Catherine Chatterley is a Canadian historian, specializing in the study of modern European history, the Holocaust, and research on antisemitism,[1] and is the Founding Director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA). Chatterley is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Antisemitism Studies, the first scholarly journal devoted to the study of antisemitism. It is published by Indiana University Press.[2] [3] Chatterley appeared in the documentary called "Unmasked: Judeophobia" (2011), where she was one of the scholars interviewed.[4] [5] That same year, she was invited as an expert scholar to participate in the Canadian All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism, which produced the Ottawa Protocol.
Her undergraduate studies included European history and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at the University of Manitoba, European Intellectual History at Concordia University (Montreal), followed by a doctorate in Modern European and Jewish History, and German-Jewish Literature, which she completed at The University of Chicago under the direction of Moishe Postone and Michael Geyer.
Syracuse University Press published her first book, Disenchantment: George Steiner and the Meaning of Western Civilization After Auschwitz, in their series on Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust, edited by Steven T. Katz. Disenchantment was named a 2011 National Jewish Book Award Finalist in the category of Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Alongside Juan Asensio in France and Ricardo Gil Soeiro in Portugal, Chatterley is recognized as a leading scholar of George Steiner, an internationally renowned cultural critic, and has published two chapters in international collections about his work, both edited by Ricardo Gil Soeiro. Steiner died on February 3, 2020, and Chatterley wrote an obituary for the Times of Israel.[6]
As the Founding Director of CISA, Catherine Chatterley was invited to be a member of the official government delegation to Israel in January 2014.[7] From 2002 to 2008 Chatterley taught history at the University of Winnipeg and from 2007 to 2018 at the University of Manitoba.[8]
Chatterley created the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA) in the summer of 2010 to "help facilitate the scholarly study of antisemitism and to educate Canadians about the phenomenon in its classical and contemporary forms."[9] CISA is the first national academic institution in Canada dedicated to the scholarly study of a subject that is usually addressed by political advocacy organizations. It is the only such institution in the world founded by a non-Jewish scholar.[10] [11] [12] The Institute sponsors the leading academic periodical on the subject. Antisemitism Studies is published by Indiana University Press and Chatterley is Editor-in-Chief.
Chatterley was involved in the public debate over the place of a permanent Holocaust gallery proposed for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR).[13] In an editorial criticizing the attempt to remove the proposed Holocaust gallery from the museum, she stated, "the problem with the CMHR is it is mired in the politics of Canadian ethnic identity rather than rooted in the scholarly study of genocide, Holocaust, and human rights. Subjective feelings are influencing content and design choices rather than objective historical and legal reality and this does not bode well for the international reputation of this institution." This article also described the offensive UCCLA postcard campaign using Orwellian imagery to target supporters of the Holocaust gallery, depicting them as pigs. Chatterley stated unequivocally, "the fact that this kind of postcard was distributed in Canada in 2011, without shame or conscience, by an organization that claims to protect civil liberties, is astonishing. This alone demonstrates the clear need for this museum, its permanent Holocaust gallery, and for the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism."[14] [15] In 2013, Chatterley interviewed the former curator of the Holocaust gallery and provided the first concrete published information about the content of the CMHR for the public.[16] Holocaust and Genocide Studies published her study of the conflicts and controversies at the CMHR, entitled "Canada's Struggle with Holocaust Memorialization: The War Museum Controversy, Ethnic Identity Politics, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights."
Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) was another cultural controversy she addressed in the media. In Canada's National Post, she said that IAW is a Canadian invention, established at the University of Toronto in 2005, and "while the event is new, the ideology at the heart of IAW is not. The accusation that Zionism is racist and imperialist by nature is as old as Israel. The Soviet Union was a leading proponent of this conception of Zionism; and it drew on the long history of leftist antisemitism, identifying Jewish nationalism and capitalist imperialism with Judaism and the Jewish bourgeoisie."[17] After Chatterley expressed her concerns about IAW in the national daily, the president of the University of Winnipeg addressed the issue and said both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and of wider Middle East issues should be presented and debated. Chatterley expressed her hope that an "intelligent and responsible scholarly approach" would be followed by all university administrations in Canada and worldwide.[18] Lloyd Axworthy, the president of the University of Winnipeg, invited Catherine Chatterley to lecture on the subject of antisemitism during Middle East Week in March 2013.
As a scholar of German history and the Holocaust, Chatterley was consulted in 2014 about the problem of stolen art in Canadian museum collections.[19] Heritage Canada sponsored the Holocaust-era Provenance Research and Best-Practice Guidelines Project, through which they investigated six art galleries in Canada including the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Chatterley has also critiqued comments made by religion writer Karen Armstrong in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Kosher Grocery murders in Paris. In a Dutch interview, Armstrong claimed that the murders of French Jews by the Hebdo terrorists had nothing to do with antisemitism: "The supermarket attack in Paris was about Palestine, about ISIS. It had nothing to do with antisemitism; many of them are Semites themselves. But they attempt to conquer Palestine and we're not talking about that. We're too implicated and we don't know what to do with it."[20] In response, Chatterley wrote a critical op-ed for The Huffington Post correcting her historical and conceptual errors and arguing that the murders of Jews in Paris had everything to do with antisemitism.[21]
In September 2023, Chatterley called for the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, to be fired for inviting a member of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division (known as the Galicia Division), a Nazi unit composed of Ukrainian volunteers, to attend Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Parliament and for valorizing Yaroslav Hunka, 98 years old, as “a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.” Members of Parliament, then, gave this elderly Ukrainian Nazi soldier a standing ovation, which Chatterley characterized as a "disgusting embarrassment that is now making international news."
Chatterley was one of the first scholars of antisemitism to publicly condemn the Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. She characterized the coordinated assault on civilians as a pogrom and drew attention to the sexual violence and torture perpetrated on women and children. Many subsequent developments unfolded as Chatterley predicted in her October 9th article, "The Time is Now for Intellectual and Moral Clarity."
Her book, Disenchantment: George Steiner and the Meaning of Western Civilization After Auschwitz, is an intellectual biography of the literary critic. It focuses on his neglected writings on the Holocaust and antisemitism, and explains how and when the Holocaust enters Western consciousness in the decades after World War II.[22] [23] [24] [25]