"Online Antisemitism: Trends, Research Gaps, and the Direction of Future Study" with guest speakers Yfat Barak-Cheney, Matthias Becker, and Tal-Or Cohen, December 8, 2024.

 

Yfat Barak Cheney is the Director of International Affairs and the Executive Director of WJC's Technology and Human Rights Institute. Yfat earned an LL.M in International Legal Studies from New York University where she was a Transitional Justice Scholar and an International Law and Human Rights Fellow. She also holds an LL.M (with honors) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also received her L.L.B and a B.A in International Relations, receiving an award for outstanding international law student. She previously worked with the Ministry of Justice Unit for Combating Human Trafficking and in several NGO’s. Yfat is a co-founder of ALMA – Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law in Israel. She is a member of the New York Bar and the Israeli Bar Association. 

 

Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Adv., is the founder and Executive Director of CyberWell – the first ever open database dedicated to fighting online antisemitism. Tal-Or is an expert in digital social platforms, hate speech and extremism. She focuses on online antisemitism and social media hate speech policies, alongside hate crime reporting and legislation. Mrs. Cohen Montemayor has led a variety of open-source intelligence research projects, providing analysis and consulting services to the Institute of National Security Studies, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Jewish Agency. A Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) magna cum laude graduate of Government and Law and a member of the Israel Bar Association, prior to launching CyberWell, Tal-Or worked in the business and web intelligence space at a boutique consulting firm in Tel Aviv.

 

 

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is an expert in cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and social media studies, with a particular focus on the study of hate speech within the political mainstream. His doctoral dissertation, Antisemitism in Reader Comments, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021, analyzes antisemitic stereotypes and historical analogies in British and German online discourse related to the Middle East conflict. Since 2020, he has been leading the international, transdisciplinary research project Decoding Antisemitism. In this context, he serves as co-editor of a comprehensive 40-chapter Lexicon that offers systematic guidance for deconstructing both explicit and implicit antisemitism on social media.