R. Amy Elman is a Professor of Political Science and the William Weber Chair of Social Science at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. She graduated from Brandeis University with a BA and went on to receive an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Politics at New York University. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including two Fulbright grants, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a grant from the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University. She has worked on behalf of women’s rights and against antisemitism in the US and within Europe for over three decades. She has lectured and published widely on the response of states and the European Union to issues of citizenship, migration, violence against women, sex discrimination, and antisemitism. She has published four books. Her most recent book, The European Union, Antisemitism and the Politics of Denial (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), explores the conditions that precipitated the EU’s efforts to stem antisemitism and considers the consequences.
She details her project below:
“My current focus is on antisemitism within social movements and the ways they mobilize transnationally against Jews under the guise of global justice. More specifically, I am focused on the ways in which BDS is building effective planks through women’s movements and LGBT movements to garner greater legitimacy. To this end, I hope to underscore ways in which scholars and others might be better able to systematically recognize and measure antisemitism within unexpected contexts.”