Dr. Deidre Butler is Director of the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and Associate Professor of Religion (Jewish Studies) in the College of Humanities at Carleton University. As a Jewish studies specialist working in the area of contemporary Jewish life and thought, antisemitism is central to Butler’s thinking about how Jews encounter the world we live in and how Jews are understood. She works and consults on issues of antisemitism across Canada in the educational sector, with federal, provincial and municipal governmental bodies, as well as with Jewish organizations across Canada and in the US.
Dr. Butler’s publications, including articles on Canadian Jewish divorce, modern Jewish thought, feminist thought, and responses to the Holocaust, foreground the lived experience of Jews to think critically about larger questions of identity, memory, and community. The history of antisemitism, and how it has changed over time, is a deep through line in this work. Butler is lead researcher and author of the bilingual (English/French) open educational resource Hear Our Voices: Survivors share their stories of trauma and hate (2021) which centres oral history to educate about antisemitism and the Holocaust.
Butler is co-founder and co-chair of NECA (Network for Engaged Canadian Academics, neca-rpce.org), a non-partisan organization with over 220 Canadian academic members from 33 universities and colleges across Canada. Founded in 2022, NECA is committed to genuine fairness, inclusivity, the promotion of academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, as well as combating antisemitism on university campuses across Canada.
Her current research projects include a documentary film that follows Professor Jan Grabowski’s family history during the Holocaust and concludes with the ongoing story of how this historian became a target of antisemitism by the Polish government; a quantitative and qualitative project that explores faculty experiences of antisemitism in Canada and the US; and a preliminary study of the ways in which EDI fails to address Jews and antisemitism through interviews and a critical analysis of EDI policies across Canadian universities and colleges.