister’s Office, centred on the online environment and designed to address the diverse actors, tactics and harms targeting the Jewish community. This brief builds on ISD’s research and policy development on the diverse harms landscape, covering threats such as terrorism, extremism, hostile state activity and targeted hate including antisemitism.
Abstract: The chapter uses an autoethnographic method to analyse the displacement experiences of its authors, who come from different ethnic backgrounds, mother tongues, geographies and histories in Turkey. The fact that the paths of the authors, as living representations of Turkey’s ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity, crossed in exile in Germany is also the history of the silencing of ethnic, religious and political minorities. The authors uncover the interconnectedness of those individual stories that are inherent in the larger historical narrative of the country. Thus, they offer us an analysis of the experiences of exile in Germany, through three intertwined autoethnographies of Jewish, Kurdish and anarchist academic exiles.
Abstract: Following last week’s horrific antisemitic attack in Golders Green in north London, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer called on the public to “open their eyes to Jewish pain”. Yet our research suggests that the PM and his government might do better to open their own eyes to what underpins the pain many British Jews experience today: the state’s failure to honour its social contract with this minority.
Since the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Gaza war, Jews in Britain have experienced a growing tide of antisemitism. Over the course of 2025, 3,700 instances of antisemitic hate were reported, up 4 per cent from the previous year and 14 per cent lower than the highest ever annual total of 4,298 antisemitic incidents reported in 2023. Incidents include last week’s Golders Green attack, in which two men were stabbed; an arson attack at former synagogue in east London; an attack on the Jewish ambulance service Hatzola; an attempted firebombing at a synagogue in Kenton, London; and a terrorist attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue in October 2025, which killed two Jewish people and seriously injured three others.
In the wake of this alarming rise in antisemitism, focus groups we conducted between December 2025 and March 2026 with 43 British Jews across the UK revealed severely declining trust in Britain’s major institutions. The oldest non-Christian minority in the country, the Jewish community is less than 0.5 per cent of the UK population and includes both practising and non-practising members from a range of denominational affiliations and political views.
But despite their differences, people repeatedly expressed a similar stark sense of betrayal. Focus group participants stressed that while they were fulfilling their side of the bargain—complying with the law, paying taxes, contributing to civic life—the state increasingly was failing to provide them with protection and treat them fairly. “The pillars in the society we live in”, bemoaned a man in his 70s from Birmingham, “are letting us down”.
Abstract: This research investigates how recommender algorithms on TikTok and Rumble expose UK minors to antisemitic content.
Analysts created 10 TikTok profiles representing 15-year-old users with varied political and cultural interests, including neutral interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict, left and right-wing political interest, male lifestyle influencer content, far-right content and two neutral accounts. The profiles were prompted towards relevant topics for each interest through an hour and a half of manual content viewing, followed by content engagement via bespoke bot over 14 days, resulting in over 5,500 recommended videos. Thematic analysis clustered content into 10 core themes, revealing pathways from neutral lifestyle content to highly politicised and conspiratorial clusters. Relevant themes were manually reviewed, revealing that harmful content persisted through videos, comments, and TikTok’s sticker and sound features, illustrating systemic gaps in safeguarding minors.
On Rumble, analysts collected 4,412 videos from the platform’s “Editor’s Picks” over six months. Analysts filtered for antisemitism-related keywords and reviewed 259 videos potentially relevant to antisemitism. Findings show Rumble hosts more overt antisemitic content than TikTok, including slurs, Holocaust distortion and conspiracies about Jewish control. These findings underscore urgent gaps in platform accountability and the need for robust enforcement of the Online Safety Act to protect children from the normalisation and mainstreaming of antisemitic content.
Abstract: In this report:
According to new data from Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, 742 people emigrated to Israel (‘made aliyah’) from the UK in 2025 – the highest annual count for over 40 years. This report examines the recent migration data in its historical context to assess whether this latest figure represents a genuine shift and if so, whether it is being fuelled by concerns about antisemitism in Britain.
Some of the key findings in the report:
742 people emigrated to Israel (‘made aliyah’) from the UK in 2025 – the highest annual count for over 40 years.
Over the past 20 years, annual counts have remained within a fairly narrow range, from about 400 to about 740.
Taking the past three years together, an average of 566 British Jews made aliyah per annum – close to the annual average over the past two decades.
About 2 Jews per 1,000 in the UK Jewish population currently make aliyah each year, somewhat higher than the equivalent figure for Canada (0.7), but considerably lower than in France (6.4), and orders of magnitude lower than the levels associated with major cases of Jewish flight during 20th Century crises or periods of acute uncertainty.
Since October 7, 2023, British Jews have shown a small but marked increase in their likelihood of making aliyah.
Younger people, orthodox Jews and those most affected by antisemitism are most likely to say they are considering making aliyah in the coming five years.
Aliyah, like all forms of migration, is also informed by socioeconomic conditions; there is clear evidence that factors such as unemployment rates are key determinants in people’s decisions.
Migration is not a one-way street: the number of people living in the UK who were born in Israel rose from 12,229 in 2001 to 23,152 in 2021, a net increase of 10,923 over those 20 years.
Abstract: В статье рассматриваются фольклорные версии, объясняющие ненависть Гитлера к евреям. Рассматриваемые тексты зафиксированы в основном на территориях, входивших в черту оседлости, от людей старшего возраста, которые или сами контактировали с евреями, преимущественно до войны, или много слышали о них из уст родителей. Версии сводятся к одной из трех объяснительных стратегий: среди ближайших родственников Гитлера или его сослуживцев был еврей, на которого Гитлер был сильно обижен и по этой причине стал мстить всему народу; или ненависть вызвана особенностями самих евреев, которые, согласно этническим стереотипам славян, умнее, хитрее, ленивее немцев и славян, а также могут понимать немецкий язык. Наконец, Катастрофа может объясняться евангельскими событиями. Во всех трех случаях в рассказах о причинах, повлекших Холокост, используются разработанные традицией механизмы осмысления окружающего мира: этноконфессиональные стереотипы, сюжетные клише традиционной квазиисторической фольклорной прозы, объединенные с попытками индивидуальной интерпретации.
Abstract: This study develops a novel analytical framework to advance studies of monuments. It does so by systematically integrating four elements of a monument’s assemblage – design, surroundings, rituals, and narratives – to examine their combined potential affective impact on visitors’ bodily and emotional engagement with monuments and the past these represent. These four elements will be applied in the comparison of two Dutch Second World War monuments, the National Monument on Dam Square and the National Holocaust Monument of Names. The article reflects on who or what shapes these monuments’ four elements and what kind of potential affective experiences they engender. The results show that the Holocaust Names Monument creates a sacred space for personal and active Holocaust remembrance. In contrast, the National Monument allows more profane, non-commemorative behaviour, except on 4 May, when the Annual Remembrance Day turns it into a sacred site, evoking collective sentiment and remembering of diverse victims. Despite these differences, both monuments seek to foster empathy for individual victims and a sense of responsibility through reflection. These similarities and differences have emerged over time, reflecting the influence of both individual and institutional actors involved in the monument’s design and management, as well as broader socio-political shifts in commemoration.
Abstract: Historical commissions have played an important role in the most recent efforts to garner restitution and reparations for Holocaust victims and their families. Several dozen Holocaust commissions were convened in the late‑1990s and early‑2000s in European countries where histories of collaboration and complicity with the Nazi regime were either under‑documented or suppressed in the official discourse. This essay examines the Holocaust commissions from a historiographical perspective with special attention given to the methodological and rhetorical strategies they employed when confronted by the traumatic experiences and memories of victims and survivors. While the work of these commissions was shaped and influenced, to varying degrees, by external political forces and interest groups, this essay explores the ways in which “the politics of history” entered into their written reports and, consequently, obscured and silenced fundamental aspects of Holocaust history. Three commissions, in particular, are held up for scrutiny (i.e., Austria’s Jabloner Commission, the International Commission for Holocaust‑Era Insurance Claims, and France’s Mattéoli Commission), and an assessment of their work is given against the backdrop of ongoing debates within the field of trauma studies and in response to questions concerning the Holocaust and the “limits of representation.”
Abstract: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum received two million visitors in 2019, making it the most heavily visited museum in Poland. This entry situates tourism at Auschwitz within the broader context of Holocaust tourism by providing an historical account of the phenomenon. It begins with those visitors to the camp before 1945 who were not tourists (Nazi officials, local suppliers, engineers), drawing attention to tourism’s ethical ambiguity. Since the museum’s 1947 opening, tourists have encountered a site undergoing continual development, its exhibition spaces and its messaging evolving from the Stalinist era through the Cold War to the present period. This chapter considers how shifts in the site’s memory politics, especially regarding the representation of different victim groups, have led to unresolved tensions that still surface during the tour. It then considers some present-day challenges to the legitimacy of tourism at Auschwitz, such as visitor behaviour or the difficulties in providing an appropriate, authentic, and informative experience to large crowds. Finally, the chapter reviews different scholarly approaches to Holocaust tourism, such as dark tourism theory and empirical visitor research, before concluding with questions for future research into Auschwitz tourism.
Abstract: The chapter addresses the key problem of Polish collective memory of Auschwitz, that is, how Poles perceive the former camp, in a wider context of Polish memory of World War II, Nazi camps, and the Holocaust. It presents and discusses results of surveys representative of Poland’s population, particularly two designed by the authors and conducted in 2020. The surveys show that the war is the major theme of Polish collective memory, and Nazi camps in general and Auschwitz in particular belong to top Polish lieux de mémoire. Auschwitz evokes in Poles mostly general and universalist associations with destruction, murder, crematoria, gas chambers, and death. The Holocaust is spontaneously associated with Auschwitz only rarely. On the other hand, the camp is the most frequently associated site of the destruction of Jews. The Polish collective memory of Auschwitz hinges upon a poor awareness of the number, nationality, and countries of origin of the camp’s victims. However, Poles are aware of the major historical functions of the camp and share different symbolic meanings of it. Some survey results suggest that a cosmopolitan Holocaust memory focusing on Auschwitz developed among Poles while others indicate that the Polish memory of Auschwitz has nationalist characteristics.
Abstract: This article examines how rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust are represented in the Polish elementary school core curriculum and history textbooks, offering a critical assessment of the current approach to Holocaust education in Poland.
The inclusion of the Holocaust as a distinct educational topic in schools in Poland is a relatively recent development, marking a shift from earlier decades when it was marginalized or instrumentalized for political purposes. The article traces the evolution of Holocaust education in Poland and highlights the changes introduced after the 2015 parliamentary elections, when the Law and Justice (PiS) government, within its historical policy, began emphasizing Poland’s ‘heroic past’ and the rescue of Jews. This narrative, the authors argue, risks overshadowing the complexities of Polish–Jewish relations during World War II. Trojański and Szuchta demonstrate that current curricula and textbooks often present a simplified, hero-centered narrative that neglects the broader historical context, including collaboration, blackmail, and violence against Jews. Such omissions contradict recent scholarship and hinder the ability of students to understand the multifaceted nature of the Holocaust. Because elementary school materials shape foundational historical knowledge, this imbalance has lasting implications. Finally, the article briefly notes the early steps taken by the new government to broaden the historical framework, but emphasizes that meaningful change will require time, resources, and careful revision of teaching materials.
Abstract: This article examines how local complicity in the Holocaust is negotiated, silenced, and revealed through the spatial memoryscape of Rajgród, a small town in northeastern Poland where Poles participated in the murder of their Jewish neighbors in the summer of 1941. Using a microhistorical lens, it analyzes how knowledge, denial, and memory are inscribed in physical spaces and communal practices, rendering space a cultural text. Drawing on personal and municipal records and ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how Catholicism, nationalism, and ritual symbolism shape collective remembrance and moral hierarchies of suffering in post-socialist Eastern Europe.
