October 7th marks the first anniversary of the bloody attack on a music festival in Israel by Hamas. Over 1,000 people were killed, dozens of people are still being held hostage by Hamas, and the region is at war. Against this backdrop, there has been a spike in antisemitic hate crimes around the world. In the United States, the FBI reported a 63 percent increase over 2022. In Germany, the monitoring group RIAS reported that antisemitic incidents rose by over 80 percent in 2023 – reaching a new high since RIAS started keeping track in 2017.
Join the American Council on Germany on Monday, October 7, at 11 am ET, for a virtual discussion with antisemitism expert Dr. Sharon S. Nazarian, the President of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation. She has been exploring how the rise in antisemitism can be seen as an indicator of the waning health of democracy. She will talk about the myriad challenges posed by increasing antisemitism and how international cooperation can be implemented to address the problem and shore up democracy. Dr. Nazarian just completed a speaking tour for the ACG, which included discussions in four Eric M. Warburg Chapters and in New York.
Dr. Sharon S. Nazarian is the President of the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation, with a regional office in Israel called the Ima Foundation. She is an expert on antisemitism and its intersection with democratic crisis across Europe, North America, and Australia. Earlier this year, she was the inaugural Gahl Hodges Burt Scholar at the American Academy in Berlin.
Dr. Nazarian is the founder of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, housed at UCLA’s International Institute, which provides a systematic, academic study of contemporary Israel. In 2017, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) appointed Dr. Nazarian as Senior Vice President in international affairs. She served in this role for five years, acting as chief diplomat and policymaker of ADL, meeting with heads of state, foreign ministers, and leaders of Jewish communities around the world and advancing ADL’s initiatives for fighting antisemitism and racial hatred globally. She also oversaw ADL’s Israel office.
Dr. Nazarian currently serves as a member of ADL’s national board of directors, a trustee of the board of Freedom House, and is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. She also chairs the board of the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA and sits on the board of governors of University of Haifa. Dr. Nazarian studied Journalism and International Relations at the University of Southern California, where also received her master’s and doctoral degrees in Political Science, specializing in political economy and economic development in newly industrialized countries.
