02/09/2026
https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20160448/cfp-turning-image-around-anti-judaism-antisemitism-satire-and-cultural
Call for Papers! International Research Workshop
Turning the Image Around: Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, Satire, and Cultural Resistance across the Ages
Hostility toward Jews and Judaism has assumed different forms across history, shaped by changing religious, social, political, racial, and cultural circumstances. While anti-Judaism has often been associated primarily with religious and theological hostility toward Judaism and Jews, modern antisemitism has frequently been understood in relation to racial, nationalist, political, economic, and conspiratorial ideologies. Yet the boundary between these categories is neither simple nor uncontested. Images, accusations, narratives, stereotypes and myths originating in religious polemic have persisted, migrated, and acquired new meanings in modern secular and political contexts.
At the same time, the history of anti-Jewish hostility is also a history of responses to it. Across different periods and cultural settings, Jews and their allies have challenged hostile representations, appropriated and transformed stereotypes and myths, and developed visual, literary, performative, intellectual, educational, and political strategies for confronting prejudice and persecution.
The Department of the Arts and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) invite proposals for an international workshop examining anti-Judaism and antisemitism, their representations and transformations, and the diverse strategies developed to challenge, reappropriate, and resist them from antiquity to the present. We therefore welcome contributions that examine not only the differences between anti-Judaism and antisemitism but also their continuities, ruptures, transformations, and conceptual boundaries. How do medieval religious stereotypes and myths relate to modern antisemitic imagery? When does tracing continuity illuminate the history of anti-Jewish hostility, and when does it obscure historically specific phenomena? How have older motifs been reformulated in response to changing media, audiences, ideologies, and political circumstances?
By bringing together scholars working on different periods, geographical regions, and media, the conference seeks to foster dialogue between historical and contemporary approaches. We particularly welcome contributions that cross conventional chronological boundaries, trace the migration and transformation of motifs across time and media, or investigate the ways in which earlier representational traditions are remembered, forgotten, revived, appropriated, or contested in later contexts.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• The conceptual and historical relationship between anti-Judaism and antisemitism;
• The formation, transmission, and transformation of anti-Jewish and antisemitic stereotypes and myths;
• Satire, parody, humor, irony, and comedy as responses to anti-Judaism and antisemitism;
• Jewish self-representation and the appropriation, inversion, or subversion of hostile imagery
• Medieval and early modern visual and literary traditions and their modern afterlives;
• Caricature, political imagery, propaganda, and visual satire;
• Literature, theatre, performance, film, television, and popular culture;
• Holocaust humor and the ethics and limits of satirical representation;
• Cultural memory, trauma, commemoration, and resistance;
• Gender and anti-Jewish or antisemitic representation;
• Contemporary antisemitism and cultural responses in the aftermath of October 7, 2023;
• Social networking platforms, memes, digital culture, and new forms of antisemitic discourse and counter-discourse;
• Museums, exhibitions, education, and public history as arenas for combating antisemitism; and
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to stereotypes, cultural memory, satire, temporality, reception, and cultural agency.
Submission Guidelines
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Submissions should include an abstract of 250 words and a short biographical note of up to 100 words.
Submission deadline: 11 October 2026
Venue: Senate Building, Marcus Family Campus, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Conference language: English
Submission address: [email protected]
