What Is Antisemitism? A Legal Analysis

This annual lecture examines antisemitism as a legal question, exploring what anti-discrimination law can offer in addressing this complex and timely issue. While the question has been debated extensively across many disciplines, it has rarely been asked in legal terms — this talk considers the possibility and promise of bringing legal tools to bear on it.

About the speaker

Dr. Zalman Rothschild is Assistant Professor of Law and Horn Family Distinguished Research Scholar in Law and Religion at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He holds a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. from New York University. He previously served as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss.

His scholarship has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and the Yale Law Review Forum, and has been covered in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He has also testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on religion and public schools. Rothschild received the Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship from the AALS Law and Religion Section in both 2023 and 2026, and the American Bar Association’s “Top 40 Young Lawyer” distinction.

From the Director: Professor Rothschild delivered the Fishman Seminar on April 26 and stayed for nearly two hours of conversation with students afterward. The engagement was the strongest we can remember from a Fishman lecturer, and the students themselves asked, unprompted, whether he could return to lead a sustained discussion.

This endowed lecture is part of the Fishman Family Endowed Lecture series, established by Dr. Lawrence Fishman, z’l, and Suzanne Fishman VC ’55. Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program. Free and open to the public.