The UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies (Leve Center) and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate (ISH), with the support of the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, is pleased to announce The Research Hub on Antisemitism, a dynamic collective poised to evaluate the rising tide of antisemitism nationally and internationally. The Hub is pleased to announce two initial endeavors: a Postdoctoral Scholar position in the study of antisemitism, designed for a scholar who understands antisemitism within broad historical and political contexts and is open to exploring its connection to other forms of group-based hate. We are also pleased to announce a call for research proposals from within the UCLA community, in any discipline, that engage with the past or present of antisemitism. UCLA faculty, research staff, and students (graduate and undergraduate) are welcome to apply, and collaborative projects are encouraged. The Postdoctoral Scholar and successful grantees will build bridges between the vibrant communities of the Leve Center and ISH.
“Professors Myers and Stein are visionary scholars who can build community and translate the Research Hub’s important goals into real-world action,” said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of humanities. “The combined forces of their leadership and these three important entities will allow us to better understand how hate takes rise, is spread and becomes lethal — so that it can be more successfully diminished and prevented.”
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Co-Directors
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr. Kathryn Huether (2024-2026)
Kathryn Agnes Huether received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a master’s degree in religious studies/Jewish studies from the University of Colorado. She has held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University and Bowdoin College and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. A classically trained violinist (she studied with Angella Ahn of the Ahn Trio) and vocalist, Huether continues to seek out performance opportunities and enjoys folk, klezmer, and blue grass.
Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery.
While at UCLA, Huether is researching the roles that sound plays in antisemitic virality on social media, in addition to completing her first book project, Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, about sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory. This dynamic project draws on memory studies and trauma theory, as well as Musicology, to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of the complex political economy of the Holocaust.
Research Projects
Je Hoon Che (Ph.D. Candidate, Communications) and Tim Groeling (Professor, Communications): Comparing Interventions to Reduce Hostility toward Jewish and Muslim Americans.
Eleanor Kaufman (Professor, Comparative Literature, English, and ELTS): Antisemitism and Its Absence in the Early Twentieth-Century American Southwest.
Jarred Brewster (Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology) and Erin Debenport (Professor, Anthropology): Circulating Conspiracy: The Invocation of Antisemitic Canards in Anti-Muslim Prejudice.
Shreya Sundar (Undergraduate Student, Public Health), Shreya Lakshmanan (Undergraduate Student, Public Health), and Mona Zahir (Professor, Public Health): Religious Leaders’ Responses to Intergroup Hate within Their Congregations and Between Faith Communities.
Aomar Boum (Anthropology): Partners Against Hate: Arab Graphic Satire Responding to Antisemitism Across Wartime Middle East and North Africa.
Pavel Savgira (Ph.D. Candidate, Film, Television, and Media) and Homa Hosseinmardi (Professor, Communications): Language Models and Public Perceptions of Antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Antisemitism Hub Survey
In Spring 2025, a team including Ph.D. candidate Joshua Goetz, Prof. Aliza Luft, Prof. Salma Mousa, and Prof. David N. Myers collaborated to craft a survey on political attitudes and (mis)perceptions concerning antisemitism, anti-Zionism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian sentiments on the UCLA campus. They launched the survey in two rounds, the first in Fall 2025. The results of this initial survey indicated that there are strong misperceptions about outgroups’ prejudice (for example, there is far less anti-Palestinian sentiment amongst Jewish students than pro-Palestinian students tended to assume). The second round of the survey, launched in Winter 2026, contained a misperception-correcting treatment, which they hypothesized would reduce students’ fears about and prejudice against outgroups. They presented preliminary findings at the last monthly research seminar of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute on May 19, 2026.