What drives antisemitic hostility in the 21st century? A comparative case study of Germany, Sweden, and Russia (1990–2020)

Public concern about antisemitism has increased globally in the 21st 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 21st-century expressions are distinctively linked to antizionist 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 antizionist sentiment, thus demonstrating the centrality of the "Israel factor" in contemporary antisemitism.