David Hirsh, BSc MA PhD
Research interests: crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing; international and cosmopolitan law; cosmopolitanism, nationalism, fundamentalism; Israel / Palestine, antisemitism, Islamophobia; socio-legal studies.
David studied Sociology as an undergraduate at City University, London. He did an MA in Philosophy and Social Theory at Warwick University and he wrote his PhD there on Crimes Against Humanity and International Law.
He was the holder of the Sociological Review Fellowship 2001-2, which enabled him to write Law against Genocide: cosmopolitan trials, published in 2003. This book was awarded the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Prize for the best first book in sociology in 2004. By focusing on two trials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the trial of Andrei Sawoniuk for crimes committed during the Holocaust, and the David Irving libel case, the book comes to some tentative conclusions about the possibility of the emergence of cosmopolitan law.
David received a Rothschild/Hanadiv Foundation research grant of £25000 for a project 'to investigate the character and dynamics of anti-Zionism as a contemporary political movement and its relationship to antisemitism' (January 2007 to August 2007). The central research output made possible by this funding was a major Working Paper published by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, entitled Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections. Hear him talk about the paper. In 2006/7, David was a Research Fellow at Yale University.
Read the presentation that David gave at the 2009 London Conference on Combatting Antisemitism.
Selected publications
Monograph
- Hirsh, D, (2003) Law against Genocide: cosmopolitan trials, London: GlassHouse Press, Cavendish Publishing
Book chapters and papers
- Hirsh, D, (2008) 'Unjust, unhelpful: arguments against the academic boycott of Israel' Democratiya 13, Summer 2008, republished in Dissent. An edited version was published in Babylon, 01/08. See also this debate between Martin Shaw and David Hirsh which followed in Democratiya 14, republished in Dissent. More discussion here.
- Hirsh D, (2007) Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections, The Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) Working Paper Series #1, New Haven CT
- Hirsh, D, (2006) 'Law against genocide' in Freeman, M, (ed) Law and sociology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Hirsh, D, (2001) 'The trial of Andrei Sawoniuk: Holocaust testimony under cross-examination' Social and Legal Studies, Vol 10, Issue 4, pp 531-545
- Fine, R and Hirsh, D, (2000) 'The decision to commit a crime against humanity' in Archer, M and Tritter, J (eds), Rational choice theory: resisting colonization, London: Routledge.
Book reviews
- Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitic myths: a historical and contemporary anthology, 2008, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 384 pp., $24.95 (pb).
This review is from Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 32 No. 4 May 2009 pp. 749-750.
Newspaper, magazine and journal articles
- Hirsh, D 'Jews as canaries and hawks,' Ha'aretz, 25 December 2009
- Hirsh, D 'Do not confine Jews to the couch' Jewish Chronicle, 10 April 2009
- Hirsh, D 'Occupation not apartheid', Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 3 October 2008
- Hirsh, D 'The Livingstone Formulation', Z-word.com, February 2008
- Hirsh, D 'It's not about Israel, stupid' YnetNews.com, 9 October 2007
- Hirsh, D 'The boycott's biggest victims are British Jews', Jewish Chronicle, 13 July 2007
- Hirsh, D 'Divided in Peace: Marching for and against War', Times Higher Education Supplement, 28 July 2006
- Hirsh, D 'The new anti-semitism: we must strike back harder' Manna, The Forum for Progressive Judaism, no. 90, Winter 2006
- Hirsh, D and Jon Pike, 'Know the Boundaries' in Ha'aretz, 24 January 2006
- Hirsh, D 'The Smart Way to Fight British Antisemitism' Jerusalem Post, 1 November 2005
- Hirsh, D and Jane Ashworth 'The State They're In' Progress Magazine, November/December 2005 - this piece appeared in Critica Sociale, 2005, no 10, translated into Italian
- Hirsh, D, 'Against the Academic Intifada' Dissent, Fall 2005
David is the founding editor of the Engage website, a resource for those working to understand and to oppose contemporary antisemitism and he has written there regularly. He is also the founding editor of the Engage Journal.
He has written a series of blog pieces on the Guardian's website Comment Is Free.