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Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias 

Do Human Rights Still Apply to the Jewish People? On Weakening the Human Rights Law Protection against Antisemitism

September 26, 2021, Noon, Eastern Time (US and Canada)

During my lecture on antisemitism and the capture of human rights discourse, I  demonstrated how the new narratives about human rights have started to exclude the fight against antisemitism from the original human rights language, law, and agenda. The call for "Never again”, which emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust and was a founding call for the international human rights protection systems, is now simply being denied. As a result, antisemitism is being excluded from the discussions on racism and xenophobia. Instead, pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli attitudes are being treated even as new forms of racism. Antisemitic hate speech is slowly being treated as a legitimate manifestation of views directed against the Israeli government, and acts of hate crime are sometimes deemed a justified response to "Israeli crimes.”

Dr. Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences and member of the Board of Governors of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. Expert in the fields of anti-discrimination law, constitutional law, freedom of speech and memory laws. She is co-editor and co-author of Constitutionalism under Stress (OUP, 2020) and Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History (CUP, 2017). She was Bohdan Winiarski Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre of the University of Cambridge and Graduate Fellow at the Yale University Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism. Between 2016 and 2019 she was a Principal Investigator in the ‘Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective’ (MELA), an international research consortium sponsored by the EU Commission. Apart from her academic and scholarly work, Dr. Gliszczyńska-Grabias is a co-head of the Public Interest Strategic Litigation Program at Dentons global law firm, Polish Branch.