Manfred Gerstenfeld

Gerstenfeld was born in Vienna in 1937. His family was forced to flee to the Netherlands and survived the Holocaust by hiding in a small Amsterdam apartment.[7] As a young man, he wrote for a Dutch Jewish newspaper, including articles preserving survivors’ memories of disappearing Jewish communities in the Netherlands.[7]

While studying at university, Gerstenfeld also attended a Jewish seminary in the Netherlands and completed degrees in chemistry and economics.[7] He then began a career in international business strategy in the context of the European Economic Community and moved to Paris.[7] After the 1967 war, Gerstenfeld and his wife moved to Israel, where he continued his professional work from Jerusalem.[7]

Gerstenfeld worked as an international business strategist, consulting for governments, international agencies, and the boards of major corporations.[1] His consulting included business and environmental strategy for senior executives of multinational companies.[3] Alongside this professional work, he held research, publishing, and leadership positions at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) and later served as a Senior Research Associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.[2][3]

He chaired the JCPA Board of Fellows from 2000 to 2012 and remained a member of the board.[4] His institutional roles also included chairing the Steering Committee and founding and directing the Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism program.[5] He also edited the Jewish Political Studies Review.[7] By 2001, he was co-publisher of the Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints and Jewish Environmental Perspectives.[3] A 2012 biographical note credited him with fifteen authored books and five edited volumes, several addressing post-Holocaust issues and antisemitism.[4] Other institutional biographies reported totals of fourteen or sixteen published books without explaining the discrepancy.[1][8]

Environmental questions formed a substantial part of his early publication record.[3][9] His books included Environment and Confusion: An Introduction to a Messy Subject, Judaism, Environmentalism and the Environment (1998), and the Hebrew-language The Environment in the Jewish Tradition: A Sustainable World (2002).[9] He published environmental work and analysis in five languages and completed a doctorate in the field in 1999, aged 62.[7]

In “Jewish Environmental Studies: A New Field” (2001), Gerstenfeld advocated examining contemporary sustainability questions through classical Jewish sources.[3] The article addressed intergenerational equity, biodiversity, destruction of resources, and durability.[3] His account of being the sole speaker on environmental issues from a Jewish perspective at the 1997 World Congress of Jewish Studies formed part of his presentation of this area as a developing field.[3]

His books of the 1990s also covered business, political forecasting, and Israel’s future.[9] They included Revaluing Italy, written with Lorenzo Necci and published in Italian in 1992; Israel’s New Future: Interviews (1994); and the Italian-language The State as a Business: Do-It-Yourself Political Forecasting (1994).[9] Later titles included American Jewry’s Challenge (2004), Israel and Europe: An Expanding Abyss? (2005), and European-Israeli Relations: Between Confusion and Change? (2006).[9]

Gerstenfeld’s writing on European antisemitism included Europe’s Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today’s Anti-Semitism (2003) and the French-language edited volume The New Clothes of European Anti-Semitism, produced with Shmuel Trigano in 2004.[1][9] He also wrote the 2006 monograph The Autumn 2005 Riots in France: Their Possible Impact on Israel and the Jews.[9] His journal articles included “The Deep Roots of Anti-Semitism in European Society,” published in the Jewish Political Studies Review in 2005, and “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism: Common Characteristics and Motifs,” published there in 2007.[10]

In 2007, he edited Academics Against Israel and the Jews, a volume comprising an introductory overview and eighteen essays covering issues across four continents.[9] He contributed the introductory overview, “Academics against Israel and the Jews,” as well as “The UCU May 2007 Boycott Resolution and Its Aftermath” and “Utrecht University: The Myth of Jewish Cannibalism, Censorship, and Fear of Muslim Intimidation.”[9] His introduction examined attacks on Jews and Israel on university campuses and proposed responses to academic harassment.[9] Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews followed in 2008, and The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses appeared in 2009.[8]

School education was another focus of his research.[5] He participated in a session on anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments in Western schools at a November 8, 2011 conference co-sponsored by the JCPA and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.[11] In a 2012 essay, he called for systematic examination of textbooks and curricula, teaching methods, attitudes toward Jewish students, Holocaust education, and harassment.[5] He advocated country-specific programs to address these issues.[5]

His 2013 article on Holocaust-memory distortion set out eight categories: promotion and justification, denial, deflection and whitewashing, de-Judaization, equivalence, inversion, trivialization, and obliterating Holocaust memory.[12] He explained that quantitative data on such occurrences were unavailable and that his discussion could cover only a limited selection of incidents.[12]

The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Delegitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism appeared in 2015.[13] It examined the public roles of journalists, academics, human-rights activists, educators, lawyers, the United Nations, and other groups in discourse about Israel, then considered effects on Jews and Israelis and possible responses.[13] The book also addressed the circulation of messages against Israel and proposals for combating BDS.[14]

In a 2015 interview, Gerstenfeld presented the book as both an analysis of Israel’s delegitimization and a practical plan for opposing it.[15] He argued that contemporary anti-Israelism shared motifs with religious and ethnic antisemitism.[15] His proposed response included a government counter-propaganda agency that would monitor attacks, analyze them, and preserve accumulated experience.[15] He also discussed media-monitoring organizations and individual writers as contributors to exposing what he regarded as anti-Israel bias.[15]

His research extended beyond antisemitism to Jewish communal life and Israeli politics.[8][16] A 2010 article examined American Jewish identity, education, communal leadership, attitudes toward Israel, and antisemitism.[8] He coauthored Israel at the Polls 2006 with Shmuel Sandler and Jonathan Rynhold, published in 2008, and Israel at the Polls 2013: Continuity and Change in Israeli Political Culture and Israel at the Polls 2015: A Moment of Transformative Stability with Eithan Orkibi, both published in 2017.[16]

A 2005 interview coauthored with Nathan Katz covered Katz’s career in Indo-Judaic studies, Jewish communities in India, Israel–India relations, and Indian perceptions of Jews and Israel.[17] In a 2008 review, Gerstenfeld discussed postwar Jewish return and rebuilding in Europe, restitution, migration, and persistent anti-Jewish discrimination, responding to a collection of fourteen essays about nine countries.[18] With Wendy Cohen-Wierda, he later wrote Veerkracht: de (her)oprichting van de Joodse Jeugdbewegingen in Nederland 1945–1965, published in Amsterdam in 2019.[19] The 357-page illustrated book concerned Jewish youth societies and movements in the Netherlands and included bibliographical references.[19]

His later papers continued to address European antisemitism and contemporary political discourse.[20][21] In a 2019 paper, he discussed Eurobarometer 484 findings that 50 percent of respondents considered antisemitism a problem in their country, including 15 percent who considered it a very important problem.[20] He also cited a Fundamental Rights Agency survey finding, conveyed by EU Commissioner Vera Jourová, that nine out of ten Jews in Europe perceived antisemitism to be rising.[20]

In a 2021 paper on conspiracy theories, Gerstenfeld examined the reappearance of historical antisemitic motifs in pandemic discourse, including accusations that Jews sought to poison non-Jews or control the world.[21] He characterized Jews as “often the first target, but not the last” in the spread of conspiracy theories.[21] Israel’s Multifaceted Power, published in March 2021, was the final Perspective Paper he submitted to the BESA Center before his death.[6]

Gerstenfeld received the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s International Leadership Award.[11][22] In 2019, the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research awarded him its International Lion of Judah Award in recognition of his work on contemporary antisemitism.[2]

His institutional record included establishing and directing the JCPA’s Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism program.[5] His publications addressed Jewish environmental thought and European–Israeli relations,[9] as well as Holocaust memory and Jewish communal life.[8][12] He also coauthored studies of Israeli elections.[16] His environmental scholarship proposed bringing classical Jewish sources into discussion of sustainability, and his educational work called for systematic research and practical responses to anti-Jewish harassment in schools.[3][5]

Gerstenfeld died in Jerusalem on February 25, 2021, aged 84.[6][23] His final BESA paper appeared the following month and was identified by the center as the last Perspective Paper he submitted before his death.[6]

Gerstenfeld’s interpretation of the relationship between anti-Israelism and antisemitism generated disagreement, particularly over the conclusions he drew from public-opinion surveys.[22] In 2013, he estimated that well over 150 million European Union citizens held what he called a “demonic view of Israel,” extrapolating mainly from a 2012 survey of 8,000 people in eight member states.[22] Around 40 percent of respondents in most participating countries agreed that Israel was conducting a “war of extermination” against Palestinians; Hebrew University scholar Robert Wistrich rejected the inference that this response established antisemitism, while Simon Wiesenthal Center associate dean Abraham Cooper regarded the figures as alarming and credible.[22]

His political assessments also included the argument that operational and structural weaknesses prevented the European Union from effectively combating antisemitism, alongside criticism of what he regarded as EU incitement against Israel.[20] A 2018 paper on German Jewish organizations and the AfD argued that mainstream parties’ immigration policies posed a greater threat to German Jewish life than the AfD and made claims about antisemitism among Muslim immigrants; these were his contested political assessments rather than independently established findings.[24] His media commentary similarly advanced his own interpretation that omissions and critical editorials harmed Israel while Palestinian crimes were ignored or misrepresented.[15]