What Drives Antisemitic Hostility in the Twenty-First Century? A Comparative Case Study of Germany, Sweden, and Russia (1990–2020)

Public concern about antisemitism has increased globally in the twenty-first century, sparking renewed interest from social scientists. However, the crucial question of why trajectories of antisemitic hostility differ between countries remains unanswered due to a lack of studies designed to track temporal and cross-national variation. Addressing this gap, I evaluate the explanatory power of two main lines of argument that divide the literature: generalist and particularist. While generalists see antisemitism as a manifestation of general outgroup hostility common to various forms of prejudice, particularists stress the contextual specificity of antisemitism and posit that its twenty-first-century expressions are distinctively linked to anti-Zionist sentiment (enmity toward Israel and its supporters). I derive observable implications from these positions and conduct a comparative, longitudinal case study of antisemitic hostility in Germany, Sweden, and Russia (1990–2020), using a mixed-methods approach to integrate incident counts, victimization surveys, media analysis, and expert interviews. Findings match predictions from the particularist position, with flare-ups in the Israel–Palestine conflict generating or catalyzing antisemitic hostility depending on the strength of local anti-Zionist sentiment, thus demonstrating the centrality of the “Israel factor” in contemporary antisemitism.