Leading scholars, experts and practitioners from Europe, North America and Israel held a closed meeting in Paris, to confront the question of how to build an effective multi-layered “tool” to measure antisemitism effectively. Please view the press release from the proceedings below.
MEASURING ANITSEMITISM: EXPERT MEETING
As more governments are accepting responsibility for monitoring and collecting data on antisemitic hate crimes — one of the commitments accepted by OSCE participating States in 2004 Berlin Declaration — it is vital to formulate effective and standardized tools to measure them.
How can antisemitism be measured comparatively across countries and in cyberspace? In Paris on September 20, 2016, leading scholars, experts and practitioners from Europe, North America and Israel held a closed meeting to confront this question. The objective of this project is to create an effective multi-layered “tool” to measure antisemitism effectively.
The lack of such a tool has been felt for some time. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights noted in a Working Paper on Antisemitism in 2012 that “Continued and sustained efforts at the national and international levels, as well as at the level of civil society, need to be exerted if data collection on the matter is to be improved. The ready and regular availability of robust and comparable data on the situation of antisemitism in the EU would enable policy makers and relevant stakeholders to develop targeted interventions to combat antisemitism.”
This innovative project to create an internationally applicable measurement tool was initiated by ISGAP (The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy), and is supported by the Israel Ministry for Diaspora Affairs. The Paris meeting was graciously facilitated by CRIF. It is anticipated that the measurement tool will be further refined in the coming months to provide an integrated method greatly needed by international agencies to address a pressing need felt by Jewish communities.
