Dr. Charles Asher Small is the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle East and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and the Goldman Fellow at the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University. He will also be a Visiting Academic and Senior Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.
Charles was the Koret Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and the Founding Director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), the first interdisciplinary research center on antisemitism at a North American university. At Yale, he lectured in the Political Science Department, as well as a Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, and directed a post-doctorate and graduate studies fellowship program at YIISA. He was also an Associate Professor and the Director of Urban Studies at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), as well as an Assistant Professor at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Geography. Charles was also the VATAT (Ministry of Higher Education) Fellow at Ben Gurion University; and a professor in the Departments of Sociology and Geography at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London; Tel Aviv University; and the Institute of Urban Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
As the Founding Director of ISGAP, Charles has convened groundbreaking academic seminar series, conferences and programming in the emerging field of contemporary antisemitism studies at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, Stanford University, Fordham University, McGill University, University of Miami, La Sapienza University in Rome, the Sorbonne in Paris, the National University of Kyiv, the CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research or Centre national de la recherche scientifique), and other top-tier universities around the world. Charles founded and directs an annual innovative, cutting-edge professor training program at St. Johns’ College, Oxford University, which trains professors from around the world to develop new courses on contemporary antisemitism and then teach them at their respective home universities upon completion of the course for academic credit.
Charles is the author of numerous books and articles including: The ISGAP Papers: Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective: Volume Two (2016); The Yale Papers: Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective: Volume One (2015); the six volume Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity (2013); and Social Theory – a Historical Analysis of Canadian Socio-cultural Policies Race and the Other (2013). Volume Three of the ISGAP papers will be published in 2018.
Charles received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, McGill University, Montreal; M.Sc. in Urban Development Planning in Economics, Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London; and a Doctorate of Philosophy (D.Phil), St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. He completed post-doctorate research at the Groupement de recherche ethnicité et société, Université de Montréal.
Charles lectures throughout the world as an expert scholar on antisemitism. He was a Visiting Professor at McGill University, Cape Town University, La Sapienza University in Rome, and the University of Lithuania. Charles has been a guest scholar and lectured at hundreds of universities throughout the world. Charles also addressed the European Parliament, United Nations, Israeli Knesset, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Kigali International Forum on Genocide, as well as the Australian, British, Canadian, Chilean and Italian Parliaments, the German Bundestag, as well as various leading think tanks in China, India, Europe and the Americas. Charles submitted evidence to the British and Canadian All-Party Parliamentary Inquiries into Antisemitism and continues to help inform public policy. He has also served as a consultant and policy advisor in North America, Europe, Southern Africa, and the Middle East.
Charles has been active on issues relating to human rights throughout his life. He was the Chairperson of the African National Solidarity Committee of Canada and worked with the ANC leadership and the international anti-apartheid movement. He was also active in the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry chairing the SSSJ in the early 1980s at McGill University, as well as the struggle for Ethiopian Jewry. He has also been engaged in promoting rights of the First Nations in Canada.
Charles is committed to safeguarding human rights and democratic principles and conducting scholarly programming and research on contemporary antisemitism at top tier universities internationally, as well as helping to establish contemporary antisemitism studies as a recognized academic discipline.