Charles A. Small


Charles Asher Small is a Canadian intellectual, the founder and director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy the first international interdisciplinary research center dedicated to studying antisemitism with a contemporary focus.

Biography

Dr. Charles Asher Small is the founding director and president of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-semitism and Policy. He is also a Research scholar at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle East and African Studies, and the Hartog School of Government and Policy, Tel Aviv University. Small received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, McGill University, Montreal; M.Sc. in Urban Development Planning in Economics, Development Planning Unit, University College London; and a Doctorate of Philosophy, St. Antony's College, Oxford University. Small completed post-doctorate research at the Groupement de recherche ethnicité et société, Université de Montréal. He was the VATAT Research Fellow at Ben Gurion University, Beersheva, and taught in departments of sociology and geography at Goldsmiths' College, University of London; Tel Aviv University; and the Institute of Urban Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Small convened groundbreaking academic seminar series in the emerging field of contemporary antisemitism studies at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, McGill University, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Sapienza University, Rome, the Sorbonne and the CNRS, Paris, Stanford University, University of Miami, Yale University. Dr. Small also convenes an annual professor training program at Oxford University on Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies, where he leads and international effort to train professors; at Hertford College and St. Antony's College, Oxford.
Small was the founding director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, the first interdisciplinary research center on antisemitism at a North American university. At Yale he taught in the Political Science Department and the Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, and ran a post-doctorate and graduate studies fellowship program at Yale Initiative. Small was also the Koret Distinguished Scholar, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was also an associate professor and the director of Urban Studies at Southern Connecticut State University, and an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Geography. He lectured internationally and worked as a consultant and policy advisor in North America, Europe, Southern Africa, and the Middle East. Small specializes in social and cultural theory, globalization and national identity, socio-cultural policy, social movements, and racism – including antisemitism.
Small is the author of books and articles including the six Volume "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity"; "the Yale Papers: Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective"; and "Social Theory – a Historical Analysis of Canadian Socio-cultural Policies Race and the Other", Eleven International Publishers; and The Yale Papers: Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective. Small is committed to creating scholarly programming and research on contemporary anti-semitism at top tier universities internationally, and establishing contemporary antisemitism studies as a recognized academic discipline.
Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, he has a D.Phil. from Oxford University, and has taught at the University of London, Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, and Hebrew University. Small was also the Koret Distinguished Scholar, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was the Director/Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. Small has been a visiting professor at University College London; McGill University, Montreal; the University of Vilnius, Lithuania, and Cape Town University, South Africa. He also spoke as an expert on anti-Semitism at the Australian, British, Canadian, Chilean and Italian Parliaments, the German Bundestag, and at the United Nations, Geneva and in New York.
On September 19, 2006, Yale University founded The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism , the first North American university-based center for study of the subject, housed at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies, with Small as director and founder. He cited the increase in anti-Semitism worldwide in recent years as generating a "need to understand the current manifestation of this disease".
In August 2010 in New Haven, Small was elected as the President of the newly formed International Association for the Study of Antisemitism.
Small was one of a number of academics who submitted evidence to the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. He was also an expert for the Canadian All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. Charles Asher Small convened an historical conference at the Vatican in September 2017. The ISGAP-Vatican Conference entitled "Antisemitism and Minority Rights in the Middle East: Regional and International Implications". The international conference brought together scholars from around the world - Christian, Muslim, Copts, Bahai, Jewish, Catholic thinkers, as well as humans rights activists and policy makers including the British former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Charles Asher Small is a human rights activist and was the Chairperson of the African National Congress Solidarity Committee of Canada; the Chairperson of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, and worked with the First Nations of Canada.

Study of Antisemitism

Charles Asher Small and his colleagues at ISGAP have been at the forefront of ensuring that the scholars deal with issues of contemporary antisemitism at the academic level, around the world.

Contributions

In a path-breaking article entitled "Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe," in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Small and Yale's Prof. Edward Kaplan demonstrated that Europeans who hold deeply anti-Israeli views are more likely to also have classic anti-Semitic opinions by a significant margin. Looking at populations in 10 European countries, Small and Kaplan surveyed 5,000 respondents, asking them about Israeli actions and classical anti-Semitic stereotypes. "There were questions about whether the IDF purposely targets children, whether Israel poisons the Palestinians' water supply - these sorts of extreme mythologies," Small says. They demonstrated that Europeans whose opinions are extremely anti-Israel, are highly likely to also be anti-Semitic. "The people who believed the anti-Israel mythologies also tended to believe that Jews are not honest in business, have dual loyalties, control government and the economy, and the like," Small says. The study demonstrated that an Israel-hating European is 56% more likely to be anti-Semitic than the average European. "This is extraordinary. It's off the charts," says Small. "If a food or a drug was 56% more likely to cause cancer, it would be taken off the shelf."

Books